36 Chapter 36: Desperate Escape

"A…aaaaah!"

My knees buckled and I crashed into a kneeling position as the agonized scream tore itself out of my throat. Fuck, I regretted giving my Redwood Jacket to Hughes. Now when I really needed it, but I didn't have it. Without its protection, Sakaguchi was cutting me apart.

"Just die already!"

With a snarl, Sakaguchi increased the pressure on his broadsword, and its blade bit deeper and grated against bone, sharply amplifying the red-hot agony that burned its way through my torso. I let out another scream and almost blacked out from the excruciating pain.

Oh God-Emperor of Man, help me…Throne on Terra…aaaaaah!

My hands scrabbled at the broadsword, as if trying to dislodge or remove it, but my hands went slick with blood – not just the blood pouring from my wound, but also from the deep line of cuts that the blade tore open in my palms.

"F…!"

I let out a shriek as the broadsword cut so deeply that it cut into bone. If I increase the pressure and tried to yank it off, it would slice straight through my hands. Tears leaked from my eyes, and my vision turned into a haze of red.

I can't die here…I can't…!

Gritting my teeth, I abandoned my efforts and dropped my hands. I scrabbled frantically for my fallen staff and snatched it up. The broadsword dangerously sunk lower, chewing through bone, sinew and tissue and cleaving my lung and stomach further. With a hiss, I brought the staff up and parried the broadsword to stop the downward slide.

It was almost too late. My body was almost falling apart. I almost couldn't feel my right arm, which felt as if it was severed away from my body. My shoulder was hanging away from my neck and chest, the massive blade wedged between and beneath them.

I had to do something quickly. I wasn't going to survive at this rate, even with my prodigious Regeneration or undead abilities.

Forcing myself not to black out, I gritted my teeth harder and channeled as much mana as I could to my staff. I didn't care that dark magic was weakened by 90%. I didn't have the intention of killing or injuring Sakaguchi.

My sole purpose for now was to escape.

Shadow Lunar Fang!

"What?!"

Sakaguchi swore as his view was suddenly obscured by a violent swirl of darkness. His divine armor glowed white as the defensive runes protected his body from the sudden devastating spell – but even without Divine Defense, the vastly weakened Shadow Lunar Fang would only scratch him at most. More shocked than hurt, he waved the swirling miasma away and glared at me.

I was gone.

"…bastard! Where did he go?!"

I ran away, of course. What, did he honestly think I would just lie flat and let him kill me so simply? He was clearly deluded.

"Ugh…"

Fortunately, the thick armor that provided him his formidable defense was heavy and clunky, which slowed him down massively. Even though I was heavily injured, I was already widening the distance and outrunning him on foot. It also helped that my grievous and fatal wound was already slowly closing up and healing. I had been afraid to leave a trail of blood as I escaped, but the bleeding had stopped the moment my flesh knitted.

The dull pain as my organs, sinew and tissue tried to mend told me that my Regeneration was not as fast as before. I flinched every time I took a step, but it was no longer at the point where I would black out from the sheer agony.

I'm really running low on energy.

Hunger was gnawing at my stomach, a sign that I had depleted vast reserves of mana.

Most probably from all that regenerating…plus I used quite a few spells. And before that I even helped to heal three mercenaries.

Ah. Fuck.

Dismayed, I plunged through the woods as the memory hit me. Not only were the men I saved now being hunted down and slain by Asakura, I also realized just how feeble and helpless I was against Sakaguchi.

Every single one of his special abilities were a direct counter to mine. It was as if he was created solely to fight me. No matter what I did, there was no way I could win against him, not unless I solely relied on the Sword Saint special ability.

In fact, it was only because of my immature Sword Saint ability that I even survived the battle at all. I shuddered to think of what would have happened if I didn't possess that ability. Even if I had my Redwood Robe, its regenerative protection might not be enough to protect me from the constant barrage.

"Where are you, fucking Tanaka!? Get your ass out here!"

Sakaguchi was still roaring, swinging his broadsword about and chopping down trees in frustration. I wasn't stupid enough to respond, and quietly widened the distance between myself and him. It was a good thing he was being so noisy and conspicuous – I knew where his location was and could move accordingly in the opposite direction.

It wasn't long before the white light from his Holy Blessings disappeared from sight and I could no longer hear his howls.

