My Beloved Princess ~The Boy Called Incompetent Rises with Only a Sword and the Princess's Devotion~ - Chapter 118: The Nightmare Continues

Chapter 118: The Nightmare Continues

It was a nightmare.

Her husband stood there like a scarecrow, taking a one-sided beating.

He was the one who held the position of Dragon King, and yet he was being beaten down by an unarmed woman. Worse, he could not even manage anything that deserved to be called resistance, and little by little, his strength was being ground away.

Another body blow drove Anraku one step closer to death.

And yet he was not wholly defenceless. A longsword clutched in one hand, he gritted his teeth and tried over and over to strike back even as the barrage rained down on him. But every attempt was thwarted by the woman’s elusive footwork, which slipped through his guard and never allowed him to catch her true body.

That was why he was losing.

Her fists hammered into him one-sidedly, while every retaliatory slash carved through empty air. Never missing even the slightest opening created by his attacks, the woman circled into his blind spots and pressed the assault without mercy. Seiran could do nothing but watch as her husband’s body was stained with fresh blood beneath the relentless barrage.

He had already taken well over a hundred blows, still forced to remain standing, not even allowed to fall. It was endless torment, torture that would continue until Anraku’s spirit finally broke.

It truly was a nightmare. Seiran was watching a nightmare unfold.

The overwhelming power woven into that masterwork blade’s [Sword Ki] meant nothing if it could not hit.

Why was he being pushed this far by a barehanded opponent? She could not understand it. She did not want to understand it.

Unable either to flee or to rush to his aid, Seiran crouched down and clutched her head.

Then, the very next instant.

The woman’s straight punch smashed into her husband’s face, and his huge body, more than two metres tall, lurched sharply backward.

Even with his balance broken, he was still the man destined to inherit the Dragon King seat. He would not go down so easily. Relying on his superb core strength and his thick, battle-hardened arms like tree trunks, he swung his longsword in a sweeping horizontal slash.

ROAR!

Like a silver flash tearing through the wind, the blade shot out to take the woman’s neck in a single clean line.

Seeing that sharp stroke, aimed perfectly at a gap in the enemy’s guard, Seiran was certain her husband had won.

But in that very moment.

A violent gust blasted through the room, knocking Seiran off balance and sending her sprawling onto the floor.

She lifted her face from where she had caught herself with her hands behind her. Right before her eyes, the half of the blade that had snapped away was buried in the floor.

“Wh… what…?”

It was the exact opposite of what she had imagined.

Her certainty of victory was overturned in an instant, and what Seiran saw instead was defeat.

The absurdity sprawled out before her was so overwhelming she could not even find her voice.

Why had the blade been the thing to snap, while the woman remained completely unharmed?

Was the woman’s neck made of steel? No, Anraku’s [Sword Ki] could cut through even Black Dragon Stone. In that case, was her toughness on the level of their ancestors’ dragon scales?

“So even close-range attacks are nullified?”

Anraku spat the words out bitterly.

Even in this hopeless situation, his fighting spirit had not faded in the slightest. He threw away the longsword, now broken in half, and drew the dagger hanging at his waist.

Having lost his reach, he lowered his stance and leaned farther forward, ready to step in deeper than before.

He was prepared to take her down with him. As though mocking Anraku for making a last stand with his back to the wall, the woman clad in black walked toward him with easy composure.

“As expected of a Dragon King. Of all the people I’ve fought so far, I would say the quality of your [Sword Ki] is among the most refined. But…”

The woman vanished from sight.

“Guh…”

“So what? That’s my honest impression.”

The movement was so sudden it could only have been mistaken for teleportation. A black shadow slipped through the gap in his awareness like liquid darkness and drove a palm strike into Anraku’s abdomen.

The blow sank deep into his solar plexus. Was this the strike that had inflicted fatal wounds on the Head Consort-sama and the Benevolent Consort? Anraku’s huge body lurched, and the dagger slipped from his weakening hand.

Its hard clatter rang across the stone floor, and Anraku staggered back one step, then another, clutching his stomach.

Spitting blood and gritting his back teeth, he thrust a palm out and shouted,

“Flame!”

In that instant, the overwhelming heat generated from his palm turned the frost clinging to the ceiling back into liquid in the blink of an eye, and the falling droplets were seared by the flames and instantly evaporated. The temperature reached three thousand degrees Celsius.

An inferno fierce enough to burn down to the marrow rushed toward the woman in a swirling torrent. Its heat was high enough to reduce even dragonkin, with their natural resistance to fire, to cinders. But the woman stared calmly at the flames and brushed them aside with the casual air of someone batting away cigarette smoke. That alone was enough to make the three-thousand-degree blaze vanish without a trace.

