Chapter 1513: Chapter 214 - The Gluttony (4)
"Round two," Beelzebub repeated cheerfully.
The seven extra arms extending from her right shoulder suddenly came together in a loud clap.
For a brief moment, absolutely nothing happened.
I kept my eyes fixed on her.
Elise did exactly the same thing.
Neither of us moved from our positions.
Because with someone like Beelzebub, the moment you assumed nothing had happened was usually the exact moment something terrible happened.
As it turned out, that assumption lasted less than a second.
Then the sound finally arrived.
It wasn’t a shockwave of any kind.
It wasn’t an explosion either.
It wasn’t even an attack in the way I normally understood attacks.
It was laughter.
Hundreds of different laughs echoed throughout the room all at once.
I turned my head cautiously.
Elise turned her head too.
The entire room was laughing.
The walls were laughing uncontrollably.
The floor was laughing as well.
Even the shattered chunks of rubble scattered throughout the room had somehow grown tiny mouths that opened and closed in perfect synchronization.
"Kukukuku!"
"Hahahaha!"
"Hehehehe!"
"Did you miss me?"
"I missed me!"
"Did you miss yourself?"
"I miss myself all the time!"
I stared at the scene for a solid second.
Then I looked back at Beelzebub.
"...You’re really committed to this whole bit."
She grinned proudly.
"Thank you!"
I wasn’t complimenting her at all.
I had a feeling she knew that and simply didn’t care.
Then the mouths detached themselves from whatever surfaces they had been attached to and started flying toward us.
Not crawling across the battlefield.
Not jumping through the air.
They were actually flying somehow.
At that point, I was beginning to suspect that Beelzebub’s understanding of physics was less of a scientific discipline and more of a series of suggestions she occasionally ignored.
I swung Ayuru.
A crescent-shaped slash of mana burst forward and erased dozens of the flying mouths.
Beside me, Elise’s threads shot through the air and sliced apart dozens more.
For a brief moment, I thought we’d dealt with them.
Then the severed mouths burst apart into droplets.
The droplets transformed into eyes.
The eyes blinked once each.
Then they exploded immediately afterward.
A massive cloud of smoke engulfed the battlefield.
I exhaled slowly and carefully.
Of course they exploded eventually.
Why wouldn’t they explode anyway?
A hand suddenly emerged from the smoke.
It wasn’t Beelzebub’s hand.
It was my own hand.
I stared at it cautiously.
It stared back at me.
Then it tried to punch me.
I cut it in half.
Several more hands emerged from the smoke.
Some belonged to me.
Some belonged to Elise.
Some belonged to people I had never seen before in my entire life.
One of them had way too many fingers.
Beelzebub’s laughter echoed from every direction at once.
"I’ve always wanted to know!" she called out cheerfully. "Do people trust their eyes more than their instincts?"
"I’ve got an answer for you." I said back.
"Oh? That’s your answer?"
"You’re absolutely insane..."
"Hahaha! Correct!"
The smoke suddenly collapsed inward.
It didn’t fade away naturally.
It didn’t disperse into the air.
The entire cloud compressed itself into a sphere no larger than a fist.
Then the sphere transformed into Beelzebub.
She was hanging upside down.
She was also spinning rapidly.
"Hello there!"
I didn’t bother responding to her.
I swung immediately without hesitation.
She split herself vertically.
She hadn’t dodged my attack.
She hadn’t moved at all.
She literally split herself in half.
My blade passed cleanly through the empty space between her two separated halves.
Both halves smiled at me.
Then they rotated around Ayuru and fused back together behind me.
I turned instantly.
Unfortunately, I was already too late.
She had already disappeared.
"Above!" Elise shouted urgently.
I looked upward immediately.
There were fifty Beelzebubs.
I actually counted all of them.
I immediately regretted counting them.
They weren’t falling toward us.
They weren’t floating there either.
They were swimming through the air as though the air itself had somehow become water.
Then they dove toward us.
Elise reacted immediately.
Her threads exploded outward.
The air itself seemed to fracture under the sheer density of her attack.
Several Beelzebubs were shredded apart instantly.
The rest adapted.
Their bodies flattened themselves.
Not metaphorically speaking, either.
They literally flattened themselves.
They became thin enough to slip through the gaps between Elise’s threads like raindrops passing through cracks.
I stepped forward.
