And (N)one Shall Remain

“Much better!?” yelled one of the knights from the Royal Guard who joined as part of the additional members the Kingdom sort of forced upon the party. If Alissa remembered right he was the fourth son of a noble or something like that, and Nadine had hinted that the man was definitely on the side of her eldest brother. “Nora and Alsace are dead and you call that much better!?”

 

The names he mentioned were two other members from the Royal Guards who had the misfortune of being in the path of the beast’s last disintegration beam. Alissa had seen some of the new Temple Guards help drag out their bodies from their hiding spot after the battle, and it was an ugly sight, to say the least. They had not died pretty.

 

One of them – the woman, so likely Nora since Alsace was a man’s name as far as Alissa knew – took the beam directly on her chest and it carved a smooth hole through her torso, carving through her lungs and heart and killing her instantly before she could even scream in pain. The man had been less fortunate, and took a glancing blow to the side of his thigh, which disintegrated half of that leg and caused him to fall into the beam right afterwards. He had been the source of the scream that had been cut short.

 

The beam had carved away most of the left side of his torso before it subsided.

 

“The last time this party had to take on a foe of this relative caliber, half of them died,” stated Sir Inolet calmly and nonchalantly without giving a care for the young noble’s anger. He had warned all of the new members of the risks they were taking, so if some of them realized only later on that those risks were more serious than they first expected, that was on them. “We only lost two this time, and neither were even of the main party. An improvement, most assuredly-”

 

“I have to correct you here, Sir Inolet,” said Cerilla all of a sudden from where she knelt next to the fallen Royal Guard that had taken the soul attack particularly badly. The way the woman had bled from all her facial orifices was a scary sight, to say the least, but from the way her chest still vaguely moved, it looked like she still clung to life. “While I managed to save Lady Vera’s life, I do not think she would be able to fight ever again, so that makes for three casualties.”

 

“I stand corrected, thank you, Madam Cerilla,” said Sir Inolet with a slight bow of recognition to the priestess. Technically he was so far above Cerilla in rank and seniority that he could have just omitted any sort of title before her name, but he used it to make a point in this particular case and lend weight to her words. “Three out of twenty. A much better improvement over ten out of twenty lost, don’t you agree?”

 

Alissa had to hold back her laughter as she watched the young nobleman splutter wordlessly for a while, lost for words to answer Sir Inolet’s rebuttal. He was probably used to throwing around his status to get his way, and was lost when he ran directly into the iron plate that was Sir Inolet, who gave no shits about politicking or people’s status. If they were assigned under him, then they better do their job right or he would have their hides, no matter who they are.

 

Needless to say, he made very few friends amongst the nobles, but between his popularity amongst the various knight orders and the military as a whole, as well as his status of having fought in the previous war and lived, even if those nobles hated his guts they did not dare to lift a finger against him. One of them had tried in the past, and had foolishly targeted the family of Sir Inolet’s sole daughter.

 

Back then, the attempt had been foiled by happenstance as his in-laws – both powerful warriors in their own right – happened to be visiting their newborn grandchild, but the incident incensed all of them regardless and resulted in a noble house getting completely uprooted, with the approval of the Royal Family, even.

 

After all, they could not afford to be seen as allowing the families of those who had risked their life and limb to fight for the Kingdom in the Great War to be harmed unless they wanted a truly dangerous uprising in their hands. The Royal Family, the noble houses, the Temple, and the military all formed separate factions in the Kingdom’s politics, which naturally made for complications.

 

While the nobles might cause trouble if offended, the Royals of the time decided that offending them was far less risky than offending the military, most of which would have stood firmly behind their heroes like Henri Inolet, come what may.

 

That confrontative young noble looked like he had some more choice vitriol to spew when Alissa noticed how Sir Inolet’s face changed all of a sudden. She immediately noticed the mistake they had made. They relaxed a bit too far while still in dangerous territory. Her eyes saw the colorful blur at around the same moment Sir Inolet yelled out a warning to the party and alerted them.

 

It was all too late for the cocky noble, though, as that colorful blur impacted against the chain coif that covered the back of his head and drilled through with ease. He spasmed and jerked where he stood, before a hole was blown from the inside of his forehead, spewing blood, shards of bone, and brain matter everywhere in the vicinity.

 

From within that hole, just above and between his now-glazed eyes, appeared the head of a small bird – not too unlike a hummingbird in appearance, save for the fact that it had four eyes and was covered with insect-like chitin instead of feathers. The creature looked curiously from side to side for a moment before it turned into another blur that headed straight towards Alissa.

 

Unfortunately for the creature, while it was absurdly fast to the point that even Alissa could only see a blur in her field of vision, she was arguably one of the best equipped to fight it amongst the party, as Alissa focused quite a bit of her Body stats into Dexterity, while her class further granted additional Perception and Intuition as she leveled.

