The Men of the Kingdom Part II

by Kugane Maruyama

  Entoma saw the dirty edge of the war pick rise up.

  I underestimated this person, she scolded herself.

  Dodging it would be easy enough. Certainly, if she were a human and the ground beneath her had been destroyed, she would have lost her balance and found it difficult to escape between the two shock waves. But Entoma was one of the Pleiades, and all the magic items she had equipped were upper tier, so this situation didn’t bother her one bit.

  There was just one problem.

  To dodge, she had to jump aside, and it would get her maid uniform dirty.

  Was that a pardonable offense? It was her best outfit, given to her by the Supreme Beings.

  Time…to finish this.

  Hostility appeared on her face beneath her mask for the first time.

  Time to finish this.

  I’m gonna kill you.

  Filled with not the mild annoyance of a human brushing away a bug but murderous intent, Entoma raised her left arm to meet the descending war pick. Even a floor guardian wouldn’t make it through this attack unscathed, so for her, it would be nearly impossible.

  The next second, instead of metal gouging flesh, the clang of hard object against hard object rang out.

  Entoma’s left hand suddenly had a small shield sticking to it, quite literally. There was a bug with over eight legs clinging to her arm.

  “What…is that thing?!”

  “I…am a bug tamerrr. So I can summon bugs and put them to work for meee.”

  She flung her other arm to the side, and a long bug that looked almost like a broadsword flew out of the dark night and affixed itself to the back of her right hand.

  “Sword Bug and Shell Bug. I’m gonna kill youuuu. I wasn’t going toooo, but I can’t let this stannnd.”

  Entoma charged and launched a single stroke.

  She sliced open the man-woman’s armor, and blood spurted. But it was far from a lethal blow. Even if it had been impossible to evade Entoma’s all-out attack, the warrior had been able to get away with only a light injury.

  So that stuff earlier about being top class in the kingdom was neither exaggeration nor a bluff. But if this is all this person’s got, they’re no match for me.

  Entoma Vasilissa Zeta may not have been built purely for combat like Yuri Alpha, but she was still a member of the Pleiades, which meant that a mere human could never match her strength.

  She swung again and bathed her face in the fountain of blood.

  Because of the wound from the first attack, this blow cut deeper—not such a light injury this time.

  “Your movements have changed! Does that mean you’re taking this seriously now?!” The angry shout came at the same time as he-she swung the war pick, and Entoma repelled it with her Shell Bug. The shock that ran through her was surprisingly intense, but she braced her legs and didn’t stagger so much as a step. There was no harm in doing so, but this was a manifestation of her pride—being moved by a human was obnoxious.

  The man-woman didn’t die but instead, maintaining momentum, unleashed a fluid chain attack. It was an attack of Sturm und Drang and was probably buffed by one of those special “martial arts” exclusive to this world. But Entoma made skillful use of her Sword and Shell Bugs and blocked all fifteen attacks to emerge unscathed.

  Entoma had no way of knowing, but that had been Gagaran of the Blue Roses’ ace move, performed by activating multiple arts simultaneously. It was a super-elite chain attack. Each blow in the barrage was backed by the full strength of Gagaran’s powerful arms and could defeat even the martial art Fortress—it was possible to stay on the receiving end only with a defensive art that no one but a few geniuses were able to acquire, Impenetrable Fortress. Yet Entoma was blocking everything with her innate physical strength alone.

  This was a gap born of a difference in level and racial physical ability.

  Even when the first glimpse of despair appeared in her opponent’s eyes, Entoma showed no emotion. The only thought in her head was to kill.

  Pwah!

  It was the sound of someone coming up for air. At the same time, the chain of attacks stopped. Entoma took her right hand—the one with the Sword Bug—drew it back like a bow, and thrust it forward like an arrow. Her aim was the chest of the man-woman in front of her.

  The war pick rose up, but it moved at the speed of a tortoise. Entoma’s stab was faster and pierced the man-woman’s chest—

  —or that was what was supposed to happen.

  Her blade sliced air. The Sword Bug missed its mark and thrust into the darkness of the night.

