Chapter 955: To My Beloved Dawn, Part 28

Because alone, in solitude, they are so lonely they cannot bear it.

And so they create friends who will never betray them.

But.

◇

The serpent Yozora commands, "Uwabami," is a serpent, and yet not a serpent.

She wields the toxins generated within her body in the shape of a serpent... a mass of poison possessing neither a physical body nor a fixed form, something that nests within her own body.

Yozora, who found her path precisely within solitude, placed no importance on a presence beside her... on one who would soothe her twisted emotions.

And so she gave a name to the sentient poison that crawled from within her body toward her wounds.

Originally, it had been no more than a stopgap capable only of closing her wounds, but after she was defeated by that Goldunine and forced into her ranks, it produced an unintended synergy.

Poison fills the wounds carved into a body of poison. If it fills what is lacking with neither excess nor shortage, then the result is plus-minus zero.

Yozora as she is now can completely recover from any damage whatsoever.

"Is it really this hard to get any damage through...!? Are the others like this too...!?"

Kyogoku had no way of knowing any of that.

To her eyes, Yozora was a terrifying enemy who recovered from damage no matter how many times she was cut.

Slashes that, against players, would have been enough to finish off two of them... or, against Sunraku, five of him, were sealed away as though plaster were being packed into cracks in a wall.

If this were a punching bag, she could keep cutting it again and again. But Yozora was an enemy, and an enemy naturally counterattacked when struck. And those counters came with enough lethality by default to wipe out Kyogoku's entire HP bar in a single hit.

There was one more fact she could not have known.

Yozora was a mighty warrior who wielded her own katana and continued surviving until the day she died. In player terms, her stats were those of a frontline attacker like Psyger-0, one who accepted taking hits in order to deal damage... which meant that her base vitalityHP pool was enormous to begin with.

"what's wrong? are you Out Of Breath?"

"Your concern is entirely unnecessary, thank you...!"

Formidable base specs, recovery powerful enough to erase damage outright, and the movements of a master swordsman layered on top.

Put simply, she was absolutely not an opponent to challenge alone... among the poison clones, Yozora was a joker of the highest order.

A katana the size of a zanbato was swung around, and Kyogoku ducked beneath it. She then jumped over the returning blade as it came sweeping back like a branch being whipped around.

But that wild flurry of the black blade, swung like a branch... with nothing but a snap of the wrist, made it difficult even to deflect, let alone close in.

And yet, within that despair, Kyogoku found one slender chance at victory.

(...It'll probably work. This is still, ultimately, a fight against a monster... so it should work.)

In full-dive VR, becoming "out of breath" is something that ordinarily cannot happen.

But there was nothing to be done about mental exhaustion... and Kyogoku let out a rough, heat-laden breath.

(She's definitely strong, or rather, way too strong. Grandfather casually swinging around a zanbato is brutal even as a joke......... but no matter how much she looks like a girl, she's an NPC... a monster. So it'll work...!!)

As Kyogoku reset her katana into a seigan stance, she fixed her gaze straight on Yozora's... slender neck.

(The Destruction Attribute. Against monsters it needs a certain amount of buildup, but there's no way it won't work... and in ShanFro, as a general rule, cutting off the head causes instant death regardless of HP!!)

Yozora's HP was certainly astonishing, and her recovery was more astonishing still.

But the damage itself was undeniably occurring. And if that was the case...

(Make her neck brittle with the Destruction Attribute, then cut it off before it regenerates...!!)

The hypothesis Kyogoku had formed from the battle thus far was that "this Goldunine is not, strictly speaking, a living creature."

This was not a question of where her will resided or whether she possessed a soul... nor was it simply a matter of the substance composing her body not being protein... rather, if they were to be classified, the category they most likely belonged in was...

(A slime, or a golem...!!)

Nonliving-type monsters whose bodies are composed of a single substance.

Therefore, when viewing that body as an object, it should not be treated as a human body... but as a single mass of poison "shaped like" a human body.

That is why no blood comes out when she is cut, why she regenerates immediately without issue even after a blow that has clearly cut all the way through the bone. Precisely because it is a body "shaped like" a human body, it can also perform inhuman movements.

The things that scream under movements that ignore the laws of physics are the bones, blood vessels, muscles, and tendons that make up the human body, and that is precisely because it is an object made from a collection of puzzle-like parts wrapped in skin, but if it is instead a single mass of poison... then it should be viewed not as a living creature, but as an object.

And then, the Destruction Attribute.

Just as its name declares, rather than producing a damage effect, it creates weak points in the form of structural damage, breakage, and missing sections... and this rare attribute, which increases Karma merely through its use, produces an exceptionally powerful effect against a single homogeneous substance.

(I didn't mean to, but the fact that I haven't used the Destruction Attribute until now is huge...!!)

In terms of classification, the Destruction Attribute is a buildup-type status ailment, placing it in the same category as paralysis and poison.

Repeated activation might be possible against monsters at Level 100 or below, but against anything higher, it was not an effect she could trigger over and over on the same target... all the more so when that monster vastly outclassed her.

(Two hits. Two hits. I'm not expecting the Destruction Attribute alone to sever her neck... break it, cut it, and take her head off!!)

If she still moved after that, then Kyogoku would have no choice but to run.

"Thinking time's over."

"I see."

Even as Kyogoku found something strangely amusing in Yozora dutifully replying to a mere mutter aimed at no one, thinking how different Yozora was from her grandfather, who had remained utterly unresponsive even to words directed at him unless they began by addressing him...

Kyogoku pointed her blade toward Yozora, the figure who made her see the shadow of her grandfather, and aimed to turn death back into life......... that was when.

"Hm?"

Suddenly, something slipped loose from within her memories.

The past flashed back as though spilling out.

An utterly ordinary piece of daily life with her grandfather, and precisely because it was ordinary, something as precious as a jewel.

Why had she remembered it now? It would be easy enough to say that Yozora's behavior had stirred her memories, but for some reason, Kyogoku held the baseless certainty that "that wasn't it."

Yes, that was, if she remembered correctly......... truly only a short while before her grandfather died.

Author's Afterword

Yozora's main fighting style is a no-guard attacker strategy of endlessly charging in and cutting under the principles of "if I let them cut my flesh but it doesn't reach the bone, I'm safe" and "even if the bone ”breaks” then I'm safe, as long as it doesn't shatter." [*1]

She uses the master's combat discernment built into her thought process to judge how much damage she can afford to take. That is why she does not dodge Kyogoku's attacks. Since a comminuted fracture makes Uwabami take longer to crawl through, she tends not to dodge slashes that would be difficult to evade.

Translator's Notes

• [1] Let Them Cut the Flesh: Yozora's rules parody the swordsmanship maxim "let them cut your flesh to sever their bone," meaning to accept an injury in order to deal the opponent a decisive wound. Yozora reduces it to the far more self-serving principle that being cut is safe as long as her own bones remain sufficiently intact.