Chapter 96: Demon Sword Meeting (3)

“Sword incel!! I’ll kill you too!!”

[Come at me, you outdated demon sword!!]

Despite his threat, he retreated sharply and darted into the nearby alley. He kicked off the wall and leapt onto the roof.

Once up there, he bounded between rooftops, hurling daggers at Hori and me.

Realizing Hori’s value as a hostage, he aimed the daggers so they’d hit her if I dodged.

His cat-like agility as he darted about flinging daggers was like an annoying buzzing fly, grating on my nerves.

‘Is there no way to get Hori out of here first?’

I could have Hori escape while I dealt with him, but she might get captured by his allies and become a hostage.

It was late, and the street was deserted. Unless we waited until morning, help was unlikely to arrive.

As for Marina… as always, she’d lazily show up after everything was over, so I had no choice but to handle this alone.

‘Is multiplying daggers his only ability?’

Though modest, it was a versatile skill depending on how many he could create and how much he could alter them. But it seemed rather lackluster for a demon sword’s power.

Thinking he might have other abilities he hadn’t shown yet, I watched him closely. He threw a dagger in a completely different direction from where we were.

My gaze naturally followed where he threw the dagger, and when I turned, I saw his dagger stuck in the ground.

‘It didn’t disappear?’

The first dagger he threw had vanished into particles about a few seconds after hitting the ground.

But this dagger remained there for over a minute after striking the ground, not vanishing.

Concluding there was something special about the daggers that didn’t disappear, I paid close attention to them.

Soon, when another dagger he threw hit one that had remained stuck in place, I understood what his other ability was.

‘The trajectory bent….’

The dagger that hit the one stuck in the ground bent at a 90-degree angle and flew towards us at an even faster speed.

This seemed to be the dagger’s second ability – freely changing trajectories by shooting daggers at others pre-positioned in the ground or walls.

‘Not bad, but that’s all it is….’

It was a threatening ability depending on the location and user’s skill, but in the end, they were just daggers – weapons used by petty thugs.

Against the katana, hailed as the king of all weapons that brings all others to their knees, the blade’s length fell short by a million light-years.

“Vacuum Slash Wave.”

Countless vacuum slashes spread in all directions, destroying the many daggers flying towards us and the ones stuck in the ground.

“Ugh…!! Even if they break, again…!!”

He fired more daggers, but without any to change their trajectory, his attacks were so simple even Hori could dodge them.

“Vacuum Slash Whirlwind.”

Just before drawing Wolffang, I twisted the draw’s trajectory. A vacuum slash, twisted almost into a circle, destroyed the daggers blocking its path and flew forward with a thunderous roar that tore through the air.

He tried to dodge hastily but couldn’t fully avoid it. One arm was caught in the whirlwind created by the vacuum slash and torn off.

“Aaaargh!!”

With his right arm torn off, he let out an ear-piercing scream and fell to the ground along with debris from the sheared roof.

Seeing him bleed and feel pain, I wondered if his body was much different from a human’s.

‘If I leave him like this without stopping the bleeding, will he die completely?’

It would be a fascinating experiment to see if the demon sword’s core would survive even if the body died, but that could wait until after I extracted all the information from him.

“Hori, follow slowly just in case.”

“Yes!!”

Approaching the man still writhing on the ground with Hori, I placed my hand on the sword hilt and asked him.

“Myne has regenerative abilities, but you don’t seem to have them? Or do you have them, but not enough to restore a severed arm?”

Closely observing the cross-section of the severed arm for a moment, I saw it regenerating, albeit weakly.

I had expected them to have regenerative abilities since Myne did, and this seemed to confirm my prediction.

“I’ll start with an easy question. How did you get in here? It doesn’t seem like you could enter alone with your abilities.”

The Academy had a barrier spread throughout the city that immediately detected beings with mana.

If he hadn’t used some special magic tool, there must have been an accomplice who helped him infiltrate the city.

“If you don’t speak quickly, next will be your left arm–!”

Bang!!

With a sound like a bomb exploding, a spear that had flown through several building walls barely grazed my face.

“What, so there was another one with you.”

The spear thrown by the second attacker didn’t stop there, but continued piercing through walls for quite some distance before finally losing its momentum.

Judging by the explosive sound earlier and the superheated air, was it a technique that attacked by propelling the spear with an explosion?

I didn’t have the luxury of dealing with it while focusing on the dagger, so as I was about to finish this side first, a thick fog suddenly rose and began to envelop the dagger’s body.