“I’ll tell you something as a souvenir for your journey to the afterlife. The ultimate form of [Ki] that only I can use, [Lightning Ki], distorts space and prevents all attacks from interfering with me.”

Faced with such an overwhelming difference in rank…

The woman’s voice no longer reached Seiran, who was suffocating in despair. The only thing pounding against her eardrums was the heavy throb of blood pulsing violently through the vessels beside her ears.

“The only thing it cannot block is an attack that directly uses [Ki]. But can you do that? Can your immature [Sword Ki] break through my [Fighting Ki]?”

Even the outrageous arrogance of treating the Dragon King like a helpless child left no room for rebuttal when it was backed by power on that level. Anraku answered in silence alone, returning magic with magic.

“May the stakes of hellfire pierce through. [Flame Serpent Prison Palace].”

What appeared in midair were four burning stone pillars, blazing as they tore through the darkness. Their violent flames drove back the gloom filling the throne room.

The pillars fell around the woman, boring into the stone floor and rising there wreathed in orange fire. Slender, serpent-like flames stretched from the four corners, and when they bit together as though linking pillar to pillar, a barrier of fiery latticework was complete.

Steadying his ragged breathing, Anraku said,

“Well? This way, I can keep roasting you indirectly. Even if you distort space, you can’t stop the temperature around you from rising as well, can you? One half of the Black Kirin.”

Inside the vortex of flames, the woman laughed.

“Not a bad idea. If this turns into a battle of endurance, the disadvantage is mine. But…”

BAM!

With a sharp shout, the woman stamped through the stone floor.

The impact shook the castle so hard it nearly tilted, and a violent gale ripped through the throne room.

Buffeted by the wind, the tightly bound stakes of flame unravelled and vanished. As though snuffing out candle flames, the gust born from that single burst of fighting spirit blew out every fire burning on the stone pillars.

All that remained were four great candles, still smoking with residual heat. Even those did not last long once the spell had been broken, vanishing like a mirage.

“A barrier of this level cannot hold me.”

The woman kicked off the ground again.

Her palm strike speared into Anraku’s completely open torso, and this time his footing finally failed. His huge body lifted into the air, flew some ten metres, slammed into a thick stone pillar, and tumbled to the ground. Before she even realised it, Seiran was running to him.

“Anraku-sama!”

“You fool. I told you to run.”

He slapped away the hand she reached out to help him up.

That desperate voice sounded nothing like the bold, magnanimous man he usually was. Bruises carved across his entire body. He could not even rise at once, only gasp for breath. Every scrap of information before her told Seiran there was no saving this, and as she sat there in shock, Anraku gently caught her shoulder and whispered into her ear.

“Look after the child in your belly. Carry proof that I lived into the next age.”

“Anraku-sama…”

Then he spoke firmly, clearly.

“To Tengen… offer surrender. You are the only one who can do that now, as the last survivor among the Six Consorts. If you do, then you and the child in your womb… should be allowed to live in peace.”

If Anraku died, the collapse of the pack was certain.

The moment word of his death spread, Tengen, who had his forces arrayed on the plain beyond the mountain, would be the first to attack. A pack that had lost both its master and the Six Consorts no longer had the strength to repel such an invasion.

That left only two paths. Resist to the end and die following her master, or submit to Tengen and survive. If one chose the latter, surrender had to come before total defeat. Once one had become a complete loser, there would be no room left to negotiate terms.

And Anraku had chosen the latter.

“My life is about to end. So this is my final order… ghf.”

Warm blood spattered across Seiran’s shoulder.

Wiping at his bloodied mouth, Anraku gave her a firm nod.

He did not have long left. She understood that now.

“I told you I wouldn’t let you escape, didn’t I? To begin with, even if you somehow survived, entering Tengen’s service would be impossible. His troops are already arranged to come pouring over the mountain very soon, after all.”

There was not a single ornament on the woman’s dragon robes, nor even any embroidery to show what pack she belonged to.

An assassin of unknown identity.

But if what she had just said was true, then she was an assassin sent by Tengen. And if that was the case, then there was no longer any way to save the pack.

“The capital will become a sea of flames. Like Algant.”

With the fire of hatred burning in her eyes, the woman advanced another step, then another.

“You bastard! So you really are one of Tengen’s people? Not content with taking the lives of Head Consort-sama and the Benevolent Consort, you’ve laid hands even on Anraku-sama himself, and now… now you mean to burn our capital as well!?”

“Playing the victim? That makes you even less forgivable.”

Holding her husband as death drew nearer with every passing moment, Seiran screamed back at the woman. At that cry, hatred hurled against hatred, the woman drew her brows together in naked disgust, then barked out a harsh “Hah!” and smashed her foot into the floor as though venting her fury. The stone flagstones shattered to pieces. A presence like a volcanic eruption blasted through the room like a gale, making the stone throne room tremble violently. Before that force so intense it shook even lifeless matter, Seiran’s throat could only manage a choked little sound.

