Chapter 32
Having thwarted the woman's attempt to launch her daggers at Chaska and Anya, Shiro kicked one of the kunai back at her, then fired his shotgun.
She deflected it with a short katana whose name Shiro couldn't quite place, though he knew he knew it.
Unfortunately, the next squeeze of his trigger only produced a click, prompting him to switch to the Vanguard.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
All three shots missed her, standing further down the hall. Shiro winced. As avid as he'd been with his shopping, he'd forgotten to restock ammunition for the Vanguard, which meant every wasted shot cut deeper into his limited supply.
Despite lining up a fourth shot on her, hovering upside down on the ceiling like some kind of damn spider mutant, he hesitated to fire it, choosing instead to close the distance.
She made a motion that suggested another kunai was coming, then seemed to abort it, or so it looked, until daggers came flying anyway, their angle strange enough to make him question her aim.
Halfway through the throw, dual wielding pistol and shotgun, he used the Vanguard to deflect one dagger and swung the shotgun in a way it was absolutely not built for, batting the rest away before they could reach the girls behind him.
"Take cover!" he shouted, and they did, before he turned back to face Karen. "How shameless. Aren't you supposed to be a hero?"
"Who decided that?" she barked, launching more kunai from seemingly nowhere, interrupting his attempt to reload. With the girls now safely out of the line of fire, Shiro mimicked her evasive style, dodging in a corridor never meant for that kind of movement.
"You people decided that for me!"
Taking cover behind the recess of a doorway to reload the shotgun and then the Vanguard, "We have?" Shiro blinked, as her kunai, which shouldn't have had the angle to reach him from there, somehow ricocheted off the ceiling, one missing his skull by inches.
Rolling out of cover, shotgun back in one hand, he immediately charged her.
From what he could tell, she thrived at range, so his plan was simple: strip her of that advantage.
He'd closed to about fifteen meters when a rain of arrows forced him to step back and fire the only shell he'd managed to reload, an aether-spark gel round, which knocked a few daggers out of the air but not all.
It did, though, close the last of the distance between them just as her kunai found purchase all over his body.
A blast from the shotgun, bright orange and blue sparks erupting outward, sent her crashing through the window behind her and into the abyss below.
Quickly yanking the dozen or so kunai still buried inches deep in his skin, he walked to the window to check something.
From this floor it was going to be a nasty fall, but they were dealing with a hero, one he suspected hadn't just died from a blast that had, so far, condemned every one of his other targets to an agonizing fiery death.
He was proven right when he spotted her clinging horizontally to the castle wall, as if it were solid ground beneath her.
Her outfit, which had been concealing her appearance, was engulfed in flames, yet she made no effort to extinguish them.
Instead, she focused on hurling a kunai trailing a live grenade, the projectile moving slowly enough for Shiro to easily dodge it and take cover before it detonated a second later, shaking the entire floor.
Amid the chaos, a muffled scream from the girls made him call back toward where they'd vanished, ears still ringing, reloading the shotgun. "You guys alright back there?"
Looking toward the corner they'd taken cover behind, he saw two heads pop up. "We're good," they reassured him, confirming the scream hadn't come from either of them, but instead someone in one of the rooms on this floor.
"You? You alright?"
"I'm good, I'm good," he called back, firing his shotgun with one hand at Karen, now scaling the wall toward the roof, while yanking kunai out of his own body with the other. "Going after her," he declared, already reloading.
"You sure? You look..."
"I'll be fine. Later."
"Careful out there."
"That's my line, hehe," he snickered, before scaling the wall toward the roof where she'd gone. Unable to walk horizontally the way she could, he made his way up the same way he'd brought the girls to this floor earlier, throwing himself upward from ledge to ledge.
As expected, the moment he reached the roof, he was welcomed by a kunai trailing another grenade, which quick reflexes let him swat away with a bat-like swing of his shotgun, sending it exploding a dozen meters off instead.
She stood several dozen meters away, most of her ninja outfit burned away by the flames, revealing an unexpected appearance.
Karen the Elusive, nicknamed for her supposed thousand-year age and reputation as an overprotective grandmother figure, looked shockingly young for someone claiming that history.
"I promised not to kill you unless you attacked first. I've tried to honor that, even though you've given me plenty of reason not to. That last stunt might've been enough to change my mind." But since she was reasonably pretty, Shiro thought, "I'll give you one more chance."
"I'll kill you!" she barked.
"Seriously? At least tell me why. Because I get the feeling you've got some serious history with me. Scratch that, with Hiro."
"Why?! Why?! You're asking me why?"
