Chapter 1512: Chapter 214 - The Gluttony (3)
"Do you think you’ll be able to handle me now?"
The moment those words left Beelzebub’s mouth, all of her bodies moved.
None of them acted one after another.
There wasn’t any sort of sequence.
All of the Beelzebubs in the room moved at exactly the same time.
The sheer synchronization almost made my brain reject what I was seeing.
I swung Ayuru in a wide horizontal arc.
The blade gave off a low hum.
A crescent of energy burst forward and tore through the air, cutting through the three Beelzebubs charging from the front before they could even reach me. Their bodies split neatly in half.
For about half a second, I thought that had actually worked.
Then their upper bodies kept flying toward me.
Their lower halves hit the ground, planted themselves like they had legs to spare, and immediately grew new arms.
I just stared at them.
"...You’ve got to be kidding me."
"Hahahaha!" all of the Beelzebubs laughed at the same time. "Why would I waste perfectly good body parts?"
Those lower halves lunged toward me.
I pivoted and brought Ayuru down in a diagonal slash, cutting through them again before they could get close enough to grab me. Beside me, Elise’s fingers moved.
Her threads flashed through the air.
Most people wouldn’t have even seen them. I barely could. They only became visible when they caught the light for the briefest instant before slicing through several more Beelzebubs charging from the side.
Their bodies burst apart.
Then all of the pieces started moving.
The severed arms began crawling across the ground.
The detached legs twitched and kicked around.
Meanwhile, the heads actually bounced.
One of those heads landed, rolled twice, then suddenly opened its mouth so wide that its jaw should have snapped off.
Instead, it launched a stream of acidic slime straight at Elise.
She reacted instantly.
Her fingers pulled backward.
The threads immediately tightened.
The head was sliced into dozens of tiny pieces before the acid could even reach her.
"Leon!" she shouted.
I had already seen it.
One of the Beelzebubs behind me had stretched her arm across nearly half the room. At some point, the limb had become so thin and so long that it no longer looked like an arm.
Instead, it looked like a whip.
I spun around.
Ayuru flashed brightly.
The stretched arm was severed cleanly.
Unfortunately, that solved absolutely nothing.
Before the detached section even touched the ground, it suddenly began expanding.
Its size rapidly increased.
The entire thing inflated.
For one horrifying second, it looked like someone had taken a human arm and turned it into a balloon.
Then the arm exploded.
It wasn’t fire.
It wasn’t blood.
It was more Beelzebubs.
I blinked several times.
"...Okay," I muttered. "That’s definitely new."
"Kukuku!" one of them giggled.
Of course she could do that.
Apparently, the embodiment of chaos had decided that self-replicating body parts were a skill worth learning.
Three Beelzebubs rushed Elise.
Five of them rushed me.
Another three remained behind.
At first, I thought they were stretching.
Then I realized that they weren’t stretching at all.
They were unraveling themselves.
Their bodies elongated into strands.
Those strands weren’t flesh.
Those strands weren’t muscle.
Those strands were slime.
Countless strands of slime intertwined with one another and formed a massive web descending from above.
Elise reacted immediately.
Her fingers danced through the air.
Countless threads shot upward.
The collision between her threads and Beelzebub’s web looked almost beautiful.
It was only almost beautiful.
The two forces wrapped around each other, sliced through one another, tangled together, and tore each other apart faster than my eyes could properly follow.
Meanwhile, the Beelzebubs charging me apparently decided they hadn’t been annoying enough already.
One of them flattened herself against the ground.
Then she surged forward.
She didn’t move like a person.
She moved like a wave.
Another compressed herself into a sphere and launched herself at me like a cannonball.
The third simply split herself vertically.
Then both halves grew their own heads.
I stared at them for a brief second.
"You are making this way too complicated."
I stepped forward.
Ayuru released another pulse of energy.
The living wave split apart.
The cannonball exploded into fragments.
The divided Beelzebub lost both of her newly-grown heads.
Apparently, this was the funniest thing she had ever experienced.
"Hahaha! Again! Again!"
The fragments scattered across the ground began rolling toward one another.
That was absolutely not happening.
I drove Ayuru into the ground.
Mana surged through the blade.
The resulting shockwave erupted outward and blasted all of the fragments away before they could reconnect.
For a moment, I thought I’d finally gotten ahead of her.
Then I realized something.
Beelzebub wasn’t trying to overwhelm us with numbers.
She was trying to do something else.
I realized it the moment the ground beneath my feet moved.
I thought it was the ground.
Except it wasn’t actually the ground.
It was slime.
At some point during the fight, countless tiny fragments of her body had spread themselves across the entire room.
Neither of us had noticed.
Looking back on it, that was probably exactly what she had been counting on.
All of those fragments moved at once.
Numerous hands burst from the floor.
There weren’t just one or two.
There were dozens of them.
Those hands grabbed at my legs from every direction.
At the exact same moment, another Beelzebub stretched her body into the shape of a spear and launched herself directly at my chest.
I swung immediately.
The spear split apart.
The hands were severed.
Then both halves of the spear transformed.
They transformed into mouths.
Those mouths were enormous.
Those mouths were so absurdly disproportionate that I was honestly offended on a conceptual level.
I let out a sigh.
"Oh, that’s cheating."
The mouths snapped shut.
Ayuru flashed once again.
Both mouths split apart before they could bite down.
A moment later, Elise’s threads crossed in front of me.
The air itself seemed to crack apart.
All of the Beelzebubs caught within the web of threads were sliced apart.
It didn’t happen once.
It didn’t happen twice.
It happened dozens of times.
For the first time since the battle had begun, everything became quiet.
The entire room was covered in fragments.
There were hundreds of them.
Scattered arms covered the floor.
Detached legs lay everywhere.
Severed heads continued rolling around.
Chunks of slime spread across the battlefield.
Tiny droplets covered almost every surface.
For one brief moment, nobody moved.
Then all of the fragments started laughing.
"Hahahahahaha!"
Each piece laughed.
Each drop laughed.
Each severed fragment laughed.
The sound echoed throughout the room.
Then the fragments began to melt.
They flowed together.
They merged together.
They combined together.
Something massive began rising from the ground.
I looked upward.
Elise looked upward.
Even Lucielle, who had been watching everything until now, stared upward.
Beelzebub’s body rapidly expanded.
It reached ten meters.
Then it reached twenty.
Then it reached thirty.
Her torso remained vaguely humanoid.
Although, only vaguely.
Dozens of arms protruded from her sides.
Several heads emerged from her shoulders.
Everything below her waist dissolved into an enormous mass of writhing slime.
One of the heads smiled.
"I was wondering how long I should keep pretending to be normal."
Another head grinned.
"You two are pretty entertaining."
A third head burst into laughter.
"So let’s do something a little more interesting."
Then the gigantic body compressed.
The process wasn’t slow.
It wasn’t gradual either.
It happened instantly.
The massive form collapsed inward.
In the blink of an eye, all of that mass, all of that slime, and all of those bodies compressed into a single figure standing in front of us.
It was the original Beelzebub.
She casually dusted off her dress as though none of that had been unusual.
"Alright," she said cheerfully. "Round two."
Then her right arm split into seven different arms.
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