Great. The bloody bastard wouldn't shut up. I had enough of listening to him. Relieved, I stopped to take a breather and ended up slumping against the nearest tree. My legs suddenly lost their strength and I fell over.

"Ugh…"

I used up too much mana and energy early for my spells and Regeneration. Now I was completely and thoroughly exhausted. My body was no longer willing to listen to me. It almost felt like it had shut down.

F…move, damn you!

I willed my body to move, but it disobeyed. My legs refused to stand and I could only lean against the trunk of a tree, sucking in a huge lungful of air as I tried to catch my breath. Shutting my eyes, I reluctantly relaxed and allow myself to rest.

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I hope Sakaguchi and Asakura won't be able to find me.

Ideally, I wanted to move as far away as them as possible. If I could, I would like to track down the surviving mercenaries and protect them, but I had absolutely no idea where they went. Furthermore, Asakura had gone after them to hunt every single witness down. I grimly realized that the chances of anyone escaping were pretty slim.

But if she can track all the mercenaries in this forest, doesn't that mean she will be able to find me too?

To my horror, I realized that Asakura most likely had a tracking skill of some sort, or she wouldn't have agreed to Sakaguchi's order to hunt the mercenaries down. Cursing, I tried to force myself back onto my feet. If that was true, I couldn't afford to stick around here.

I had to move and increase the distance as much as possible.

Wait, isn't it entirely possible that the reason why Sakaguchi and Asakura were able to find me because Asakura has a tracking special ability that allowed her to track me all the way from the city when they learned from the guild that I was still alive?

If my guess was correct, then I wasn't out of the woods yet. And I didn't mean that literally.

Feeling an icy spike of fear in my chest, I hauled myself to my feet. It seemed I had managed to recover just a tiny bit of my strength. My stomach still growled, empty after the efforts of earlier, but at least now I was able to walk.

I went straight. Or at least what I thought was straight. My mind was in a mess and I clearly couldn't tell one tree apart from another. I was just trudging in the direction I thought was opposite from Sakaguchi's location. At that time I was feeling drained from the battle so it didn't occur to me that I could be walking in circles.

The bushes beside me stirred. I froze and gripped my staff tightly. Taking a deep breath, I trained my eyes on the roughly rustling bushes, the leaves and branches swaying violently as if something huge was trying to force itself through.

I tried to pull whatever little remains of my mana together for a spell. Whether it was Asakura or a monster, presently I was in no shape to tackle them.

"Ugh…"

I waited patiently, but in the end, a weird-looking mammal poked its head out. It was a rabbit the size of a dog, scrambling on all fours. Seeing its chubby figure squeeze through the thin hole of the shrubs, I was reminded of a wombat. It looked up at me with its cute, beady eyes and then sniffed disinterestedly.

"…"

Holding my silence, I held my gaze on the cute little creature that wriggled out of the bushes. From what I remembered, it was a warm wombat. It was practically harmless, but hunters sometimes hunted them for their fur coats, which were incredibly popular in the capital, especially among noble ladies.

There were also several rich people who kept these warm wombats as pets. They had the special ability to emanate heat, and their owners took full advantage of that ability to keep themselves warm during winter by snuggling with their pets.

So cool.

"Phew…"

Relieved that it wasn't a predatory monster or one of the heroes, I exhaled and relaxed a little. Glancing warily in the direction of the warm wombat, as if I could see into the distance, past all the trees that served as a barricade, I wondered if I was heading in the right direction. I honestly had no sense of direction and no clue where I was.

Keep moving. It'll be better than staying still.

That was right. If I heard so much as a whisper from my former classmates, I could just turn around and head in the opposite direction before they spotted me.

But if they spotted me…then, well…

Don't think about it.

I drew a deep breath and continued plodding forward despite my utter exhaustion.

I didn't get very far when I felt an ominous presence.

"Oh, boy. So they're already here, huh?"

I couldn't help but groaned as I stopped to catch my breath. Placing a hand on a tree, I glanced up and peered hard into the foliage. Even with Absolute Analysis, I couldn't see a single thing. But I instinctively knew that my mortal enemies were here.

She was silent, creeping through the forest like the wind. Completely opposite to Sakaguchi, Asakura didn't make a single noise as she closed in on my position.

"!"

I was knocked back by a basic fireball, which I managed to dispel with my staff. I felt a huge measure of relief – the fireball had revealed Asakura's position. All I had to do was turn toward the direction in which it came from!

Doombolt!

