Kuro no Maou

"Leki no!!

I go after her in the fog, screaming her name.

But if you take one, two, or three steps, you will hit a hard gate that stands. Naturally, I just closed it myself.

"Damn, where, where have you been! Leki!!"

I look around, but there's just white mist spreading out there and I don't see anything. Finally, my sharp sixth sense shows no reaction whatsoever.

I don't feel any signs. The enemy is no longer nearby.

They got away with it. They caught Leki, and he ran away.

"Damn......"

Where did the guy who stabbed Leki disappear to? Did you pass on the wall and flee into the village, or did you fly away into the sky?

We have to help quickly. Now, we can still make it.

Though I think so, I can't capture the figure or the signs as if, and I have no clue what to look for. My body is free, and I still have the power to fight, but now, I can't move at all. I can't move.

I can't do anything myself. moment and passing time. Quiet white darkness. Anger and haste come to an end and my head is confused beyond anything I can do.

"Leki... you're lying... like this, by the way..."

No, you can't, don't give up. You can't possibly give up.

If you have no enemies, let's find them. Now, open the gate and go back inside the village. Maybe Leki's there, and he's still, like, safe.

What floats in the back of the brain is the appearance of octopuses who kill us first on the fallen. They do not imitate the prey they capture as long as they wait to weaken. Eat from the edge you find. Eat from what you can reach.

Leki pierced through the chest. Even if she removes her restraints, how much can both herd octopuses resist - stop. Now, we just have to act.

So I wasted even the time removing the cannula I was called upon to do, and I shook up my fist to buzz off with the Fist of Wrath (Lars Impact) as it was, that's when. Even I'm not very calm right now, there's so much freakiness that I accidentally stop my hand.

"What is it, the fog... disappears"

A strong wind blew, and the next moment I thought, the white mist surrounding me flowed all the way up into the sky. It's like smoke sucking into a powerful ventilator provided for the ceiling, so much so that the flow is clearly visible.

Not long after I think about what the hell happened, the fog quickly fades away and my vision finally clears up completely.

In front of you are the closed gates and stone walls of the pioneering village, and to the left and right there are fields where the soil is still visible in the snow melt. And there, I don't see the whole creepy green octopus thing. Of course, there's no injured leki.

I remember the illusion as if he disappeared with the fog and was a temporary nightmare.

But as if to deny my sentiments like that, the red light - yes, that light showing the monster of the trials blinked more dazzlingly into my left eye than I had ever seen before.

The way it glows as if the side of the sky has stained red like purgatory. Very unusually, gaze upwards.

"Been, ah, I'm..."

At first, I thought it was a big cloud. It is literally nature, nothing strange, even if it floats in the glowing blue sky of the sun.

But that cloud, which is as large as its entrance cloud, must be said to be unnatural. If you just look at it at first glance, you're going to miss it, but if you look at the landscape just a little bit more, anyone will notice how weird it is.

The position of the cloud is too low.

A sighting, but roughly a hundred meters from the spire of the church. It seems to be at a low altitude there. As if covering up the village, no, low as if it were falling towards the village itself.

And as a fact, not as a metaphor, it was immediately noticed that the clouds were 'moving' by their own will, looking up at the sky flashly.

"Big... No, you're too big..."

large. It was so immense that such a human word did not make sense.

The whole cloud swayed unnaturally, the next moment I realized, Sole appears - tentacles. It's super huge, tentacles.

Exactly the same octopus I fought so tired of seeing in this short time, green feet. But that scale is strange. So much so that I want to think that my eyes are crazier.

But if my eyes are really certain, those octopus feet look well over a hundred meters. The size, thickness and length of even those tentacles in the 10m class are incomparable.

If you notice, you have a shadow on your face.

The eight octopus feet, stretched together from a bright white cloud mass, are spread out all over their eyes all over the heavens. Literally, mountainous giants blocked the sun climbing into the sky instead of real clouds.

Oh, well. He is the "Gratney Octo", the true monster of the test to be defeated.

