[What are you doing?]
"It's in the way."
The blade moved. Petticoat and dress fell away below the knee in uneven strips. The air was cool against her legs.
She cut the trailing sleeves away as well. Fabric fell like petals.
She caught one midair and used it to tie her hair up.
She looked at the longsword and frowned at the blade. Cheap, battered, already unimpressive.
She discarded it and unclipped Baraha's sword from his waist.
"Borrowing this."
His sword was a greatsword - far larger than a standard longsword, far too large for her by conventional standards. She picked it up without hesitation.
She was about to toss the scabbard out of habit, remembered it wasn't hers, and set it down instead.
A well-tempered weapon. She liked how solid it felt.
Greatsword in her left hand.
[Huh? Me? You're actually using me? It's been so long!]
"There are a lot of them. And most of them I've never seen before."
Her right hand opened.
ValderGiosa materialized as though slipping through her palm.
She took it in her left and moved the greatsword to her right.
The glass-like transparent blade shimmered with its patterns.
[Can I use my abilities? Can I?]
"Yes. That's why I brought you out."
The shrieking of approaching monsters pierced the air.
"Go wild, ValderGiosa."
ValderGiosa had two primary abilities.
The first: it was built for slaughter.
Among the Giosa series, it was the most purely oriented toward killing. Its owner would instinctively know the most efficient way to kill anything before them, a quality that became useful immediately when the opponents were creatures she had never encountered.
The second...
[Full body, then?]
"Left arm. Like always."
[Fine! Still something. This is going to be fun!]
Dark mana pulsed from the hilt up her left arm. It climbed and spread, streaking part of her hair black, turning her left eye dark.
ValderGiosa converted absorbed killing intent into mana and used that mana to manipulate the owner's body. Before it was fully awakened, this was how it had controlled its hosts. If the killing intent wasn't released, it compelled unintended violence.
Echi was right-handed, but she was also proficient with her left.
With the demonic sword active in her left arm, she was effectively ambidextrous in a fight. She had used this technique so often in the life she had erased that the motion was second nature.
The first monster reached her.
Panther-shaped, six-legged, more than ten eyes, skin drooping like cooling wax. Behind it, a single-eyed giant covered in scales.
The panther swiped.
Echi kicked off the ground and went up. The tattered remnant of her dress flared in the air. Her leap, mana-driven, was extraordinary - she cleared the crown of a creature as tall as a two-story building. For an instant, upward force and gravity balanced.
Weightlessness.
Black and violet eyes found their targets.
[That one - the almost-human shape. That one's mine!]
"Do as you like."
Violet mana wrapped the greatsword in her right hand. She swung. A blade of energy separated from it and bisected the panther below, which was still scanning the ground for the human that had vanished.
Simultaneously, her left arm moved on its own. Black mana split into strands and drove into the cyclopean giant's forehead. The head shattered.
She landed like a cat. Pink hair streaked with black, fluttering.
More creatures trampled their fallen kin to reach her. To them, the dead were irrelevant.
She kicked off again, low and fast, skimming the ground, and came up beneath a bear-wolf hybrid, swinging the greatsword upward.
Violet mana flared along the arc, expanding on impact into something the size of a giant's weapon. The creature split. Her left hand, coiling black mana, caught the next creature lunging from the side before it landed.
She didn't look back at what fell. The sword told her where to hit. She hit it, and moved.
A creature with claws the size of her entire body came down with a crushing strike. She stepped onto its paw and launched off it. A second creature tried to stomp the ground she'd just occupied; she was already elsewhere. The first creature shrieked as its own limb cracked beneath its partner's weight.
She blocked a tail strike - pushed back a step, held firm. Leapt onto a monster's neck, slashed through, landed, pivoted. Block, deflect, mount, cut, drop, charge.
Violet mana trailed her like a mirage. Black mana from the cursed sword coiled and snapped in every direction like something alive.
Where her blade grazed, destruction followed a beat later. Where her foot landed, the ground broke.
This was her fighting style - a body that moved through the air as readily as the ground, striking with apparent simplicity, delivering ruin. Prey that only understood they had been cut after the sword had already passed.
It required the mana output and control she had been born with. Her untrained body couldn't have generated this otherwise.
It would cost her tomorrow. She was already spending against muscle she hadn't fully rebuilt.
'I've actually improved since the last time I was inside a node.'
[Forty-ninth! Ugh, humans are more fun than this]
"Fight, Val."
[I am! Fiftieth! You said go wild!]
"Not with your mouth."
[Don't care, not listening! Fifty-first!]
She gave up and kept moving.
It felt different from the months of careful concealment. Mana flowing freely, body given full rein, opponents with no reason to hold back against - it was like unclenching something that had been held closed for too long.
She was almost smiling.
That was the sight Baraha woke to.
"Ugh…"
He sat up, clutching the back of his neck, still foggy. He looked up.
In one hand, a transparent sword wrapped in black mana. In the other, his own greatsword.
Moving through the air between impacts with the ease of someone completely untroubled by gravity - a small, confident smile on her face, long hair tied up with torn cloth trailing behind her.
The monsters were being slaughtered.
"This… makes no sense."
He checked the empty scabbard sitting neatly beside him. Looked up again.
He pinched his forearm until it bruised. The scene didn't change.
He watched Echinacea Roaz step onto a monster's knee, shatter the limb underfoot, close the distance to its face in the same motion, and slash through both eyes before dropping back down.
Blue blood rained.
Her arms, fully exposed through the jagged-cut sleeves, were white and slender. Red liquid and monster blood splattered across her body. Beneath the uneven hemline, her legs moved in clean, precise arcs. The heeled boots hit the ground and pushed off again.
Overwhelming. Beautiful.
Before shock could form, before questions could take shape, admiration took hold instead.
His heart was pounding.
He couldn't look away.
The last monster fell.
Echi swung Baraha's sword once, clearing the blade, and looked at what remained. ValderGiosa, obedient, drank the blood clinging to it and dissolved back into her hand. The dark mana receded; her hair and eye returned to their normal colors.
Only then did Baraha recognize the blade she had been wielding.
A squire of the Celestial Knights Order would never fail to identify that sword.
ValderGiosa.
His face went pale.
And Echi turned to look at him.
She had hit him with enough force to keep an ordinary person down for half a day. She had expected him - built as solidly as he was - to recover a little faster than average.
Not this fast.
Her mind moved quickly.
How much had he seen? Had he identified the sword? Could she silence him? If he talked...
The first person she thought of was Yurien.
She could not - could never - let him find out.
[Why is he already awake? He saw everything, didn't he? We have to kill him, we can't let this get out!]
The sword still buzzed with battle-rush.
Echi pressed two fingers to her temple and let out a long breath that was closer to a groan.
Then she stepped over the scattered bodies and walked toward Baraha.