  Entoma’s head turned with an uncanny motion—to look at the interfering intruder.

  More than several yards away was a woman dressed in black. The man-woman, out of breath, was behind her.

  “Thanks, Tia. I thought I was a goner.”

  “So you have red blood, too, huh, Gagaran?”

  “What’s so surprising about that? I’m pretty sure you’ve seen me get injured plenty of times.”

  “I thought maybe by now it’d be blue, like you powered up.”

  “That’s not a power-up! More like changing races!”

  “Then a class change.”

  The sound of their cheerful banter irritated Entoma. She was the strong one, and therefore, she was the one allowed to be calm. They need to think about the position they’re in.

  “Are you almossssst readyyyyyy? Said your good-byyyyes?” Entoma braced herself for the first time. She wasn’t scared of the man-woman—Gagaran. The problem was the new opponent—Tia. If her outfit wasn’t a fashion statement, it meant she was a ninja—a class that required at least sixty levels to acquire.

  That meant the teleportation that had saved Gagaran from Entoma’s attack was ninjutsu.

  If her opponent was really a ninja, victory wouldn’t be so easy, even for Entoma. She’d wanted to end this with some energy in reserve, but under the circumstances, she no longer had the luxury to hope for that.

  “Spider Talisman!” Faster than her opponent could move, Entoma scattered four talismans.

  The moment the sheets hit the ground, they changed into large spiders. On par with the results of the spell Summon Third-Tier Monster, the conjured spiders weren’t strong, but for Entoma, gaining even a bit of insight into what her opponent could do would be tremendously helpful and give her time to prepare herself for combat.

  Although bug tamers’ bug weapons were powerful, they had their drawbacks. One of them was that summoning the bugs took a little time.

  “Shadow Double!”

  As Tia’s ninjutsu activated, her shadow wriggled, and another Tia appeared.

  Entoma paid it no attention. The doubles created with Shadow Double had only a quarter of the power of the user. The only exception was its evasion, which was proportional to the amount of MP expended. The double might have been a tough opponent for her spiders, but to Entoma, it wasn’t even worth fighting.

  The main problem was how much combat ability the original ninja possessed. Entoma readied her ace move, Bullet Bugs, and one other. At the same time, she slapped a talisman on herself to boost her strength.

  The Bullet Bugs amassed out of thin air and began to envelop her left arm. About an inch long each, the insects gleamed like steel, and their pointy, conical bodies bore a close resemblance to rifle bullets. The similar shape was only natural, as they were put to the exact same use.

  The ninja’s double had its hands full dodging an assault from one of the spiders, and the original was fending off two. She couldn’t be too terribly high level if she had taken out only one after this much time. In that case, even combining her potential with Gagaran’s was most likely not enough to interfere with Entoma’s victory.

  Heh, it won’t be that easyyyyy…

  She would settle this quickly, forcefully, and without mercy.

  Satisfied with the weight settled on her left arm, she aimed at Tia.

  The bugs had gathered on Entoma’s arm until it was twice as big around,
and they began moving down past her wrist. After reaching the tips of her fingers, they all scrambled to be the first to take off. The continuous noise of their wings was reminiscent of a Gatling gun. Shooting mercilessly through her spider minions in the line of fire, a total of one hundred fifty Bullet Bugs choked the air as they streaked toward Tia.

  These living missiles, which could penetrate steel, would scar and fell even the largest of tree trunks. But in the face of these death slugs, Tia relied on ninjutsu.

  “Unyielding Diamond Shield!”

  A shield, dazzlingly radiant with all the colors of the rainbow, appeared in front of her. The huge hexagon sparkled, ripping through the darkness, and the bugs crashed into it. The barrier lasted less than a few seconds before breaking apart with the clear tinkle of shattering glass, but by then, the barrage had ended, and Tia, safely behind cover, was unharmed.

  Entoma clicked her tongue despite not having one. Still, uncovering her opponents’ hidden moves one after the other would illuminate the path to victory. Tia could still handle her attacks for now, but the moment they surpassed the ninja’s ability, they would be like a muddy stream surging past its banks to swallow everything.