 

All those stats combined allowed her to not only perceive the beast’s trajectory, but also to make a confident guess on the maneuver it would perform along the way. The beast itself probably aimed for her because Sir Inolet was on the other side, and it dared not to rush towards him, while she probably registered to it as the greatest threat out of the party and it wanted to get rid of her while it could.

 

Instead, Alissa met the creature’s charge with an accurate straight punch where she rammed the upper corner of her shield directly against the charging creature’s beak. The impact was a violent one and the beast’s beak embedded itself into the metal of the shield, which proved to be a fatal mistake for the creature.

 

The beast, an [Eight-Winged Blitzbeak Lvl50] was one that relied on its absurd agility and its powerful charge attacks to defeat much larger creatures despite its small size. With its beak stuck in the metal of Alissa’s shield, it had just inadvertently rendered its own agility useless, as it lacked the force to pry its beak from the punctured and dented metal.

 

Instead, Alissa slammed the insectile bird-like beast against the ground hard, since it was trapped and unable to free itself. The impact itself didn’t hurt the beast much, but prevented its eight dragonfly-like wings from moving properly, which rendered it immobile for a brief moment. 

 

That moment was all Alissa needed to flip her grip on her spear into an overarm grip and stab down at the beast with all the force she could muster behind it. She used the other end of her spear, with the spearhead intended for piercing through a target at all costs, and the force behind her strike was just enough to overcome the beast’s relatively weak defenses and pierce through its small body, pinning it straight to the ground below.

 

Then Alissa held the position for long moments until the beast ceased to struggle and the notification sounded in her mind.

 

“Very well done, Miss O’Connor,” said Sir Inolet as he walked towards her and slowly clapped his hands once more. The [Eight-Winged Blitzbeak] was the beast they had originally searched for, as the old knight expected it to prove to be a challenge for the party, due to its unusual qualities. The beast was indeed tiny and relatively fragile for its level, but it was also ridiculously fast and deadly, quite unlike anything the party had to fight so far.

 

He had not expected the beast to make a beeline for Alissa only to fall under her quick reactions, though.

 

“Thanks, I guess?” said Alissa with some uncertainty in her voice. At the moment she was still kneeling and pressing down on the [Eight-Winged Blitzbeak]’s corpse, as if worried that it might spring back to life the moment she let go. “It doesn’t have any skill that would let it resurrect or something, does it? That felt far too easy.”

 

“Good prudence, but no, it’s dead. You just happened to deprive it of its greatest advantage by luck, then went for the kill as you should,” replied the old knight with some evident pride in his voice. Some of the others also looked towards Alissa with some surprise and a little awe, none of them having expected a fight against a creature of that level to end so quickly and simply. “Or rather, you grasped upon its weaknesses and acted accordingly, didn’t you?”

 

“It was just a lucky guess,” replied Alissa with a nod as she rose up, the dead beast still skewered by her spear. What she did not mention was that she had learned a new general passive skill that was likely related to her class called [A Critical Eye] some time ago, which did indeed allow her to glimpse upon the weaknesses of creatures she had in her sight. It was one reason why her attacks against the beast so accurately hit them in ways that crippled limbs, at least partially, as the skill also helped her land such blows more easily. “This thing’s corpse is valuable as well, I take it? I hope I didn’t ruin it too much.”

 

“Only the beak, which you likely guessed since it pierced through the metal of your shield without taking any damage. The eyes are worth a lot as reagents too, and you don’t seem to have damaged those either, so it’s all good,” replied the old knight as he pried off the beast’s carcass from the tip of her spear. Due to the different and far more dangerous conditions of the forest, they were followed much more closely by the harvesting crew, who quickly butchered and stored any beast the party slaughtered along the way. 

 

Even so, for safety reasons, Sir Inolet also carried an empty storage tool to keep the most valuable bits of the beasts they encountered. He had stored the abomination’s horn in that storage, and did the same with the blitzbeak’s carcass. 

 

“Anyway, that’s two of our three targets here taken care of, and we had only lost four people, none of which are relevant to our purpose in coming,” said Sir Inolet afterwards, clearly not in the least bit disturbed by the death of the young nobleman who argued with him just moments earlier. Before the expedition left, he made it clear that he did not like the idea of attempting to fish out more [Hero’s Companions] or [Associates] by way of attaching new members to the party, and that such an attempt would be dangerous.

 

He had also made it very clear that since the nobles had insisted on it, he would not be responsible for the lives of those additional members.

 

“We are going to proceed to hunt down our final target now. Are you prepared? If you feel that you might not be up to the task, it is not too late to tender your resignation here and now.”