Huge eyes emerged from the middle of the barren landscape.
It was at once a wondrous, but deceptive and ominous view.
I stood still as if entranced. But I immediately remembered Wiseman’s words.
“That’s right. Based on your view, assuming that the system’s Morganna Mode Gone is Emma Wieland – reminding the system of it can be a valid blow.”
I resolved my will and approached Morganna.
“Morganna!” I yelled.
“I don’t want to fight in vain. Listen to me!”
I could see that my friends were watching from the rear.
I heard a voice from Morganna.
At first it was faint whisper. However, in an instant, the voice became a roar.
It was a laugh. A maniacal laugh to be exact. It sounded like hundreds of women echoing all around me.
I involuntarily covered my ears and stepped back.
It didn’t seem we would be able to have a conversation.
Just then, Morganna’s huge eyes blinked. In the meantime, tears spilled out of her eyes and the drops began to fall onto the ground.
It was as if she was both laughing and wailing.
But she wasn’t, no. Those were not tears. They just looked like that because Morganna was huge and far away.
Being nearer to Morganna, I realized what they were before my friends did.
They were spherical monsters, about the same size as a PC. They were too numerous to count.
A swarm of the monsters swarmed us all at once, like the diffusion oil makes when dropped on the surface of water.
The battle resumed in no time.
It was a completely different battle from the previous one.
Until a moment ago, we had been fighting against a huge enemy. But now there were a tremendous number of smaller enemies about the same size as us.
A fierce battle in which enemies and allies were jumbled together.
The target displayed the name “Seeker”.
Someone screamed. I saw a Net Slum resident being pierced by a bunch of data sequences released from the Seeker’s eyes.
I felt chills over my whole body.
Did it really just use a data drain?
The size was different from the one used by Skeith and I, but it was undoubtedly a data drain.
Immediately, screams began to echo from all around. The allies who were struck by the data drain of the Seeker eyeballs disappeared immediately.
I was distracted by my friends. I didn’t know that one of the Seekers was sneaking up behind me.
Before I knew it, I was looking straight into the data drain effect.
If I had been one second later, I would have been attacked, but I was suddenly struck by someone.
I saw him as I fell to the ground.
It was Elk who had pushed me away.
He was pierced through the chest instead of me.
“Elk!”
I jumped up and slashed the Seeker in front of me.
It vanished with a single blow.
I helped Elk, who had fallen to the ground, to his feet and he opened his eyes and looked at me.
“Sorry,” he said in a soft voice. “I was thinking only about myself.”
Then he disappeared.
The turbulent battle was moving to a one-sided slaughter and then to a clean up operation over time. We were the ones to be wiped out.
Morganna seemed satisfied with the situation. She started to withdraw, as though inviting us to follow along, like a dance.
“Look! She’s running away!” shouted BlackRose, who was wielding her big sword.
Morganna was moving further away, summoning a horde of Seekers in her wake.
My friends and the Net Slum residents tried to chase after Morganna.
“Wait! Don’t chase her! You must not chase after her!” Wiseman commanded with a stern voice.
“But then we won’t beat Morganna,” BlackRose argued, but Wiseman shook his head.
“It would be good for us if the enemy escaped. We can continue to buy time and wait for Aura’s further awakening. Everyone, please stay back.”
Wiseman’s strategy was clear and brief.
BlackRose and Balmung began to guide everyone further back.
I looked towards Morganna, trying to find out what she was doing.
Eight lights were about to emerge from Morganna’s eyes, but what were they?
Before I could answer this question, the lights flew in a gentle arc with the sound of rustling waves, jumping high above me and falling to the ground.
The hairs all over my body stood up.
Eight shadows? The sound of the waves?
Suddenly, along with the smoke, a huge shadow appeared behind BlackRose as she was guiding our friends.
What a sight to see. It was a terrifying human-like figure that you wouldn’t soon forget once you saw it. A shadow that cuts death. Skeith, the Terror of Death.
“BlackRose, look out!” I screamed a warning, but it was too late.
It was like watching slow motion.
BlackRose didn’t have time to defend herself.
Skeith’s swung his scythe down and BlackRose became like a doll whose yarn had been cut.
Then came another strike.
Then it was over and BlackRose had disappeared.
I tried to run over to where she had been, but someone grabbed my arm and stopped me. I turned to see Balmung holding me back.
“Cool it! Stay calm!”
I was confused.
Why did Skeith appear here? We defeated him once before. BlackRose had been killed. Her PC disappeared and she probably became comatose.
“This bad. The situation is not looking good,” Wiseman moaned as the battle waged around us.
I could see that he was terribly upset, which was unusual for him.
“We are flanked on both sides. We can’t buy time like this. There’s nothing we can do. We’ll be wiped out.”
I immediately realized what he said.
Morganna dropped Seekers from a distance. And Skeith was chasing us from behind. Without a bracelet, we had no way to protect ourselves against Skeith. The Seekers launched deadly one-shot attacks.
Every time Skeith swung his scythe, our companions noisily fell.
“How cunning of Morganna Mode Gone. She still had that move up her sleeve,” said Wiseman with a hint of admiration.
“There is only one strategy we should take now.”
He looked at me and Balmung.
“Kite, Balmung. You guys should just get out of here and chase after Morganna. I would like you to go find Helba if possible …」
However, Helba was obscured by the smoke and could not be seen. She may have still been fighting to protect her Net Slum compatriots.