  With her bug sword, Entoma batted away the throwing knife flying toward her from the front, and with her bug shield, she blocked Gagaran’s attack from above. That blow must have come a long way down. The Shell Bug shrieked as the impressive momentum slammed into it.

  If Entoma had been blinded by the dazzling light of the Unyielding Diamond Shield, she probably wouldn’t have been able to block Gagaran’s charging attacks in the dark, but her sight wasn’t about to be affected by something so minor. Moreover, her field of vision was much wider than humans’. Even with this mask on.

  Perhaps judging a follow-up attack too risky, Gagaran glided out of range as if she were skating on the surface of a lake, barely moving her feet. Her agility despite her heavy build showed that her wounds had fully healed. She crushed Bullet Bug carcasses under her feet with dry crunching noises as she stood next to Tia.

  “Crap, I have zero confidence we can win this. What’s up with her? Her timing’s so perfect! She blocked my attack without even looking!”

  “Wider field of vision?”

  “There’s something else. There’s a good chance she has a bug tamer ability or whatever. That or a special sense you get from some kind of magic spell… Still, though, why doesn’t she attack while we’re chatting? The advantage is overwhelmingly on her side.”

  “A beast first assesses its opponents’ strength, then attacks their weak point.”

  “Gotcha. So she’s checking out all the tricks up our sleeves, hmm? People who are actually cautious, unlike our Little Miss Tiny, are a pain in the neck.”

  “I guess I shouldn’t underestimate theeeem too much just because they’re humannnn. Wellll, I have some other reasons, toooo, but…there, seeeee? In that case, I don’t need this bug.”

  The bug clinging to Entoma’s right arm fell to the ground and scurried off, vanishing into the darkness.

  “Instead…c’meeeeere.”

  A new creature coiled around her free arm. It was like a centipede—no, it was a real centipede, albeit over thirty feet long and its face, if it could be called that, had abnormally sharp fangs.

  This was the strongest insect she could summon, Whip Bug.

  Entoma began bracing her legs.

  She’d collected most of the data she needed about the humans in front of her—their attack speed, destructive power, defense, evasion, mobility, and so on. The only thing she wasn’t sure of was how Tia would address the situation, but that wasn’t worth getting anxious about.

  “Oops.” Entoma felt around below her face. There was a clear, sticky liquid. “I thought I was fullll, but I guess all this exercise made me hungry agaaaaain.”

  The fluid clinging to her hand was drool—proof of her yearning for the two humans, who were no longer anything besides food to her.

  Humans were her favorite, but up until now, she’d had to subsist on green cookies and be satisfied with that. Of course, she didn’t hold it against the Supreme Beings. On the contrary, Entoma felt she was being given generous consideration. For example, when villagers were captured and used in healing experiments, she was allowed to eat their severed arms.

  Still, on some level, she was just putting up with the situation, so when faced with these excellent specimens, who would make for the highest quality foodstuff, she couldn’t throw away the chance without taking even a single bite.

  The two humans shivered under Entoma’s ravenous gaze. The reaction didn’t stem from fear of their powerful enemy’s bloodlust but from a physiological instinct born of being targeted by a predator.

  “Kiiiiyaaaaaaaaa!” With a shrill battle cry like two pieces of Styrofoam rubbing together, Entoma went on the offensive for the first time in this fight. The motions of this predator hunting down her prey were direct and bizarrely fast.

  By the time the shield bug had deflected the six throwing knives hurled her way, there was barely any distance left between them.

  When Entoma saw Gagaran out front with her weapon at the ready, she decided whose she would neutralize first and lashed out with the whip in her right hand.

  The longer a whip is, the slower its tip will move—that was a given. It was natural even for someone with superhuman strength like Entoma. But that assumed the weapon was like any ordinary whip.

  What Entoma wielded was the strongest summoning she could accomplish with her bug tamer abilities…

  Normally a whip would approach in a circular motion, but this one moved in an impossible way. It approached Gagaran quick as lightning, like an extension of Entoma’s arm, twisting at acute zigzag angles. Even an adventurer who’d experienced all sorts of unknowns wouldn’t have had a chance to see or experience inconceivable movements like these—only a cross between a living being and a weapon could perform this way. It was utterly natural to be at a loss during one’s first encounter.

