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Last Embryo Volume 3 Chapter 9 Part 4

Translator: DarkHeartedAlchemist

(Remember, protecting the city and the girl is your number one priority here……!)

After all, to them, this albino girl was a precious source of information necessary for pushing forward with their investigation. In the off chance that the worst possible scenario would come to pass, at the very least she had to survive.

Finally being ready to lend her hand to Izayoi, Pritt took out a seed of the Sacred Fig Tree from one of the many pockets of her coat and implanted it into the ground, with a strike of her fist, making it grow at an astonishingly fast pace.

In the blink of an eye, it became a living barrier that protected the girl on her back. She didn’t think that Parashurama would kill her, but she had no confidence that she could keep her alive if she got involved in the battle.

Possessing the Divinity granted to it by the Earth’s Mother Goddess herself, the Sacred Fig Tree was able to go beyond the limits of its natural growth and began to rapidly cover the entirety of the slums area. With such a miraculous happening going on there are certainly going to be witnesses, but dealing with them later was a preferable alternative to dealing with the scars Parashurama’s attack would undoubtedly leave in the ground and the surroundings, creating more evidence to cover up. But now that the preparations were finally finished, Pritt hoped she could back Izayoi up as she promised, however, contrary to her fears, he and Parashurama were now engaged in a pretty even battle among the crumbling ruins.

He readied his fist as he charged. It would be his domain once he closed the distance to his opponent. If the girl got hit by his fists, with their impact comparable to power of the continental drift, even she wouldn’t come out unscathed regardless of what kind of Avatar of a god she was.

However, Parashurama did not move. She just stood perfectly still watching the approaching Izayoi. Once he was in range, he allowed his fists to run wild.

「Ho……Now, I have to say that this is quite dull.」

The 『Hero Slayer』 laughed without a hint of warmth in her voice. Izayoi’s fists were strong enough to destroy entire planets, but all she needed to do to avoid them was to simply backstep out of their range.

Izayoi’s blows triggered sent forth violent gales that ripped buildings apart and carried them onwards. If he unleashed that attack in the middle of the brilliant Rio, its buildings would’ve been wrecked in the blink of an eye, their residents blown away like insects caught up in a tornado. The boy, who had once fought against the Demon Lord that governed the calamity, carried in his fists power that could shift continents. And that was not a metaphor.

But the girl, Parashurama simply shrugged it off, left uninjured by that attack that could easily sent tremors all the way to the planet’s core.

(Kh……!)

Izayoi’s punch caught empty space and stopped just short of the tip of her nose. The way she dodged the blow was not normal. Miscalculating even by a single inch would result in her skull caving-in, but this girl had employed that way to dodge without a hint of fear. She would only have chosen this action because she had the perfect grasp of the timing of Izayoi’s charge.

In other words, she dodged like this because she had absolute confidence in her martial arts, and wanted to display the difference between them.

(Unbelievable…! She is definitely above Kouryuu in terms of martial arts prowess!)

Izayoi laughed merrily as cold sweat broke on his skin. Then, he prepared himself to receive the counter and grit his teeth. There was no avoiding the casual slash of the bloody battle axe aimed at Izayoi’s side.

「Gah……!!!」

The impact almost sent his insides the other way. Holding back the urge to vomit, Izayoi put power into his fist again.

Izayoi stopped the merciless follow-up with his arm, but at a cost of dull pain all through his limb. The battle axe was not able to cut him, however, that didn’t get rid of the force behind the blow.

Amazed at the way in which Izayoi managed to stop her weapon, the blood-covered Avatar spoke with a voice filled with genuine admiration.

「You possess some truly interesting abilities, boy. You are the first person in the world whom I could not cut with my battle axe strengthened with the power of my {Hero Slayer}.」

「That is to be expected! After all, there is no one better than me when it comes to not getting cut by bladed weapons! Not allowing any exceptions to that rule is the proof of me being at the very top of the food chain, so do yourself a favor and stop trying to cut me, because that’s just not gonna work!」

「Fair enough! If that is what you claim, then I will just have to bludgeon you to death along with that arrogance of yours until there will be nothing, not even a single piece of it left!!!」

Seeing that she could not cut Izayoi’s body with her normal attacks, the girl assumed a different stance and began to accumulate even more energy in her battle axe. While she was keeping herself busy doing that, it mean that Izayoi had a moment to calmly analyze her once more.

(She does not seem know that I possess the 『Gift of Leo』 which protects me from being hurt by any kind of weapon, essentially making that axe of her useless. And yet she still insists of hacking me to pieces with it… as I thought. Her supposed “awakening” must have nothing to do with the 2^nd War for the Sun’s Authority, otherwise she would have received intel about all the Authorities, their powers and those who are their current holders.)

If his hunch was correct, then that would mean that even though she called herself the Sixth Avatar of 『Avatara』, no one informed of the event that was currently going on in both Little Garden and the Outer World and what was at stake in it, and that in turn meant that she was not a legitimate Player qualified for the participation in the Great Gift Game.

But that information, as useful as it might have seem to be at first glance, essentially changed nothing in regards to their current situation, because Parashurama was still someone against whom neither Izayoi nor Pritt could allow themselves to go easy on.

When the next two swings of her bloody battle axe came his way, he deflected them both to the sides by swatting them away with the back of his fist.

Originally 『The Hero Slayer』, a Gift that became so synonymous with Parashurama that it actually became one of her aliases was a Type of non-offensive Gift that sealed off the Gifts of every hero who became hostile towards her and rendered their defensive abilities completely useless, making killing them as easy as breaking a dried-up twig in your fingers. This Gift was exactly what made her such a force to be reckoned with, because without any means of defending yourself against the sure-kill hit of her enormous battle axe the only effective way of fighting her would be to either beat her in a pure contest of martial prowess or to possess an offensive Gift or a type of exceedingly high Divinity that rivalled those of the Avatars of Gods and surpassed the powers possessed by ordinary heroes, which, under normal circumstances, would be pretty much impossible to do for your average Gift user. However, this is where one of Sakamaki Izayoi’s trump cards came into play.

The 『Gift of Leo』. A Gift of impenetrability thanks to which the Divine Protection of the Nemean Lion, upon which that Gift was based on was granted to Izayoi, making him invincible to any and all types of slashing attacks. Even if his opponent possessed monstrous strength that was enough to level mountains to the ground or had a weapon capable of splitting the seas apart or pierce the heavens, the 『Gift of Leo』 would still repel all those attacks without fail. It was an ability that was at the very top of its kind exactly because of that. While most of the attack repelling Gifts possessed some limitations, gimmicks or requirements to them, the protection of the Nemean Lion was truly one of a kind, not allowing any exceptions to its rule. If one wanted to surpass the concept of this Ultimate Defense, one would have to either own a Celestial Gift of the opposing nature, like 『The Gift of Absolute Severance』 that allowed any attack made by its user to reach the intended target regardless of their defensive capabilities, or a Gift tailored specifically to killing Celestial Spirits, and those could be counted on the fingers of one hand, even in the place like Little Garden, where the slaying of mythical beasts and otherworldly beings was considered something perfectly normal. But since Parashurama only possessed 「Hero Slayer」 in her arsenal of Gifts, it would not be enough for her to put even a single scratch on Izayoi no matter how hard or how long she would be hacking away at him.