But—
“The altitude…ain’t dropping.”
Looking up, he saw the White Whale calmly remaining in the sky.
It was not up so high that the cavalry could not leap up to it, but it would be very difficult for men to challenge it on foot. More importantly, without the demon beast falling to the ground, they could not shift to the next phase of the operation.
Ricardo pulled alongside, carrying his huge cleaver as blood spatter drenched the fur on his face.
“We played all our good cards right at the start. That it didn’t go down means that thing was just tougher, huh.” He snorted out of his canine snout, his pointy ears twitching as he said, “Feels like we scored a point, but it ain’t easy breakin’ through that thick hide underneath. ’Cept for a weapon like mine with brute force, or Mr. Wil’s skills, it’s a drop in the ol’ bucket.”
“Maybe that goes for physical attacks, but it looked like magic attacks worked, yeah?”
“I am quite doubtful that is the case. At first glance, they appeared to be spectacular strikes, but that white hair scatters the mana, dulling the force. My magic did not do as much damage as it appeared, either.”
Rem voiced with regret that the magic representing her own greatest firepower had been ineffective.
When her words drew Subaru’s attention, he saw that there certainly were numerous shallow wounds in the White Whale’s flesh, but none amounted to deep wounds that diminished its fighting ability. But at the very least…
“Looks like the fire spells from earlier are burning its hair off pretty well, though.”
“It’s simple—burn the magic-scatterin’ hair off and we can have that fried whale flesh under it for dinner.”
Ricardo ferociously bared his fangs as he concurred with Subaru’s guess. With the massive cleaver in hand, he gave the liger’s back a pat, hurtling toward the front line once more.
“All riiight, let’s bring what we’ve got left in the sack just like earlier! Crusch, give the big guy one more slug in the gut, will ya?”
Drawing up his own laundry list, he slipped under the White Whale and leaped onto its body once more.
When Subaru looked, Wilhelm, who he was sure had moved some distance off, was also aiming to get back on the White Whale, this time from the tail end. The expeditionary force had apparently come to the same conclusion as Subaru and Ricardo and was shifting to its next move—in other words, a second all-out attack.
“In this case, they’ll be pouring firepower on the White Whale, so we’d just be in the way if we got close. Rem, can you slam magic into it like you did earlier?”
“It would take time for an incantation of identical strength, and water element mana cannot do damage when it is scattered. Anything of lesser might would have insufficient firepower to begin with, so…”
If he went by Ricardo’s earlier conclusion, the right thing to do was to have Rem join the front line, morning star in one hand, and add to the blunt-force attacks against the White Whale. However, if Subaru made her do that, he’d turn into her ball and chain. It was pathetic, but using his physical condition to implement a decoy operation meant Subaru couldn’t send Rem off alone.
“It sucks, but I’ve gotta watch until there’s a move I can make…”
As Subaru spoke, their land dragon eased away from the battlefield at a slow pace, and a different land dragon pulled alongside.
“That annoying feeling’s the same for me as it is for you, meow.”
It was Ferris, riding a land dragon clad in heavily armored plates.
“Ferri doesn’t have any ways to attack, so watching is pretty much all I can do. I’m kinda, sorta used to it, but it always bums me out, meow.”
“Maybe so, but your healing is the expeditionary force’s lifeline. Can’t be havin’ you go out in front. I’m begging you, focus on that job, okay?”
Subaru bluntly emphasized that to Ferris, taking that moment to approach in his normal demeanor. The reply made Ferris close one eye with a hmm.
“You really have changed in one day, meow. What happened to you?”
“If I’ve gotta put it in words, I became a bit more of a man.”
As his eyes ran across the shifting battlefield, Subaru replied with a reflective expression, biting on bitter thoughts.
Subaru’s behavior sent Ferris suggestively poking a finger into a cheek as he said, “Subawu, don’t tell me Rem made a man out of you, meow?”
The answer was both yes and a definite no.
Subaru was about to level an angry shout to shut Ferris up for the out-of-place vulgarity.
“Master Wilhelm is—!”
But he was interrupted by Rem’s urgent shout.
When he hurriedly sent his gaze in the direction Rem was looking, he saw the aged swordsman running on the White Whale’s back.
With a sword, he stabbed the White Whale’s backside, ripping the White Whale’s body lengthwise as he ran. As Wilhelm ran from tail to back, the delayed spurting of whale blood made it look like he was being chased by geysers.
That moment, Wilhelm’s works were truly those of an angry god.
The expeditionary force lifted their faces, with morale exploding higher at the Sword Devil’s abnormal skill with the blade. The firing pace of the magic crystal cannons and the vigor of the mercenaries and cavalry unit’s organized attacks grew greater still.
Unable to withstand the agony, the White Whale writhed in midair, completely unable to respond to the expeditionary force’s attack.
Seeing the Demon Beast of Mist, the calamity that had caused continued suffering across four centuries, in such a pathetic state, Subaru firmly believed the tide was completely going their way.
“Cheeeeeiiiiii!”