"... sucks"

Instead of having an octopus monster that's actually over a kilometer long, I'm not blunt enough to just keep being stunned in front of a ridiculous being that says the island is floating, which you'd still believe.

I can't stop the chills running on my spine. One heartbeat goes off to a feeling of imminent crisis that there is nothing I can do.

I take a step naturally to escape, but still, I couldn't rush out.

"Leki......"

Can I run away here?

I don't think I can help her yet.

"... Damn, I'm sorry... Leki..."

No more. Under these circumstances, I can't help her anymore, no matter what I do.

If you keep searching unconsciously for Leki, I'll die on this spot, too.

Life is a waste. Most importantly, there are still a lot of people to protect. A fellow I have to see again, I'm waiting.

So now, we have to give up.

"-!?

Boaoaoao, and a different roar sounds similar to a heavy bass brass instrument. At that much volume, I forgot I was already wearing a helmet and reflexively covered my ears.

This is finally bad.

Readiness and a sense of crisis led me to run the streets a little further away from the village.

I guess this sound that is emitted to crush the ground from above is the squeal that that Gratney Octo makes. I keep running without looking back as the creepy, non-biological bass buzzes.

However, the resistance to the body suddenly grew during just a few seconds running through the hundred meters.

"Damn, across the street...... no, I'm drawn in!?

Just because no one needs to get away, a strong wind blows from the direction of travel. I quickly assumed that this wind was caused by a big overhead guy, not just a wack blown across the street by bad luck.

If you look back at it unexpectedly, there's already a giant tornado out there.

Gratney Octo floats to set a goal in the centre of the village. The tornado will have a super huge mouth that's going to drink the whole house. It's rolling in the center of the body.

I guess it's inhaling.

Seeing, the clumped clouds of Gratney Octo also began to sweep around the vortex.

If it wasn't just stirred by the wind, and it's not an illusion of the eye, it's clear from the accelerating rate of swirling. It's as if a typhoon is going to form now.

Ten, twenty seconds - perhaps, less than a minute later, it merged with the tornado at the mouth and turned into a storm huge enough to cover all of the village.

"Damn, Demon Hand (Band Arts) Huh!!

A few hundred meters away from the gate, my body also finally blows a strong wind. All the resistance I can have to be stirred up by such strong winds that I can't run anymore and at least secure my body with the 'Demon Hand (Bind Arts)' to avoid being blown away.

Double triple black chains wrapped around his hands, feet and torso, tips on sharp hook claws, no, thick anchor shaped and struck to the ground. It is easy to dive the unleashed anchor to considerable depth if you also use "Underground Submersible (see-through ground)".

Still, my body tied in chains screams giddy at the wind pressure as if it were being grabbed by the giant's palms.

"Grr, ooh..."

The thin trees that grow around them break apart badly and are sucked towards the tornado of Gratney Octo. How much wind speed is blowing here?

No, I'm just a little away, is this better yet?

In the village he was swallowed up by a giant tornado to be called a natural disaster, and he saw a house in a collapsed village. Only half a red triangle roof, carriage luggage, trees pulled from the roots. It is visible in the sight that various things are flying around visibly.

The cross of God on the spires of the Church is also caught in a rising airflow of tornadoes, so that the Demons and Monsters know that they are powerless in the dominated continent of Pandora -

"This is what you mean when the village disappears"

Attack those in the village. Take the money, the livestock, the crops in the fields. If it were in a raid on humans, or monsters, it would be roughly this kind of damage.

No matter how bad it is, people, houses and fields are burned down, and so on. Later, there is nothing left, which is just an expression that there is nothing of value, and where it is burned, it will always remain ashed and wrecked.

But I have now seen the unprecedented and damaging consequences of leaving nothing, nothing, physically, behind.

houses and trees that can be wound up. Perhaps that will undoubtedly include the villagers. And all of them are sucked into the mouth like hell for nothing, literally, leaving nothing behind and eating it up.

It's really, really overwhelming, the ultimate bulimia...

……

If you noticed, the wilder wind subsided and I was watching a deserted field.

