She had agreed to it. But after confirming Haimer was in no danger, Shakti, who meant to set off for the Babel Tower exit at once, pulled her body up short.
Brows still knit, she glanced at the girls flexing their hands, itching to move out, and then at Haimer, dressed in nothing but a single unarmored robe.
"But... Lord Haimer."
"If every capable fighter pulls out to go save people, and you stay here..."
"What if the force behind these riots is aiming for exactly this moment, when the manor's defenses are hollow, and slips in? What becomes of your safety..."
"If you come under even the slightest threat, the whole situation goes past saving."
Shakti's tone hardened.
"What's there to worry about!"
But before Haimer could answer.
Hestia, who had not managed a single word since the trouble broke out, padded barefoot across the carpet and squeezed straight in between the two of them.
She had been a step slow all night, left out in the cold the whole time, and here at last was room to shine.
And so.
Hestia's small pale hand thumped proudly against her considerable assets.
She tilted her head up, brimming with confidence, and made her guarantee on the spot.
"Haimer's safety is my job! Even if I have to keep my eyes open all night without blinking, staring straight until dawn, I'll hold this place!"
"Absolutely! Absolutely nothing weird or nasty is getting past me to hurt one hair on Haimer's head!"
Haimer flatly ignored Hestia, who had no fighting strength whatsoever.
"This isn't a job for you, Hestia."
He laid a hand on her shoulder and nudged her off toward the side.
"You, right now, go find the Miach Familia, or Takemikazuchi and his people. Tell them to gather their non-combat members somewhere sheltered, and send anyone with fighting strength out to help clear the stray monsters off the streets."
"Fei only just went to pass word about this mess, and Reed and that group of Xenos have to fight their way up from the twentieth floor and dodge the ordinary monsters in the Dungeon the whole way to the surface. Half an hour, and that's if it goes well."
"Orario right now needs every extra pair of hands it can get."
"But... what if someone bad really does sneak in!"
At that.
Hestia's high spirits wilted in an instant, and she looked thoroughly unwilling.
However.
Haimer's stance did not shift an inch.
After all, the smell of the ** raw gemstone had come out of the second floor of this very manor.
With that smell spreading on the wind, there was no question about it: tonight this place was the center of the storm for every maddened monster in the district.
Haimer reckoned his martial foundation could crush monsters one-sidedly even with his Divine Power sealed. He had margin to spare.
Therefore.
Better to keep Hestia far away from the whirlpool.
So.
Seeing that Haimer would not agree, Hestia finally let her shoulders sag and answered in a sulk, "...Fine. Don't you dare get hurt, you big idiot."
Hestia, Shakti, and all the girls were not the only ones.
Even Rania, and Aruru, who had hopped back into Haimer's arms and was butting her head up under his chin, had plain worry in their eyes.
"Put those farewell faces away."
Haimer crooked two fingers and flicked Aruru on the forehead.
"I do carry the title of a god of war, whatever else is true."
"Don't assume that with my Divine Power sealed in the Lower World I can't even keep myself alive. That spear is still up in the study on the second floor."
"Besides."
"Mary and Miss Rei are in the study right now as well. With me and the two of them here, nothing is going to go wrong."
"And Miss Rei is a Lv.5 siren. Once she gets a little of her strength back, no random small fry gets to pick a fight with her either."
"The only one I'd worry about is Miss Rania."
Haimer looked at Rania, his gaze turning serious.
"You, and every other Xenos joining tonight's fight, make absolutely certain to tie a bright strip of coarse cloth around your arm or somewhere else obvious!"
"That's so the guardsmen and the adventurers get a clear visual cue on those dark, chaotic streets that you're allies. Otherwise the adventurers with blood in their eyes take you for wild monsters and stab you all in the back."
With that said.
Haimer lifted Aruru out of his arms and, in one easy motion, set her squarely astride the black scruff of Hegel the Hellhound's neck.
At his words, the girls, uneasy a moment before, followed the clear battle order, exchanged a look, and gripped their weapons, nodding hard.
"By your command, Kami-sama!"
And so.
Once the girls had gone back to their rooms and geared up.
"Move out!"
At Haimer's word.
Every fighter in the manor charged into the night.