With an energetic outburst, Wilhelm drew his sword in a line all the way to the White Whale’s head, maintaining his momentum as his old bones leaped off from the tip of the enormous body. As the old man twisted and inverted in midair—
“There ya go!”
Ricardo’s cleaver matched Wilhelm’s timing, rising up to greet him from below. Wilhelm descended, aiming for the cleaver as it rose toward its zenith, the soles of the Sword Devil’s feet meeting the cleaver’s blunt, impending blow.
“Shii—!!”
Ricardo’s brawn added to Wilhelm’s leaping ability, sending the Sword Devil flying like a bullet.
Shot out, Wilhelm’s dual blades whirled around, savagely slicing the White Whale’s face. It was cruelly shredded from the tip of its nose up its cheek, with Wilhelm unleashing a stab toward its gigantic eye.
“!!”
The twin swords sank their hilts into the White Whale’s left eye, and clear fluid flowed out of the ravaged eyeball.
Wilhelm instantly abandoned the two sunken swords, drawing two new swords in a flash—from right and left, his slashes cut above and below the eye; flipping the blades, he added vertical cuts to its left and right.
As a result, the White Whale’s left eyeball was cut from four directions when—
“The eye’s falling!”
Gouged out by four slices, the White Whale’s left eye fell freely, and Wilhelm along with it—
The shout, from whatever source, became truth, and the eyeball, spewing blood and fluid, collided with the ground, squishing and splattering.
Wilhelm landed right beside it, the Sword Devil driving a sword into the eyeball, threatening to lose all coherence, and raised it high so that the White Whale’s right eye could see it.
“—Pathetic.”
Then, the corners of his lips turned up in a ghastly, triumphant smile.
The White Whale had been rendered helpless as the Sword Devil’s sublime combat techniques made sport of it.
It was clear to all that their fighting strength was not determined by the overwhelming difference in the sizes of their bodies.
Perhaps it took the loss of its left eye for the White Whale to finally accept that fact…
“The color of the Wh
ite Whale’s eye is…!”
“It’s coming!!”
“Subaru, please keep your head down—!!”
The instant Subaru noticed the change, Ferris shouted, and Rem accelerated the land dragon.
Because they had stopped, the wind repel blessing was not in effect. Subaru, clinging to Rem as he endured the ferocious wind and shaking, somehow managed to turn his eyes to the White Whale overhead.
Within Subaru’s field of vision, the White Whale’s state changed at once.
“!!”
The White Whale, angry at having an eye gouged out, let up a roar as its one intact eye was dyed deep red.
The eyeball, now the color of blood, shot like a dagger through the expeditionary force, pulling back to put distance between it and the beast. Immediately after, the White Whale’s body quaked in hatred and rage as a change came over its flesh.
…the instant that change began, Subaru was unable to repress a sense of disgust that defied words.
The White Whale opened its mouth.
No, those words were both correct and incorrect. To more accurately express the truth…
—The mouths of countless cavities over the White Whale’s entire body opened and began to raise their voices.
“!!”
Reverberations like shrieking voices poured out of the countless mouths created all over the demon beast’s flesh.
The discordant sound one would not think existed in that world seemed to claw away directly at the listeners’ spirits, coursing from their hearing to violate their cranial nerves.
The damage did not stop at human beings alone. The land dragons and ligers employed as mounts stopped in their tracks, seized by instinctive, primordial fear.
The expeditionary force was overcome by its worst instance of defenselessness since the start of the battle to bring down the White Whale.
And then…
“…Ah…”
Raising a chorus, the countless mouths spewed an immense amount of mist.
In the blink of an eye, the mist poured onto the plains, and the world illuminated by the effect of Night Repel was blotted out in white.
His vision obstructed, his entire body cowering, Subaru understood that the White Whale had acknowledged them as its enemies.
It was the Demon Beast of Mist raising its war cry that announced the true commencement of hostilities.
5
Loud laughter echoed across the Liphas Highway.
Discordant sounds trickled from the small mouths open across the giant body of the White Whale as it swam leisurely in the sky.
When it roared from its proper mouth, it came with such destruction that it made the earth shudder. But the sound given off by many mouths out of sync was twisted and repulsive, like being clawed by the very wind.
The unpleasant feeling was not a blow to the eardrums but rather, like having one’s brain poked at by slender needles.
With that ghoulish change in the White Whale, Subaru sensed that the tide had turned.
They’d pounded that immense preemptive strike into it with the expeditionary force, from Wilhelm on down, adding their own concentrated attacks. The damage inflicted on the White Whale was by no means minimal. After all, the combined firepower was enough to kill Subaru a hundred times over; if comparing with other demon beasts, it was attack power sufficient to wipe out an entire Urugarum pack ten times over.
The beast, bathed in all that, had taken enough damage to lose one eye. If it was not enough to settle the battle, Subaru had hoped it would at least result in bringing the beast down to earth, but—
“Crap, the mist…!”
Continuing to raise a shrill cry, the White Whale spread mist from its countless mouths.
The mist spread in a wide range across the highway, its encroachment progressing as it fell thickly from the sky. Subaru’s field of vision became progressively whiter, and the effect of the Night Repel magic crystal waned.