  But her ability to dodge it nonetheless proved she was an adamantite-rank adventurer—the highest-rank adventurer.

  Gagaran just barely avoided the bug whip, and it whizzed past the side of her face.

  “Watch out!”

  The same moment Tia screamed, Gagaran was sent flying—by Tia’s ninjutsu, Ring of Fire Bombs, which she set off knowing it would hit both herself and her teammate. As the flames and explosive blast enveloped the pair, the Whip Bug suddenly made a hairpin turn to pass through the space where Gagaran’s head had been.

  Without Tia’s resolve to take drastic measures, the Whip Bug would have undoubtedly decapitated Gagaran. It was a decent evasive tactic, but Entoma’s attacks didn’t end there. As if bound by a leash, the Whip Bug abruptly changed direction and headed for sooty, blackened Gagaran.

  At the same time, Entoma threw a talisman in Tia’s direction.

  Thunder Bird Talisman.

  In midair, it transformed into a bird discharging pale-blue shocks and flew toward Tia.

  When facing two opponents, one of them could be left to a bug. That was one of the good things about being a tamer.

  A burst of electricity bathed the area in a pale-blue light, illuminating Gagaran, who was trying to subdue the Whip Bug, and Tia, in her pain.

  “Dammit! I hate creepy-crawlies!”

  Holding the bug’s head down with her war pick, Gagaran tried to pin it against her left flank, but it took advantage of its full thirty feet to wrap around her body.

  A dagger Tia threw mid-charge crashed into Entoma’s shield bug with a clang.

  “Wild Flight of Thunder Bird Talisman!”

  Entoma scattered several talismans with her left hand. They changed into birds slightly smaller than the previous one and assaulted Tia all at once. Tia, however, disappeared, and the birds flew off when they failed to detect her.

  The ninja loomed in the darkness behind Entoma, outside her field of vision. Tia had used short-distance teleportat
ion. But Entoma had already found her. Some bugs have antennae, and the additional sense Entoma had was possible thanks to an organ very much like those, which detected changes in airflow.

  She shot her few remaining Bullet Bugs at Tia, who oozed out of the shadows into the open.

  “Kugh!” The grunt of pain was accompanied by the smell of fresh blood, but Entoma judged that her opponent still had the will to fight and made a follow-up attack.

  “Bombing Talisman!”

  An explosion larger than Tia’s broke the night’s stillness. The ninja was sent flying, and as she tumbled across the ground, Entoma threw more charms at her: Sharp Slash and Colliding Winds. Without a chance to stand up, Tia was cut and blasted, rolling away in a trail of blood.

  “Tia…! You buggy bitch!” Gagaran’s insult came from the center of a lumpy sphere—the Whip Bug was completely coiled around her.

  The plan had probably been for Gagaran to subdue the Whip Bug with her strength and for Tia to take on Entoma herself.

  Entoma sneered beneath her mask.

  All she could say was that they’d been too foolish. Humans of this caliber never had any chance of defeating Entoma, a member of the Great Tomb of Nazarick’s Pleiades. The smartest thing for them to do would have been to ignore that she was eating humans and withdraw as fast as they could. They were in this situation precisely due to that error of judgment.

  “…I went out of orderrrr, but I guess that can’t be hellllped. In any caaaase, you’ve got a lot of musclllle, so you should be plenty substantial and tastyyyyy.” Entoma summoned a bug. This one wasn’t fiendishly dangerous in a fight, but its slender, syringe-like body contained a paralyzing poison.

  With the bug in hand, Entoma approached Tia with a light step.

  She’ll make a great souvenir. There were quite a few creatures who preyed on humans in the Great Tomb of Nazarick. Entoma was sure they would be delighted.

  “Hmm? What’s thiiiis?” Entoma’s superior senses detected something long, thin, and cold approaching from overhead, and she leaped aside. That same moment, a spear jammed into the spot where she’d been standing.