The tall Magic Stone lamp posts leaned every which way. The roadside fruit and vegetable stalls, and even the heavy wooden carts, had been ground down by monstrous strength into splinters that carpeted the ground and stabbed at the soles of your feet.
Scorching orange firelight licked wildly at the cloth awnings over the shopfronts, burning half the silent sky red.
Conditions out on the streets were far uglier than they had sounded from inside the manor.
"H-help me—!"
A scream came from around the corner of a narrow alley up ahead.
Lili took the lead. Her small body, nimble as a cat's, threaded through the shattered stalls and racks.
She cleared a burning sack in one stride, rounded the corner, and the sight in front of her pulled a cold breath through her teeth.
A battle boar gone berserk, huge, its long hair bristling up like steel needles, both eyes bloodred, had its four hooves dug into the ground and its head lowered, gathering force.
Coarse snorts blew out great gouts of white steam.
Less than five meters in front of the boar, a commoner woman and her daughter had fallen into the muddy water and clung to each other, shaking with terror.
The boar's hind legs shoved off hard, its enormous body turning into a heavy war chariot, ready to drive two long saliva-slick tusks into the thin backs of that mother and child.
"Drop dead! You stinking stupid pig!!"
In that hair's breadth of a moment.
An orange afterimage came shrieking through the air, launched off the half-collapsed second-floor balcony to the left.
It was Aihara Enju.
Riding the fall, her right leg came down like a battle axe.
Aimed at the battle boar's skull.
And chopped down with everything she had.
Crack.
Bone gave way.
The huge battle boar that had been charging a heartbeat earlier lost consciousness on the spot.
Then.
Aihara Enju stamped a kick into it.
Several tons of flesh lifted clean off the ground.
It turned a full rotation in the air.
And then came a booming crash as it smashed through the load-bearing stone wall on the other side.
Stone came down in a heap.
The mother and daughter, who had already squeezed their eyes shut to wait for death, heard the noise and lifted their tear-smeared faces in a daze.
And there.
Right in front of them.
stood nothing but a little girl in twin ponytails with a pair of pretty red eyes, slapping the dust off the front of her boots.
"It's all right now..."
Lili hurried over from behind the rubble, put out a hand, and gently helped the pair up off the ground where they had gone limp.
"That monster's dead. Quick, run down that main street and find the nearest guardsman squad!"
"Awooo—!"
Lili had barely finished speaking.
On the other side of the street, out of a burning row of shopfronts.
Three arsonists, Hellhounds with black smoke curling from their mouths and drool dripping from their jaws, smashed through the charred wooden door and burst out into the road.
The instant they appeared, all three yawned open their bloody jaws, bright firelight already surging up from deep in their throats, ready for a fresh volley of flame.
Instead.
Onigawara Rin had reached this side as well.
A ring of steel.
Only the very briefest cry of a blade.
Onigawara Rin's sword-light became a bolt of pure black lightning.
In the instant before the fire in those three throats could spray out.
A wet thud.
Three black dog heads, still trailing sparks, left their necks together and flew away backward. The bodies pitched into the sea of fire, and one roll of the flame-wind turned them to ash.
"Garbage at this level is so weak I don't even want to spend the energy swinging," Amou Kirukiru said from one side, unimpressed.
Tendou Kisara kept pace beside her.
"Stop dawdling, Senior Kirukiru!"
"While our stamina's still full, we should spread the formation out and push for the central district at full speed. The guardsman squads whose lines are about to break need support!"
With a battle plan set.
The girls of the Haimer Familia split into pairs and pushed outward fast.
However.
Beyond this hard-charging group from the Haimer Familia.
What truly made the passersby crouched behind half-ruined walls stare in disbelief was the scene at the junction of East Main Street.
"We can't fall back! The safe zone's line is right behind us. We have to hold this thing until support arrives!"
At the narrow mouth of the alley.
Two guardsmen in the light armor of the Ganesha Familia braced a waist-high metal shield out in front of them with everything they had.
And on the far side of that shield.
stood a Minotaur fully twice their height, eyes webbed with red, out of its mind.
Smuggled up to the surface, the Minotaur had no weapon in its hands, so it was ripping and tearing at the two guardsmen's shield instead.
Any moment now it would put its strength in and break this line guarding the civilian safe zone.
The two guardsmen were certain their end had come.
Instead.
The next second.
"Rrraah—!"