—The Demon Beast of Mist had come into its own.
With visibility worsening, the expeditionary force was unable to maintain tight cohesion over the mist-shrouded plains. Moreover, didn’t it look like even the White Whale was melting into the mist, vanishing from sight…?
“You’re kidding me…?!”
“—Subaru, please entrust me with your life!!”
Rem leaned forward and shouted to Subaru, shaken by the vanishing of the White Whale. Subaru responded to her shout by deepening his arms’ embrace of Rem’s body.
Obeying Rem’s snap of the reins, the land dragon whirled around, splitting the ground as it began to sprint.
Ferris, beside them until just earlier, similarly turned the head of his land dragon toward the interior of the mist. With the White Whale entering a state of combat, the counterattack would grow desperate. Naturally, casualties could not be avoided. That being the case, this was where his duty lay as he was called The Blue Knight, the greatest of healers.
Yet, in spite of that…
“All hands, retreat—!!”
…a bellow from inside the mist resounded, halting them before they leaped into the sea of white.
It was Crusch’s voice they heard.
What is she doing? was the look on the face Subaru lifted up, but the next moment—
“Whoa?!”
Subaru’s body was shaken by centrifugal force as the land dragon veered left in a spur-of-the-moment decision. In front, Ferris’s land dragon was making its own emergency right turn, resulting in them going separate ways.
And white came violently surging into the corners of Subaru’s tilted vision.
“—Hey now, hold on?!”
The middle of the path that had opened up by their splitting apart was blown away in a single gust of very dense mist.
The force of the tall wave of mist shooting through would have surely swallowed up the land dragons had they evaded even a second slower.
Without having seen the real thing in action, one might laugh it off as making a big deal about mere mist. But no one seeing the nature of that mist up close with their own eyes would ever dismiss it so lightly.
The surface of the plains grazed by the mist was gouged out as if melted away, with the highway surface vanishing all the way down to the foundation.
A human body fully bathed in that mist would invariably share the same fate.
“If we got hit by that…!”
Subaru thought he’d fully taken to heart the briefing beforehand concerning the threat of the White Whale’s mist. But the real thing was beyond even his expectations.
“So this is the serious mist…!”
The White Whale, called the Demon Beast of Mist, had mist that broadly fell into two varieties.
The first was the wide-area mist it scattered to expand its own swimming area, such as what it had used to cover the highway. And the second was the annihilating mist, which had erased a good chunk of the ground before his eyes just then.
He hadn’t seen the means of attack until then, but it was the latter, the annihilating mist, that wrought destruction. And though a single glance was sufficient to understand its destructive power, there was even more to it than that.
Namely—
“Yaaa!!”
In a vigorous flash, a gallant voice cut through the mist as something suddenly sliced open the white scene before Subaru’s eyes.
It was a white land dragon with Crusch on its back that leaped out of the mist. She’d probably used the super-long-range invisible slicing attack to disperse the mist and secure her vision.
Crusch brusquely wiped off the sweat on her brow, panting atop the land dragon. Using her as a marker at the center of the cleared mist, the scattered elements of the expeditionary force began to hastily regroup.
Crusch looked across her subordinates from each of the assembled squads and asked, “—How many people were hit?”
“Our squad has twelve people—we’re three short.”
“…Who are you missing?”
<
br /> “We don’t know…!”
Faced with Crusch’s impatience, a man in his prime seemed to wring out his reply as he shook his head.
Under normal circumstances, such an exchange would be incomprehensible. The squad leader, cognizant of the number of people in his squad, was reporting that he could not remember the names of the lost members. Surely such a crazy thing was not possible, yet…
“We have fourteen and have lost one.”
“Two men in my squad. Similarly unclear.”
“Six men… I am very sorry! Our position was deep, and we were unable to avoid the mist…!”
Similar reports came in one after another, with none able to remember the names of their vanished comrades.
It was that bizarre circumstance that was the true menace of the White Whale’s mist.
“The annihilating…mist…!!”
In shock, Subaru’s molars clattered as the murmur came running up his throat.
Those literally annihilated by the mist had even the memories of their existence erased from the world. Even if proof remained of those erased, no memories of their existence remained.
That was the true meaning behind Crusch organizing the expeditionary force in squads of fifteen men each. If the squads were to lose men due to the mist, they would be unable to even discern who had been hit. Even so, by having a set number in each squad, they could at least grasp the fact that they had lost people.
—Subaru knew that eerie fear for himself, for he had tasted it the previous go-around.
For Otto, the traveling merchant accompanying him on the highway, the existence of a fellow merchant fallen prey to the White Whale, and the existence of Rem, who’d stayed behind to slow the White Whale down, had been completely consigned to oblivion.
At the time, Subaru was of the thought that Otto had forgotten those inconvenient memories out of fear, but it made more sense that he was under the effect of the White Whale’s mist. All memory of his fellow merchant, and Rem, was erased from that world—just like when, back at the mansion, even Rem’s older twin sister, Ram, had forgotten her.
Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World-, Vol. 7 Page 10