The woman was practically foaming at the mouth, making Shiro wonder if she was on something, some kind of drug, because this wasn't the reaction of someone in their right mind.
"You killed my family!"
"I did?"
"You killed my next family too!"
"Erm, you're going to hate me for this, but I don't remem—"
"I won't let you do it again! Even if it's just one of you, I'll make sure to take you down with me!
" she declared, drawing a scroll from god knows where and using it to conjure something absurd in the space between them.
It started as a small, fist-sized distortion, then in an instant became a devouring collapse of space, swallowing everything around it, wind, chunks of the ceiling, none of which seemed to satisfy it.
In the few seconds it existed, it began pulling hard at Shiro, and at her too, both of them being drawn in, until, just as his footing started sliding toward it in real panic, it vanished, suction and all, releasing everything it had condensed in a single violent explosion.
Shiro checked his ears for blood, the pressure had been that absurd, and through the ringing still lingering in his hearing, caught her muttering, "How?! How!?" before summoning a katana from equally mysterious origins and charging him.
He had no sword. Only a shotgun.
A shotgun was meant to blast people into pieces, and Shiro hesitated to do that, which was why he ended up using it as a melee weapon instead, a decision he regretted with every blow she landed. "Lady, listen—"
"No," she refused, coming at him with a rapid combo of swings.
"What the hell! Just listen, goddammit," Shiro snapped back.
"I don't know if what you're saying is true.
Probably is, I'll give you that. But I don't remember doing whatever you're accusing me of to your first family, or your second.
About your third family, maybe there's room to argue there. Since I might have—"
"I'll kill you!" she shouted, swinging clearly meant to take his head off, but his gauntleted hand caught the blade instead, which genuinely made him proud of that particular purchase, right as he pressed the shotgun's barrel against her chest.
"Let me explain," he warned.
"I'll kill you," she repeated, pulling a grenade out of thin air, adding, "for my family, for everyone in Zanoba city," which was enough for Shiro to stop hesitating and pull the trigger. The shotgun roared, blasting her several meters back before she detonated.
He caught a glimpse of something flung further off, nearing the edge, before it dropped out of sight. He looked down, half expecting more grenades to come flying up at him. Nothing. No sign of her at all.
Not entirely sure what to feel about that, Shiro turned his thoughts back to the girls and headed to rejoin them.
He didn't even bother climbing back down.
He just dropped through the massive hole the lunatic's attempted black hole had torn into the floor, landing on the floor of the level he'd left behind, then made his way over to find them roughly where he'd left them.
"Shiro!"
"Master Shiro, you're back!"
"Yeah, of course. Did you doubt that?" he laughed, before noticing a third person with them. They weren't alone. A girl sat surrounded by the three of them, Chaska gripping her by her bright blonde hair. "Who's that?"
"I'm Sylvie Bellier, heir of this dukedom. If you dare touch me again, my grandmother, the—"
She was cut off by a sharp smack across the face from Anya. "Speak only when spoken to."
"So it's her. The one behind all of this."
"Yes," Anya confirmed. "But are you actually alright? You were covered in arrows and knives earlier."
"She's right," Chaska added.
"I'm fine," Shiro reassured them, glancing down to confirm it himself.
Not a single mark remained where he'd been stabbed repeatedly by Karen's kunai, not even a scratch.
"Wow, guess that explains why that kunai injury didn’t stick," he chuckled, then looked up to find Chaska watching him with concern, an odd thing to notice given she was still yanking the girl's hair without any letup.
"Didn't you say her daggers were poisoned?" she noted.
"Oh."
He'd completely forgotten about that.
"Do you feel alright?"
"I think so," Shiro self-diagnosed. "For now."
"We need to move fast," Chaska told Anya. "If I'm right, he's going to collapse soon."
"I will?" he wondered aloud. He still couldn't remember what had happened after getting cut by her kunai the first time. Chaska, though, had apparently seen the aftermath firsthand, and he didn't doubt her on this.
Anya looked briefly thrown, but quickly gathered herself and did what needed doing, which meant slapping the girl again, still held down on her knees by Chaska's grip on her hair.
"How dare you, I'm—"
"You're nobody. Scream all you want, nobody's coming to save you. Not your father, he's dead. Not your grandmother, she's—" Anya glanced at Shiro, apparently realizing she had no idea what had actually become of Karen the Elusive. "What happened to her?"
"Don't worry about her anymore."
"You're lying, my grandmother would—"
Anya smacked her again. "Want proof your precious grandmother isn't coming? Watch this." Another slap, and the girl finally broke into sobs.
"Staaawp, pleeease! Stawp."
"Alright, I’ll stop but you better answer this correctly. Where's my sister?!"