With a low roar.
A pure-black Hellhound wearing an eye-catching red strip of coarse cloth turned into a streak of black light and vaulted through the air.
"Rrrgh!"
In midair, Hegel clamped his jaws down on the thick arm the Minotaur had drawn back to load another shove.
Sharp Hellhound teeth.
They tore the Minotaur's arm open on the spot and ripped a great bloody slab of hide and meat right off the limb.
"RRAAGH!!"
Howling under the agony, the Minotaur gave up on shoving the shield, twisted around, and raised one thick leg to plant a killing back-kick into Hegel as he landed.
But.
The leg never came up.
Aruru, the Almiraj rabbit Xenos riding on Hegel's back.
She sprang off him at once, both hands locked around a small stone axe, and used every bit of the plunging momentum to drive the stone blade into the Minotaur's face.
"Kyuu!!"
Because Aruru had braced herself to give it absolutely everything this time, she wasn't punted away like some stray dog on the roadside.
And so.
With Aruru's small, childish cry.
The axe head, carrying all its own weight, chopped down hard into the Minotaur's face.
A crisp crack rang out. The stone axe couldn't split that rock-hard skull open outright, but the impact rocked the Minotaur's whole frame backward.
Its neck snapped up and it howled in pain, trying to tear the white-furred rabbit off its face.
However.
In that window.
Rania, the spider woman who had been crawling along the ivy-covered mud-brick wall, drew in her abdomen.
A hissing rip of sound.
A huge mass of white web shot out, carrying a sharp, glue-like stink.
"Kyuu!"
Aruru took the chance, kicked off the Minotaur, and let the force carry her back and clear.
The white web came down like a heavy fishing net dropped out of the sky and covered the Minotaur whole.
The sticky silk drew tight fast, clinging hard to the Minotaur's skin.
Wrapped head to foot, the Minotaur went utterly berserk.
That dense, brutally tough layer of sticky thread was like a bottomless bog. The harder it fought, the tighter the silk closed.
All it could do was claw uselessly at the air in front of its chest.
"Now!"
Fei circled sharply overhead and shouted down at the two guardsmen still pinning themselves in place behind their great shield.
"Stab it, soldiers of mankind!"
However.
Those two, who had just escaped death and barely got their breath back, stood like a pair of wooden posts nailed into the cracks between the paving stones.
Their muscles had locked stiff, their eyes stared straight ahead, and their minds seemed to have crashed to a complete halt.
Watching them stand there like posts with no reaction at all, Fei, up in the air, couldn't stand it another second.
She gritted her teeth, and the red wings at her back gave one hard shake.
Whip! Whip! Whip!
She was a Lv.2 harpy after all. Several dark red flight feathers, hard as fine steel, sprang free of her wings like throwing knives and tore the air open, screaming as they went.
Three muffled wet punches.
The feathers drove straight through that thick layer of webbing and skewered the Minotaur's eyes.
"ROOOAR!!!"
Blood came spurting out through the gaps in the silk.
The pain drove the Minotaur completely out of its mind. Its arms clawed wildly at nothing and it let out a shrill, ragged bellow.
"Kill it!"
The Minotaur's roar finally snapped the two guardsmen back. They shouted, dragged the short swords from their belts, and rammed them into the Minotaur's chest, right where the Magic Stone sat.
As the blades sank into its body.
Blood sprayed across the ground and across both men's armor.
"ROOOAR!!!"
The next second.
With the shattering crack of the Magic Stone inside it being crushed.
The Minotaur burst into rolling black ash that drifted away in every direction.
The ash came down.
Once the Minotaur was ash, Aruru hopped back up onto Hegel's back.
Her fluffy little hands made a quick face-pulling gesture, and she cheekily stuck out a small pink tongue at the guardsmen, who still hadn't fully caught up with what had happened.
Rania paid the little episode no attention.
She ran along the top of the high wall and scrambled swiftly over the rooftops toward the next street corner, where the faint crying of civilians drifted up out of the dark.
____
👻🔥Walnut-chan — Patre*n🔥👻
🔥 New history: Becoming a God with a Perverted System, Starting with COTE — now on The_Mikudayo
📚 Walnut-chan → 40 chapters ahead + you're funding the next translations
🎯 100 Powerstones = +1 Bonus Chapter for everyone