I blasted thick vegetation apart, disintegrating them with the potent black spell. However, not a sound was made, and the aftermath of my magic left nothing but barren soil and decaying grass and shrubs.

"?"

Asakura wasn't there.

"!"

I felt cuts and injuries slicing into me from behind. Staggering, I spun around, but my assailant was gone. Or she had remained unseen throughout the entire ordeal, stealthily sneaking through the grass and foliage.

"…damn it."

I gritted my teeth as I felt blood dripping from my wounds. This time, I didn't see the fireball or projectile. It was invisible, yet swift, sharp and deadly. Unlike the fireball, which was heat and brute strength, the new attack didn't explode upon contact.

Worse, if I had my Redwood jacket on, this pathetic spell wouldn't even scratch me.

Wind magic.

It was an offensive spell with wind attribute. Wind blades or something. Invisible, formless and almost impossible to evade.

I heard the wind sigh, almost like a groan, and dodged instinctively. The wind blades emitted a shrill shriek as it sliced through the forest, loping off branches and actually chopping down a tree. Rolling to my feet, I glanced at the direction where I heard the wind blow from.

If I couldn't see the wind, I could at least hear it. Now I had to rely on my ears a lot more than my eyes.

This is bad.

Asakura was still nowhere to be seen. She had camouflaged her position perfectly. Not only that, the wind blades came from a completely different direction each time. She was an excellent sniper who knew that she had to switch position after every shot, to prevent counter-fire or counter-sniping from her target.

So my former classmates were not merely incompetent caricatures who existed solely for me to kick their asses. They were pretty skilled too. Sakaguchi might lack Asakura's finesse and stealth, but his incredibly formidable defense and area-of-effect buffing and de-buffing had overpowered me. The guy was clearly stronger than me.

Heroes indeed.

To be honest, it didn't matter if I was fighting them one on one – hell, I was actually fighting them one on one right now. I would still lose. Asakura didn't intervene in Sakaguchi's battle at all and he kicked my ass all by himself.

And now Asakura was handling me fine all by herself. I might injured but I could still fight. Yet I didn't summon my zombies because they wouldn't be able to sniff her out. She would just slice them apart, unseen, almost like shooting fish in a barrel while they milled around helplessly trying to flush her out.

This was highly disadvantageous to me.

What should I do? Retreat?

If I couldn't attack her, especially in my weakened state, then that was the only choice left to me. Slamming my staff down, I used Corrupting Darkness to shroud the area. If I managed to hit the invisible Asakura with that, that would be great, but right now I was utilizing it more to create my own cover and conceal my movements.

"You really have sunk so low, haven't you, Tanaka?"

Asakura's voice dripped with sarcasm as she sneered at me, unseen in the forest. I snorted as I ran under the cover of the miasma.

"I don't want to hear that from you, so-called hero who goes around murdering innocent people. Even if you accuse me of not being innocent, you still killed the mercenaries who had nothing to do with this."

"Hah! You call them people? They're just NPCs, you know. They exist for the sole purpose of being farmed."

What kind of fucking logic was that? Right. The heroes from another world were so deluded that they treated Restia as some sort of game world. There was no point in convincing them, so I held my silence and focused on running.

"You think you can hide yourself?"

The wind suddenly blew the entire place apart, dissipating the miasma very easily and exposing me. Even though I had managed to dive into a thick cluster of trees, I could sense killing intent all about me. No longer bothered with subterfuge, Asakura blasted my wooden cover apart with fireball and immolated huge swathes of the forest.

"What do you think you're doing!?" I yelled as I scrambled out, desperately trying to put out the flames on my back and arms. Ugh, I was suffering serious burns, which were taking quite a while to heal because of my lack of mana.

"Flushing you out, of course. If I have to burn down the whole forest to kill you, I will."

"Why are you going this far?!"

Asakura laughed, almost as if she couldn't believe how naïve I was, or she deemed my question as stupid to the extreme.

"You're Tanaka. That's all the reason we need."

"Huh?"

"If we don't kill you now, we'll regret it. You'll come back to haunt us. You'll take your revenge on us. Tsukishima-san had the right idea. That's why you should just let us kill you – to give us a peace of mind!"

"You're just as bad as Kobayashi!"

"No, no." Asakura giggled. "Kobayashi-kun is a genius. He's correct. The weak like you should all just die. There's little point in allowing useless people to live."