Surrounded by the fog, the dagger vanished from that spot without a sound or trace, as if it had never been there.

“What’s this now…?”

The fog that surrounded the dagger spread in the blink of an eye, starting to encircle us as if to surround us.

Immediately covering my nose and mouth with my sleeve in case it was poisonous, I shouted to Hori behind me.

“It might be poisonous, so hold your breath!!”

“H-hold my breath?! Okay!! Hup!!”

It didn’t seem poisonous at first glance, but it might be an illusion-type magic that activated when inhaled.

The fact that I could no longer sense their presence, which had been clear until just now, suggested it might be some kind of barrier specialized for that purpose.

At a glance it looked like fog, but seeing that it didn’t sway with the wind direction, it seemed to be a peculiar barrier that just looked like fog.

‘Then breaking it is simple.’

If it had been magic activated using fog as a medium, it would have been troublesome, but if it was just a barrier that looked like fog, breaking it was simple.

Inside the barrier, there was something like tangled mana lines spread widely, similar to earphones stuffed in a pocket.

Cutting those lines would naturally destroy the barrier. Marina’s skill made the Academy’s barrier difficult to detect, but this one’s lines were as clear as if they were right in front of me.

“Hah!!”

Drawing Wolffang to cut the mana flow imbued in the fog, the fog slowly sank to the ground and then vanished without a trace.

“…Did they escape?”

It wasn’t just the fog that vanished. The Sword Demon Society members had also disappeared from sight, leaving only bloodstains and a twisted arm on the ground.

Given that they didn’t attack while the fog was spread, it seemed their goal was to escape rather than fight.

“Hori, are you hurt anywhere?”

“Thanks to you protecting me, I’m not hurt anywhere… But isn’t the Academy’s security too lax? With the previous attackers too, it’s like we’re constantly being invaded…”

“…You’re right about that.”

Hori’s words were spot on, but what could we do? If the Academy’s security was so ironclad that no one could attack, the story wouldn’t progress.

Standing still and looking around at the traces of the recent fight, Hori wiped the cold sweat beaded on her forehead with her sleeve and said,

“Those demon swords just now… Honestly, their talk was a bit ridiculous, but they were really strong…”

“Is that so? I couldn’t tell…”

I couldn’t say for certain about the fog and spear sides since I didn’t face them directly, but judging by the amount of aura and mana, the dagger side could probably take on Jessica or Rain.

“Then… what do we do about this now… They won’t ask me to compensate for what those guys destroyed, right?”

“If the Academy has any conscience, that will absolutely never happen!!”

“I guess so? Oh? They’re here…”

About 3 minutes after everything had ended, Marina appeared in her pajamas, looking like she had just woken up, accompanied by dozens of armed guards.

Both Marina and the guards looked exhausted, as if they had rushed over as soon as they realized something had happened, but the problem was that everything was already over.

“Haah… Um, the enemy…?!”

“They escaped. There’s an arm left over there, so you might learn something if you investigate it.”

“I-I see…. Were the attackers in league with the previous intruders? Or was it a different Myne organization…?”

“No, it wasn’t a Myne organization… They were the Sword Demon Society, an organization made up of demon swords that have become human.”

I then recounted everything that had happened with the Sword Demon Society in order, but as the story progressed, Marina and the guards looked at me with expressions of incomprehension.

“A collaborator appeared, so I tried to finish off the dagger one first, but I couldn’t because of the sudden fog. This is just my guess, but they probably infiltrated the Academy using the power of that fog.”

“…I see. It was a rather confusing story, but I roughly understand what happened. Then–“

“Excuse me!!”

As Marina was about to continue speaking, Hori suddenly interrupted. Marina stopped and looked at Hori.

“What is it, Student Hori?”

“W-well… C-couldn’t you come a little earlier next time?”

“…Pardon?”

“I-I mean!! You say it’s the kingdom’s highest level of security, but it gets breached by these ridiculous guys… And you don’t even detect the intrusion quickly… If Ian hadn’t been here, we all would have died!!”

“…Wow.”

My goodness… To think Hori would say what no one, including the protagonist, dared utter in the original work.

Compared to the previous Hori who kept her eyes down just because someone was nobility, this was truly a heart-swelling growth.

“…”

Perhaps because she was being told off by a commoner, Marina looked somewhat upset inwardly, but since there wasn’t a single wrong word, she bowed her head and said,

“…Everything Student Hori said is correct. As the one responsible for the safety of Academy students, I apologize.”

“…Yes.”

On this day, Hori became the only commoner student to receive an apology from the headmaster in both the original work and this world.