“I’ll bring everyone together and we will confront Skeith here. I’ll buy us some time…”
I couldn’t hear his words until the end.
Suddenly a horde of Seekers stormed us from the side and I got separated from Balmung and Wiseman.
Balmung’s white feathers were peeking through the gaps in the horde of Seekers, but he soon disappeared.
Beyond the horde I saw Skeith wielding his scythe, striking down PCs.
Suddenly, there were only a few of our friends left around us.
Everyone else seemed to have been killed.
All of those friends had all been exposed to a fierce system of attacks.
Both Elk and BlackRose had been deleted. Neither Wiseman nor Balmung were to be seen as well.
The characters for annihilation flashed above my head.
It couldn’t be. I’d come all this way.
Suddenly the Seekers that had been approaching in front of me disappeared in an instant, having been struck down by a wave of flames.
“Don’t give up. You still have a chance.”
Helba was standing behind me.
“Helba!”
“I just received a message. Tokuoka and his friends should be dispatching soon.”
Mr. Tokuoka? Did Mr. Tokuoka, who was active in the real world, have something to do with our current predicament?
Seekers who had been wary of Helba and kept their distance now approached again.
It reminded me of a nature show I saw on TV a long time ago. It had shown a herd of buffalo being surrounded by lions. Helba kept the Seekers at bay with a powerful spell. We were able to withstand their attacks this way.
However, in this situation, we could only get out of it by going directly to Morganna.
But Morganna was too far away. Furthermore, she kept producing Seekers from her eyes as if rubbing in her impending victory.
And from behind us, the nightmarish Skeith was approaching.
Then suddenly it seemed that the space around us began to distort, and some merchant PCs appeared all at once.
“There is light in the shadows,” one shouted.
“Live in the shadows, die in the shadows,” shouted another person.
“That is our duty.”
“However, why is it so repulsive?“
“Can we impose such a harsh decision?”
“If you don’t work overtime in this world…”
“You shall hate unjust labor, dark enterprise must die.”
“Now, look upon your gods,” another said in a clear voice with a defiant posture.
“Look upon the Urkuk Pig Squadron,” they all said in unison.
Their sudden appearance pushed back a horde of Seekers.
I remembered Aura’s words.
“I have empowered those who can fight,” she said.
So the Pig Squadron came at the last minute.
It seemed that the Pig Squadron recovered and returned to the front line…
“Lord Lios, King of Light. Leave this to us.”
When everyone spoke in unison once again, in the background there was the distant sound of a steam engine.
Some sort of huge mass flew out.
It blew away several Seekers as steam puffed from it and it made a straight line for us.
I turned away and it suddenly stopped a few feet in front of me.
It was Lios. He was looking down at me from a huge motorcycle.
Could it really have been a motorcycle? In a fantasy world, in The World?
Was this a good way to view the world?
“Kite, Helba, get on!” Lios yelled.
After making sure Helba and I were sitting behind him, Lios suddenly started driving at a tremendous speed.
What an odd-looking bunch we were. I could assuredly say that there had never been such a strange party in the history of The World.
System administrator Lios was driving a huge steam-blowing motorbike, and I was sitting behind him on it. Behind me was the super-hacker Helba.
“Lios, where’d you get this bike?” I said, clinging to my pretense.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s a company secret.”
“It’s not within the current specifications by any means,” Helba said in a happy voice for some reason. “It’s a hacker’s job to bring something like this into The World.”
“No more talking.”
Suddenly I saw something come behind us.
It was Balmung, chasing us on a Grunty.
He brought the Grunty closer to the bike.
“Kite, are you okay?”
“Where’s Wiseman?”
Balmung shook his head at my question.
“His spell saved me, but he got data drained by a Seeker.”
“Oh no…”
I followed Elk and BlackRose to Wiseman.
“This is no time to mourn. We have to defeat Morganna while my subordinates are stalling her,” Lios said.
“But what happened? Was it Skeith? Wasn’t Kite supposed to have defeated him?”
“It was not Skeith himself,” Helba said.
“It was the “Terror of the Primordial”, a pre-Eight Phases monster that could be described as the manifestation of a null value. Kite certainly destroyed all eight phases, but the enemy is gathering together to squeeze out the last of our power.”
To be honest, I didn’t quite understand Helba’s explanation. When I opened my mouth to ask a question, I felt like a shadow was cast over me.
“Be careful, Lios!” Balmung shouted.
I turned around and was startled.
Immediately behind me was the face of Skieth, an inhuman face with the contour of a giant hornet.
Lios tilted his bike and barely evaded the blow of the staff swung down by Skeith.
“Grrr…” Lios groaned as he tried to regain control of the bike.
“What the hell? Has he already defeated my subordinates?”
Skeith was flying at the same speed as the steam bike.
But I noticed something.
Skeith was full of scratches.
Not only on his face, but also on his torso, arms and legs, there are countless large and small cracks.
If he were human, these would be full-blown wounds.
Oh, that’s it, I thought, we had defeated the Eight Phases over a long period of time. That much damage had accumulated on Skeith. The accumulation of damage so far was not in vain.
Just one more blow. If we could strike a strong blow, I believed that we could beat Skeith.
But what should we do?
Now that we didn’t have the bracelet, we had no way to strike a blow.
Just then, Lios said something.
I missed it, so I asked again.
“I’ll take over operation, I said,” Lios replied. “I will deal with him.“
.hack//Translate 