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Last Embryo Volume 3 Chapter 3 Part 2

Translator: DarkHeartedAlchemist

Pritt and Izayoi were able to dodge every single one of them due to having emerged victorious from many battles in Little Garden where their lives were often at stake, but they understood full well that it was not something that could have been brought forth with legitimate laws of physics.

Since whoever was attacking them right ow was most likely hiding in the river, Izayoi turned back and prepared himself to dive right into it, but he was promptly stopped by Pritt who grabbed his arm at the last possible moment.

「Don’t just blindly rush in like an idiot, Izayoi! We’re withdrawing!」

「What the hell?! Why?! Even an idiot would have noticed that we are obviously getting attacked from underwater!」

「What’s not what I’m talking about and you know it! You must have sensed it as well as I did, right?! That those air bullets contained combustible gas within them?! If we stay here for too long then all of the accumulated gas is going to no doubts catch fire, and then this entire place will be blown up, causing the rest of the forest to be engulfed in flames as well!」

Taking Pritt’s warning seriously, Izayoi stopped trying to break himself free from her grasp. The next barrage of air bullets has been launched towards them as if whoever was making them was waiting for that exact moment.

「*Tch!*」

Clicking his tongue in displeasure, dodged once more while trying to confirm the gas’s presence by its scent, but he was unable to detect it no matter how hard he tried, which led him to believe that it must have been an odorless kind of gas that only Pritt, being the Earth’s Mother Goddess and all could sense. Aside form that, before they could worry about it being flammable or not, they should determine if it was a poisonous kind of gas.

Covering his mouth with one hand, he focused his gaze on the surface of the water in the river. With the speed they were being fired at, he should easily be able to track their movements down with his eyes alone… but he abandoned that line of thinking when he noticed that a large amount of foam began to gather at one point of the river and started to gush out from it into the air like a geyser. Seeing how the amount of water was rapidly declining, Izayoi finally understood what the gas Pritt was talking about really was.

(Whoever is attacking us, are they… are they really dividing the river’s water into hydrogen and oxygen?!)

He suddenly recalled Homura’s report he read sometime earlier, the one in which he stated that 『The Bull of Heaven』 could supposedly separate the seawater and manipulate the atmospheric pressure.

An odorless, combustible gas and rapidly declining water levels…

Even though Izayoi managed to correctly observe that the foam and the balls of compressed air that were being launched at them were created by separating the water from the river into its base components, his reaction still came a little bit too late.

「Oh fuck no…!」

He covered his Star Particle Bodies Detector in a hurry.

Mere seconds later, after the sound as if someone snapped their fingers reverberated throughout the area, the gas that was filling it has been set on fire, causing a flash of blinding light followed by an enormous explosion. The hydrogen explosion, caused by dividing large quantities of water forcefully split the river in two and made the rest of it overflow, blowing everything else around it with such force that it could easily made everyone who saw it question whether or not it was powerful enough to blow the entire mountain into tiny pieces.

After the occurrence of that hydrogen explosion, the forest in the near vicinity of the river became dead silent as the clouds of smoke made by it slowly fell onto the ground. The river itself, which was briefly turned into a giant mass of steam due to being boiled at such a high temperature in an instant was now gradually returning to its natural flow. But the thing that suffered the most from that spontaneous blast were undoubtedly the animals which were unfortunate enough to be there when it happened.

All of the reptilians that made the river their home have been ripped apart beyond all recognition, the torn pieces of their flesh and droplets of their blood falling all over the surroundings in a grotesque rain, and the birds which were resting their wings on the tree branches were subsequently blown away by the shockwave that followed the explosion.

It didn’t look like that at first, but apparently it was powerful enough to alter the shape of the terrain itself, because apparently whoever caused it did not care about the damage they would do to the environment at all. Izayoi was sure that if the site of the explosion would be view from above, then surely it would have a gaping crater right where the river used to be, and it regained its stillness and peacefulness only after a while.

And after that while, ripples began to form on the river’s surface, revealing a human silhouette that emerge from its depths.

「……」

That person – who looked like a young girl at a first glance – was effortlessly standing on top of the water from the moment she appeared on the surface, and with a step as light as that of a water strider she came to the shore in a rather leisurely fashion.

Upon closer inspection, it didn’t look like she was floating above the water’s surface. Before she caused the explosion she was hiding under the water, but she was there for much longer than what the capacity of a normal human’s lungs would allow, and her appearance was also rather far from what one would consider as 「normal」.

Her long, white hair were reminiscent of an animal’s fur, and a pair of her big, red eyes radiated the light similar to that of melted blood-red rubies. All in all, she looked like someone who was born as an albino. When she surveyed her surroundings, all of a sudden she heaved a heavy, long and somewhat relieved sigh.

On a closer look, her cheeks on her still childish face looked like they were very sunken in, and the girl herself looked like she was extremely fatigued, to the point where she was probably on the verge of losing her consciousness from exhaustion.

Other that being an albino, her exhausted condition actually helped highlight the rest of her special characteristics. At first glance she looked like she was even younger than Homura and the others, but that might have been because of how thin she was, even for a kid. The only pieces of clothing she had on her were the tattered white robe that was barely holding together, a pair of similarly worn-out gloves and handcuffs. If she was bound in chains before, then maybe she escaped from some kind of facility where she was being held captive? It must have been like that, because the remains of the chains carried the marks which made it obvious that they have been forcefully cut off from the rest.

As the mysterious girl reached the shore while still walking on water as if it was the most natural thing to do and dragging the remains of her chains behind her, she covered her mouth with her hands when she saw exactly what kind of destruction has been wrought by the explosion that she used and how scorching hot did the shoreline became.

Walking on something so hot was absolutely out of the question for her, even in her desperate situation. As a result, since she had no idea how she should proceed forward, the Albino girl simply stood in place, confused.

「Hah! And here I was wondering whether the thing to show up would be a demon or some kind of giant snake, but what do my eyes see? Just some white-haired brat!」

「Eeek?!!!」

The girl jumped up from the shock of having someone scream at her so suddenly. When she surveyed her surroundings with widely opened eyes, she saw that a single human figure was standing up from among all the rubble and debris left by the explosion at a speed that should not be possible for any normal human, the one that she couldn’t even follow with her sight even when she tried to focus her entire attention sorely on it.

As a result, Izayoi appeared right before her with an extremely displeased look on his face.

「I have to say that I am disappointed with you. All that grand display and buildup for a something as simple as a hydrogen explosion? When I heard how amazing this Star Particle Accelerator or whatever it is called was, I was expecting something that would be at least on a level of a nuclear explosion. Now, knowing all this, how are you going to make it up to me for all those broken expectations of mine, huh?」