As though shielding the legs-gone-weak Seiran behind him,

Anraku forced himself to his feet with the last of his strength.

“I see. Then I will at least make sure Seiran escapes.”

“That request is denied. You and that consort of yours will take responsibility and die.”

“Even if my limbs are torn off, there are times a man cannot retreat. I will show you the hidden strength a dragonkin man can summon when someone he must protect stands at his back.”

Then suddenly, a baleful [Demonic Aura] burst from Anraku.

It was a change that should never have occurred. Proof that he had stepped into a forbidden realm.

The difference between an animal and a monster came down to a single point: whether it gave off [Demonic Aura]. The same was true of humans. The instant one began to emit [Demonic Aura], one was no longer treated as human, but as a monster.

Faced with the pitch-black [Demonic Aura] erupting from her husband, Seiran stood rooted to the spot, struck speechless.

And the transformation that came over Anraku was enough to make her eyes bulge.

Crack. Pop. The sounds of bones snapping rang out all through his body as his entire skeleton was rearranged. At the same time, his skin rippled and flowed, something writhing beneath it tore through his back, and a great pair of wings emerged as though hatching free. Anraku let out a roar devoid of reason.

His skin hardened before their eyes, transforming into red scales. His white teeth became jagged fangs like those of a reptile, and the claws on his feet lengthened, thick and sharp, until their tips bit into the stone floor.

The next instant, Anraku’s dragon robes exploded apart.

His body had swollen. That huge frame, already more than two metres tall, abruptly doubled in size. But the expansion still did not stop.

“Dragonification, is it?”

The woman muttered under her breath.

“In exchange for a dramatic rise in combat power, one loses reason. The body regresses to its ancestral state and regains the shape of a dragon, but loses human dignity and falls into monstrosity.”

“A-Anraku-sama?”

“You would do better not to go near him. He willingly fell into monstrosity in order to protect his wife. It would be too pitiful if the very thing he meant to protect ended up killed by his own hand.”

“W-what are you saying…? Anraku-sama would never lay a hand on me…”

From her husband, who was recovering the dragon’s original form, a baleful [Demonic Aura] poured forth. That evil pressure was exactly what one would expect from a monster. And the sheer quantity of it was absurd, even though his transformation was still incomplete. If something like this rampaged, the city would become a sea of flames before Tengen even arrived. Before she realised it, Seiran was backing away from her husband.

“It is not a bad judgement. If you truly wished to let that person escape while facing me, you would need the resolve to sell your soul to the devil. Even so…”

For the first time, confusion appeared on the woman’s face.

“If a Dragon King-class being undergoes dragonification, then the threat level would be… apocalypse, god-annihilation grade, I suppose. Even for me, that is a bit much.”

Apocalypse, god-annihilation grade.

That was an extraordinary class reserved for myth-level monsters.

It stood one grade above apocalypse, heaven-shattering grade, but within the apocalypse ranks, each single step upward meant the total volume of [Demonic Aura] increased by an order of magnitude, making it incomparable to heaven-shattering grade.

The woman shook her head in troubled resignation and let out a sigh.

“I’m sorry, but I will kill him before the transformation finishes. I have no obligation to wait.”

By then, the [Demonic Aura] pouring from her husband had already surpassed heaven-shattering grade and was shifting toward the next stage. His body had grown so enormous it looked ready to burst through the throne room, his folded wings only barely fitting inside. Laying his long neck along the floor, those crimson twin eyes fixed on the object of their hatred, the jet-black assassin.

That murderous intent was not aimed at her. The faint shred of reason remaining in her husband had identified the woman as his enemy. Sensing that, Seiran hurried away so as not to hinder the battle.

Once it had confirmed that, the dragon raised its head and took a battle stance. Reflected in those crimson twin eyes was only Seiran, trying to leave the throne room.

“–[Lightning Spear].”

Lightning flashed across the back of the running Seiran. The throne room flared bright, then dark, in violent pulses.

She turned around.

And saw the lightning fired from the woman’s palm blow the gigantic dragon’s head clean off.

“……..Eh?”

It was a breath she had never seen before.

No, she could not even be sure it really was a breath. Because with one strike, a single strike, it had snuffed out the life of her husband, who had been on the verge of reaching god-annihilation grade.

His neck, robbed of its head, crashed down onto the cold stone floor with an earth-shaking thud.

The severed surface was charred black, and the torso trailing black smoke did not twitch in the slightest.

Just as a monster’s body vanished after losing its magic core and breaking down into mana, the dragon’s colossal body, now without its head, followed the same law and began decomposing into mana from the extremities inward.