Until just now, I don't think there was a single village there. There was no trace, not to mention nothing there from the beginning, so much so that it deserved.

Only rough ground, however, was vain and spread.

But the fact that I was never dreaming proves an unnatural mass of clouds that still floats above me. Should it be called village absorption, predation, or that the clouds that wrap around the body have also come back to normal because we have finished it?

Though they hide octopus feet of comparable size on the walls again in a thick layer of clouds, they can never be seen as real clouds now that they already know who they are.

Most of all, helpless to me, whether it's a cloud of nature or a monster, in the end, I just can't help but look up. As if I had returned to a real cloud, I could do nothing but drop it off until I started rising as it were with Fuyo and quietly left over the cloud covering the sky.

Thus, the 203rd Pioneering Village Supply Base disappeared completely, and... Leki died.

202nd and 203rd, evacuees from both villages arrived safely in the 204th pioneering village before sundown.

Since Gratney Octo disappeared across the cloud, there has been no fog, and countless octopuses have never struck. The road is going well. But it is colored by anxiety and despair that people's faces cannot help.

I'm sure I look the same as them right now.

"I'm sorry, Ursula... I couldn't help Leki"

I was only able to say this when I got to the 204th Pioneering Village and was ready to camp overnight. Should I say that we are finally in a situation where we can calm down and talk?

I just want to go on without a break in my mood, but I can't do that to a normal person. Well, refugees, including women and children, not the mighty Knights. Certain rest is essential.

That's how in the tent I was set up, I was supposed to sit Ursula in the front and Sariel next to each other to pass on this desperate report.

Now that I'm invisible, I also take off my armor helmet on the boulder, and Ursula and Sariel are both dressed from monastic to bedtime.

"Yes, I knew it, it was..."

There is no significant change in Ursula's expression. You don't cry, you don't curse at me with anger.

I'm sure she already had predictions, too. When I made the rendezvous on the road, I didn't look like Leki alone. I hate it, but I can't help but imagine.

But that can't be why I'm fine. The usual bongy, faceless Ursula, but I can see her blue eyes shaking with agitation. Maybe you don't understand it yet. We haven't witnessed where he's dead, and we haven't seen a body.

Even now I don't get the feeling that Leki is dead at that very late stage. Even now, from the entrance to the tent, I said, "Hey!" I feel like I'm about to jump in.

"... why"

"It was unintentional. By the time I realized it, I'd already lost it in the fog."

I don't lie. There is no excuse. Ursula is one of those people who fought together, so she has the right to know the truth. Still a child, but not young enough to delude you with a convenient lie.

"It's all my fault. I took off my village and was alarmed. The assumption was sweet. I didn't even think about it when there was someone who was surprisingly good at it."

Looking back, all I can think of is regret.

"I was counting on the strength of Leki... the truth is, I had to protect him..."

That would have been the biggest alarm.

Honestly, that time Leki came in to help, I seriously thought, "I was saved." Not as a child to protect her, but as one of the truly warring forces, I accounted for it without question.

It'll be dangerous, why are you back? I didn't mean to be so angry. In fact, Ursula was critical and helpful thanks to Leki for pushing me to come.

Right under that circumstance, Leki or Ursula, death on either side would have been an inevitable branch of fate.

Yeah, and I'm gonna mourn my helplessness again.

Damn. Even the Apostle should have knocked him down...... am I still so weak that I can't protect every girl?

"... sorry"

"Why, Ursula apologizes"

"Leki is back because of me, so"

"No, it's my will that Leki is back to protect Ursula"

"No! No... no..."

Ursula's eyes shake anxiously. Changes came to her complexion, like a crack in a faceless mask.

"It's me... mine, it's my fault... Leki's so impotent, it's me, it's me..."

For a moment, I didn't know what Ursula was talking about. But I remember right away. Triangle.

No, that's not true. Without time to deny it so, Ursula finally zeroed a large tear out of her blue eyes.

"Leki and I were fighting."

"Ursula, now is good. I can't, I don't have to talk."

"Yeah, it's okay...... please, Lord Chloe. I want you to listen to my penance."