While I would scoff at the logic, at the moment it was true that both Asakura and Sakaguchi were stronger than me. Frustration welled up in me as I escaped the burning forest.

The whole place was in flames now, with smoke billowing throughout. Coughing as I accidentally inhaled a large lungful of fumes, I staggered away from the blazing foliage and sought safer ground while making use of the smoke to hide myself.

"It's useless, you know."

A gigantic gust of wind blew the smoke apart and actually extinguished the flames in one blow. I continued moving, but I was thrown up and above, my body tumbling from the hurricane. The gale hurled me across the forest.

"Ugh!"

I scrambled to my feet after landing, using the staff to shove myself to my feet. Almost using it as a crutch or walking stick, I hurtled across the forest to maximize the distance between myself and Asakura.

But I was just running blindly. I had no idea where she was. I couldn't see or sense her at all. For all I knew, I could be running straight at her and falling into another trap.

Don't think too much. Moving and make myself less of a target is infinitely better than standing still!

"Still struggling uselessly, you worm?" Asakura sneered. I was smacked by another wind blade, which tore open a huge injury on me. Knocked off course, I stumbled and toppled over, groaning. Rolling in the grass, I tried to get back to my feet, but the pain was inhibiting my movements.

"Argh…"

"Wow, you're annoyingly tenacious. You're still alive after that?"

"You're annoyingly persistent," I retorted as I used my staff to force myself to my feet. Shaking my head, I ran again.

Wind howled at my back and I threw myself to the side to avoid the hurricane. A cluster of trees in front of me were reduced into splinters from the sheer force of the spell.

"Holy Throne!"

Praying to the Emperor, I struggled to dash through the falling splinters, hoping that they would obscure Asakura's view. She definitely wouldn't expect me to run into the spot where she had just devastated with her magic.

"Getting desperate, aren't you?"

Asakura chuckled before she launched another series of wind blades that cut up my surroundings. Relying on my instincts and hearing alone, I wove through the crumbling trees and blown up grass and soil, hoping that they masked my presence. My foot slipped on something and I found myself tumbling as the whole earth literally vanished beneath my foot.

"What…?!"

My words were cut off as I simply tumbled into nothingness. While dodging and escaping Asakura's assault, I had unknowingly ran straight off a cliff. Now I was plunging downward, crashing through nothingness and falling into the abyss below.

"Ha ha ha ha ha!"

Asakura's laughter thundered loudly behind me as she threw taunts.

"Fall to your death, you insect loser!"

That was the last thing I heard before I disappeared into the abyss below.

…or would have, but Asakura suddenly realized something.

"Hmph. I don't want to have this same old cliché of someone supposedly falling to their death from a cliff, their corpse never found, only for them to suddenly show up in future alive and well, and particularly vengeful. I had best confirm your death."

I could see a shimmer at the edge of the cliff as Asakura appeared, the outline of her body telegraphed against transparent air. Turning my body in midair, I could see her preparing several wind blades to hurl at me.

That was easy. Now that I knew where the attacks were coming from, I had ample time to prepare my defenses.

Dark Barrier!

I conjured a dark barrier to deflect the wind blades from Asakura. Even invisible, I could see the shock on her transparent face. Using Absolute Appraisal, I secretly read her stats and noted her personal information.

Name: Asakura Akane

Species: Human

Job/Rank: Huntress/Hero

Special Ability: Artemis Assault, Invincible Invisibility

What the f? Invincible Invisibility? No wonder I couldn't sense her at all. In fact, if I didn't know she was on the edge of the cliff, I wouldn't have noticed her presence at all.

Mirroring my frustration, Asakura conjured a fireball and hurled it at me. Unlike Sakaguchi, however, her attacks were not as powerful – they lacked the strength to penetrate my defenses. The fireball merely dissipated across my barrier.

"Fucking loser insect! Like a cockroach to the very end! Just die!"

Screaming, Asakura hurled more fireballs at me. Even though I had fallen off the cliff, this misfortune turned out to save my life because Asakura's attacks could only come from one direction. It was a good thing she couldn't fly or she would have jumped off the cliff to chase me down until I was confirmed dead.

As it was, she wouldn't have any trouble confirming that anyway. Turning around, I saw the ground rush up to meet me.

Except that it wasn't the ground.

"!!!"

SPLASH!

A geyser of water sprouted out as I hit the surface of the river before disappearing into its depths without a trace, even as Asakura's enraged wails echoed throughout the forest above.