Ayuru pulsed with mana.
A wave of mana erupted outward.
The space in front of me exploded.
Several Beelzebubs were obliterated.
Then their remains stopped falling.
The fragments hovered in the air.
Slowly, they began moving together.
A giant wheel composed entirely of flesh and slime formed in midair.
Beelzebub’s voice echoed from somewhere inside it.
"Oh, this one’s new!" she announced proudly. "I’ve been working on it."
I honestly wasn’t sure whether I should have been impressed or concerned.
Eventually, I settled on both.
The wheel began spinning rapidly.
Then it spun even faster.
Then it accelerated even more.
Then it rolled through the air directly toward us.
Because apparently that was a thing that could happen now.
I stepped forward and met it head-on.
Ayuru flashed brightly once again.
The massive wheel split apart.
The fragments scattered in every direction.
Then every fragment grew tiny wings.
I stared at them carefully.
For at least one full second.
Maybe even two whole seconds.
"...You know, at some point, this stops being a fighting style and starts becoming a hobby."
"It can be both!" Beelzebub replied happily.
Honestly, that sounded like something she had spent years thinking about.
Elise attacked again.
Her threads exploded outward across the battlefield.
This time, they didn’t cut.
This time, they trapped instead.
Thousands of threads wrapped around hundreds of Beelzebub fragments simultaneously.
For the first time since the battle had started, Beelzebub actually paused.
"Oh? That’s interesting."
The threads tightened immediately.
The trapped fragments burst apart.
I moved forward immediately.
Ayuru flashed again.
A wave of destructive energy tore through the remaining fragments.
For a brief moment, everything became still.
A little too still.
Then I felt it.
It wasn’t danger exactly.
Not exactly what I expected.
It was a pattern.
Something was very wrong.
"Elise!"
She reacted immediately.
Unfortunately, she reacted one second too late.
The threads she had spread throughout the battlefield suddenly moved.
They weren’t her threads.
They were copies instead.
At some point during the fight, Beelzebub had created thousands of microscopic strands of slime that perfectly mimicked Elise’s own techniques.
The false threads wrapped around Elise’s arms.
Then they wrapped around her legs.
Then they wrapped around her waist.
Her eyes widened in shock.
"What? How?"
The threads pulled.
They pulled incredibly hard.
Elise was dragged across the room before she could properly resist.
She came to a stop directly in front of Beelzebub.
Beelzebub clapped her hands excitedly.
"Oh! That actually worked!"
She grinned.
Then her torso opened.
It didn’t split apart.
It simply opened wide.
Like flower petals unfolding.
Actually, that comparison wasn’t correct.
It looked less like a flower and more like a mouth.
A massive, horrifying mouth.
Rows upon rows of translucent teeth unfolded from inside her body.
Acid dripped between them.
"Elise!" I shouted desperately.
She pulled on her threads.
The false threads pulled back.
Beelzebub laughed loudly.
"I wonder how long you’ll stay inside me before you completely dissolve in my stomach."
The massive mouth lunged toward Elise.
Then the entire room became dark.
Not because the lights had gone out.
Not because something blocked our vision.
The darkness existed because something darker than darkness itself had appeared.
I looked at Lucielle.
She stood with one arm extended.
A sphere of black energy floated above her palm.
It wasn’t black like a shadow.
It wasn’t black like the night sky.
It was black in a way that felt fundamentally wrong.
Like reality itself had looked at the color and decided it wanted nothing to do with it.
For the first time since the battle had begun, Beelzebub blinked.
"Oh. That’s unfortunate."
Lucielle’s expression didn’t change.
"Let her go."
Beelzebub smiled.
"No, I don’t think so."
Lucielle threw the sphere.
At first, nothing happened.
The sphere touched Beelzebub’s body.
Then everything disappeared.
Sound vanished completely.
Light vanished entirely.
Space itself seemed to collapse inward.
Beelzebub’s body ruptured.
She wasn’t torn apart.
She wasn’t cut apart.
She was completely erased.
The darkness expanded outward in a perfect sphere, consuming every fragment of flesh, every strand of slime, and every false thread.
For one brief moment, the entire battlefield became a void.
Then the darkness collapsed.
Silence filled the room.
Elise fell from the air.
I caught her immediately.
And in the place where Beelzebub had been standing only moments before, there was absolutely nothing left.
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