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Volume 2 Chapter 14-2: Hero

 

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Kuu’s eyes opened wide as she raised her hands before her and flames erupted from them.

The flames raged with such intensity that they started to turn white. They transitioned from red to blue and then to white. They radiated outwards and spread to leave no possibility of escape.

It was plain to anyone that these were nearly impossible to avoid and would burn their target to ash without even leaving bones. Even so the girl merely smiled and dashed towards them before instantly leaping high into the air over the flames.

She flipped once and brandished her sword.

I quickly kicked Kuu aside. I felt bad for her, but I didn’t have the time to nicely carry her out of harm’s way.

「Kyaa!」

Then the girl’s sword cut through the space where Kuu had been only a moment before.

「So you avoided those flames hmm?」

I gave a sidelong glance and checked what magic she was using. She had been using 【Body Enhancement】 alone.

If instead of kicking Kuu out of the way I had instead placed a magical defense then she would have pierced straight through it. Her magic power was great enough that she could achieve such a thing.

That she hadn’t even twitched showed that it was most likely that she had simply utilized 【Body Enhancement】 to increase her strength or firmness. Such magic was much lower in difficulty than an overall 【Body Enhancement】.

「Kicking a girl aside…how brutish~. What would you do if you left a scar?」
「At that time I would simply take responsibility.」
「You still have the leeway to joke around I see. Even though you’re just a guy who chats up a girl like me to buy time~」
「Thanks to that my ankle is all healed up. If you’d give me a bit more time my broken arm would be fixed too. How about giving me 2 more minutes to get it fixed?」
「That’s no good. Somehow…you’re weak, but I get a bad feeling about it.」

She leapt at me full force before she even finished her words.

Just by watching her movements up until now I understood. She was several times stronger than me. Her internal magical power, her ability to emit magical power, and her pure physical abilities were far and away superior to my own.

With 【Samsara Recursion】 I could definitely call a ‘me’ that was stronger than her. However, it had not been 12 hours since I invoked my partial activation back in the city. I would end up injuring my soul.

Furthermore, 【Samsara Recursion】 would take at least 20 seconds of uninterrupted and concentrated spell casting to get things just right.

Leaving myself defenseless before a foe such as this girl for so long would be enough for me to die ten times.

In the first place I had no intention of showing these two anything except my appearance as Cyril.

It was necessary to remain as Cyril and still go into battle. Even with my dominant arm broken and against such a monstrous opponent…

I asked myself. Can I win? I can.

「Are you afraid of me?」

I lightly spoke as we fought and I started up my spells.

I limited my 【Perception Expansion】 to within 50 meters of myself to lower the burden and increase every bit of relevant information that got through to me.

I adjusted my 【Body Enhancement】 from low energy mode to the limits of my own endurance.

I switched 【Program】 from general purpose mode to personal combat mode, further increasing the optimization and movements.

I activated 【Wind Armor】 which would wrap my body in wind and allow my limbs to move about the air as if aided by a tailwind. This would increase my movement speed and at times aid in interrupting the enemy’s movement. At the same time it provided a small measure of physical defense.

「Of course not, it’s just annoying.」

She said as she simply swung her sword at me.

However, this time I was able to dodge half my body to the side and the sword blow missed entirely.

Thanks to reducing the effective range of my senses I was able to obtain more accurate and detailed information, which in turn informed my optimized program of the correct movements to make, which would in turn activate my strengthened body, and the wind which increased my movement speed.

If it was limited to simply dodging then I could catch up.

If possible I would have liked to activate 【Self-healing Enhancement】 as well, but my operational abilities at the moment limited simultaneous spells to four.

「How weird…it feels like you’re faster than before. Why aren’t you dying?」
「Hmm, I wonder~」

Since a while ago she had continued to deal blows that would be lethal to me if they hit. They were all almost as strong as the first blow she dealt which had broken my arm.

Due to the change in her magic I could sense her movements and could dodge appropriately. However, I was stuck in a situation where I didn’t have any slack to counterattack.

「Ugh awww, how annoying! You know I’ll kill you eventually so why don’t you just hurry up and keel over. You don’t have any chance of killing me. You would’ve used it at the start if you did.」
「Well, I wouldn’t limit myself like that. I’m confident I have a weapon that can injure you at least.」
「In that case just hurry up and show it off.」

Feeling frustration at being unable to cut me down she made a very large swing. As I had thought, this girl has a short temper. Rather than saying her sword skill was immature I would rather say that it was just like a kid swinging a sword randomly.

Thanks to her overwhelming physical abilities she had never had a hard fight where this was a disadvantage. For her it had never been necessary to learn proper swordsmanship.

There was no way I wouldn’t be able to capture such an opening. I locked swords and forced her sword to slam into the ground.

It was a replay of what had happened earlier.

「Shi—!」

However, this time the predator and prey were reversed. I activated the oscillating cutting edge on my blade and enhanced the hardness of the knife. I used my left arm to take that blade and stab straight towards her face.

A high pitched screeching erupted and the sound of a hard object getting shaved down echoed out.

It was just that, her skin was not shaved down, it was the high performance knife. The hardness had been raised to a degree where the surface of the blade itself had been worn down.

Furthermore I had used the entire strength of my body to stab it in. It was slight, but she had been hit. For just a moment I had felt the sensation of stabbing my knife into a hard wall and her head rocked back slightly.

She recovered her stance and took some distance.

「That was your trump card? How disappointing…」
「Not necessarily. It’s enough. Three things I have set up to lead me to victory. The first is your cheek. It was only a scratch but I did wound you.」

It was a mere drop, but she had bled. Using my full enhanced physical power and an oscillating knife I was able to draw a single drop of blood…..thinking of it like that left bitter feelings, but that let me learn that she wasn’t using a proper general defense. She was using her magic to harden her skin.

「This kind of wound…look it’s already healed.」

It was probably the power of 【Self-Healing Enhancement】. Her wound closed quickly.

「The second thing. When I stabbed the knife in, your neck bent.」

This was another piece of important information. If she had set up a magical wall type of spell then such a thing would have hardened the space around her head. No matter how hard I pushed in the knife her neck wouldn’t have budged an inch.

This was proof positive that what she was doing was a simple strengthening of her body through magic.

Then the third thing…was the powder like shavings that had come from my knife being worn down in the attack. I had secretly gathered those in my pocket.

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