Like weathered stone returning to the earth.

It dissolved into the air and vanished.

Everything looked as though it were moving in slow motion.

The light of life faded, and her husband’s body disappeared.

So this was the end of one who had fallen into monstrosity. No corpse remained, and it was said that not even the soul returned to heaven.

The end of the husband who had literally staked everything to protect his wife was startlingly abrupt.

◇◇◇◇◇

A corridor lit by the faint flames of candles stretched straight ahead.

As she raced down that single path, Seiran chanted a spell in ragged breaths.

Icicles born in midair flew toward the deep darkness behind her.

She did not look back. She did not wait to see the result.

There was no way they could have hit. Rather than cling to false hope, she kept her attacks to pure harassment. If they could delay the woman even a little, that would be enough. If the distance between them widened, then her goal was achieved.

The fear of death. The grim reaper. She could feel it creeping up on her soundlessly from behind, and even as her body froze with terror, she forced herself onward.

That thing had slain dragonified Anraku in a single blow. There was no way anyone could fight that and win.

She had the form of a human, but that was no human. It was a monster.

Breathing hard, Seiran put a hand to the wall. Then,

“Do you think this is a game of tag?”

The woman stepped out from the shadow of a pillar ahead.

Seiran jerked her face up and thrust out her palm.

“Freeze!”

A breath of deadly cold swept through the corridor.

The candle flames were snuffed out, and in no time at all the corridor became a silver-white world.

Without sparing even a glance for the corridor sealed in ice and darkness, Seiran spun on her heel and ran.

That endlessly long, straight corridor. How many times had she already repeated the same thing? Nothing she did let her shake the woman off. Without fail, she always appeared ahead of Seiran’s flight, suddenly thrusting out her deathly pale face like a ghost.

“How are you getting ahead of me?”

At the dead end of the corridor, just as Seiran gasped for breath and tried to pivot around, something swept her feet out from under her and she pitched forward. She fell shoulder first, twisting to shield her belly, and rolled across the ground. Even so, she could not fully absorb the impact, and pain shot through her abdomen.

As she propped herself up on one elbow and tried to rise, two legs entered her field of view, and she sucked in a breath.

“Hih…”

Fear of death stole all freedom from Seiran’s body. Her legs gave out, and unable even to stand, she could only drag herself backward with the strength of her hips.

“To sacrifice his own soul solely to let the woman he loved escape. It was admirable. That is why I hesitated over what to do. I even considered letting you go. But no. I can’t.”

The grim reaper slowly drew closer.

Certain death, step by step.

“I cannot suppress my hatred. If I let you go, peace will never come to my heart. The enemy I hate, the one who stole my happiness, living on as though nothing happened. Just imagining it is enough to make me feel as though I’m going insane.”

In her hand she held the dagger Anraku had dropped, and when she reversed her grip, the point of the blade rose high over Seiran’s head. The cold silver edge reflected the moonlight pouring through the window and shone pale blue-white.

“Ah, ahhhhhhh…”

In that instant, Seiran turned her back on the woman, shielding her belly.

People instinctively protect what matters most. Normally, one would have taken a posture that shielded the head with both hands. Or, if one meant to resist to the bitter end, one would have kept one’s eyes on the enemy and continued struggling. But Seiran did neither. Her action must have looked unnatural. The woman tilted her head in suspicion.

“…? Could it be, you…”

Her gaze fell to Seiran’s barely swelling abdomen.

The woman lowered the dagger she had raised.

“You’re carrying a child? That is why you protected your belly rather than your head.”

Seiran’s teeth chattered so hard they would not meet, and she could not answer. Tears welled in her eyes, and she looked up at the woman as though pleading for mercy.

Faced with that desperate appeal for compassion, the woman sighed.

“I see. So you are with child as well.”

As she said that, the woman lovingly stroked her own abdomen.

Only then did Seiran suddenly realise it. The woman’s belly was faintly swollen as well.

“Ah… eh…?”

A foolish little sound escaped her.

She could not believe it.

Was she saying that while heavily pregnant, she had slain the Dragon King, even Anraku after he had gone so far as to dragonify?

“We are in the same situation.”

“–Eh?”

“By a strange twist of fate, we both lost our husbands, and only our children remain.”

The woman’s sudden words pulled Seiran’s drifting mind back.

“This child must be protected no matter what. In that feeling, we are the same.”

The woman tossed the dagger aside as though discarding it.

Spinning through the air, the dagger sank deep into a stone pillar.

“Very well. I will let you go.”

“However,” she said, bending down and gently stroking Seiran’s cheek. “Do not ever show yourself before me again. If you break that promise, then next time I truly will show no mercy. Understood?”

Then she turned and disappeared into the dark corridor with calm, unhurried steps.