Riding atop Set, Rei soared through the sky above the forest.
The forest below was filled with countless large trees, creating a green canopy distinct from the grasslands. Gazing down at that verdant carpet and tuning out the birdsong drifting up from nowhere in particular, Rei searched for familiar faces like Mirene and Yohanna.
But the canopy spreading beneath them blanketed most of the ground, making it impossible to find his targets at a glance.
"Set, looks like I'll have to leave this to you after all. Can you do it?"
"Guruuu!"
Purring to signal his assent, Set turned his sharp gaze toward the ground below.
He deployed not only his keen vision but also his hearing, sense of smell, and ability to detect magic, scanning for Mirene, Yohanna, and many other familiar faces.
Surnin and Ekril, while not quite to the same degree as Mirene, were also people who always treated him well.
He remembered every face among the Former Mobile Unit from their joint operations the previous autumn.
With such close friends in mortal danger, Set was resolved to save them—no matter what.
He stared down at the ground for several seconds...
"Gurururuu!"
Catching sight of Mirene and Yohanna through the gaps in the trees, Set let out a sharp cry.
"Found them?! ...Hey, wait, wait, wait!"
Following Set's line of sight, Rei saw Mirene and the others fleeing through the forest.
Surnin was running at the rear, with the pack of Cyclops pursuing at a distance behind him.
"Did they fight, lose, and now they're running?"
Rei muttered this because several arrows were lodged in the Cyclops's bodies.
But he immediately shook his head.
Arrows were embedded in them, true—but those were the only wounds visible.
If Mirene and the others had actually fought the Cyclops, the monsters should have borne far more injuries than just arrow wounds.
Rei knew full well that Mirene, Yohanna, and the rest possessed that level of skill.
"Which means..."
"Guruu!"
Before the murmuring Rei could say anything more, Set found the answer.
Letting out a cry to draw Rei's attention, Set's gaze led him to Ekril—standing on a tree branch, desperately loosing arrows at the Cyclops.
"Is she playing rearguard all by herself? ...Well, she's providing cover fire from the branches, so maybe 'rearguard' isn't quite right in this case?"
The reason Rei's voice carried no hint of panic was that all five Cyclops Deetz had mentioned were chasing the fleeing Mirene and her group, and Ekril's arrows were doing a fine job of slowing them down.
At this rate, he was confident they could escape the Cyclops without him lifting a finger.
However, as if to mock that very expectation, the situation changed in an instant.
"Gurururuu!"
Letting out a sharp cry, Set suddenly folded his wings and dove toward the ground.
"Set!?"
For a split second, Rei couldn't fathom why Set had acted without warning. Then he saw it—something red, right beside Ekril on the tree branch, about to slam a massive object into the trunk of the tree she stood on.
The moment Rei identified the red figure as a Cyclops, he drew the Death Scythe from his Misty Ring.
"Set!"
The same call as moments before—but laden with an entirely different emotion.
Set must have sensed it too. He beat his wings and dove straight toward the ground... but he was a few seconds too late.
The green of the treetops rushed up at them with alarming speed, but before Rei and Set could reach Ekril's position, the red Cyclops swung the object in its hand into the tree.
The trunk was thick enough that it would take several adults joining hands to encircle it, yet it shattered effortlessly under the blow—Rei finally realized, in that moment, that the object was a metal hammer.
Simultaneously, a blinding flash of light erupted outward, and a deafening crack echoed through the forest.
(What the—!?)
Gripping the Death Scythe, Rei stared at the rapidly approaching scene below in disbelief.
But before he could piece his thoughts together, his eyes were seized by the red Cyclops's next action.
It was raising its hammer, about to bring it crashing down on Ekril, who lay on the ground convulsing.
"Flying Slash!"
"Gururururuuu!"
While Ekril had been perched on the branch, they couldn't use ranged attacks carelessly—doing so might break her concentration and send her plummeting to the ground.
Ironically, it was precisely because she had fallen that they could now unleash those attacks. A flying slash erupted from Rei's Death Scythe, while multiple arrows of wind shot forth from Set.
The raw power of Wind Arrow wasn't particularly formidable, but its speed dwarfed that of Water Ball by comparison.
Normally, Magic Eye of Shock would have been the fastest attack available, but its power was inversely proportional to its speed—far too weak to be effective.
Against a Cyclops with red skin—almost certainly a rare species or high-ranking species—Set had judged that Magic Eye of Shock would be virtually useless.
The Wind Arrows reached the red Cyclops before Rei's Flying Slash, striking its body one after another.
The arrows did inflict wounds, but the Cyclops healed from them at a visibly alarming rate.
Even so, having its body torn open was apparently irritating enough that the red Cyclops halted its swing toward Ekril and turned its single eye toward the source of the Wind Arrows.
And right at that moment, Rei's Flying Slash arrived—severing the right arm that gripped the hammer clean from the shoulder.
Even from his position at a distance, Rei thought he could hear the sound of that arm—or more precisely, the hammer it held—crashing to the ground.
But even as that sound reached his ears, the gap between Set and the red Cyclops was closing fast...
"Gurururururuuu!"
Set's front leg struck out with a roar, amplified by the Power Crush skill and the Bracelet of Herculean Strength, blasting the nearly five-meter-tall red Cyclops off its feet.
"While I'm at it, take this too!"
Leaping from Set's back, Rei unleashed a follow-up strike toward the red Cyclops as it tumbled through a thicket of splintering trees.
The attack resembled Set's strike at first glance, but it was fundamentally different.
"Power Slash!"
What burst from the Death Scythe was a blow that prioritized sheer weight and impact over cutting edge.
"Gaaaaaaah!"
The two-meter giant scythe shattered the red Cyclops's ribs and carved through its torso.
Infused with magic, the Death Scythe's strike sheared through the body of the nearly five-meter-tall Cyclops, nearly bisecting it entirely.
Even though the attack prioritized raw force over sharpness, it still carried enough power to cleave through a Cyclops's torso. But just short of a complete bisection, Rei witnessed something impossible.
The red Cyclops—whose torso should have been split top to bottom—had cut surfaces that were already bubbling and fusing back together.
"Wha—!"
Seeing this, Rei was forced to accept that the creature before him was no ordinary Cyclops.
It was already clearly different—red-skinned instead of green, and a full meter taller than the norm.
He had recognized as much already. But the fact that it was regenerating at such an obscene rate while on the verge of being bisected was utterly unexpected, even by his standards.
Rei swung the Death Scythe through its arc and kicked off the Cyclops's rapidly healing body to create some distance—
"Ow!"
In that instant, a sharp, needle-like pain lanced through his entire body.
Even so, he kicked off the red Cyclops and twisted in midair to check on it—only to see its left hand gripping its right.
More precisely, it was clutching the right arm—severed at the shoulder by Rei's Flying Slash—by the hand.
When it had been blasted away, it had somehow managed to secure both the severed arm and the hammer.
At the same time, Rei understood the true nature of the brief, stabbing pain he had just felt.
Purple Lightning was crackling across various points on the red Cyclops's body.
The source, unsurprisingly, was the hammer clutched in the severed right arm's grip.
"...Troublesome in more ways than one."
Rei muttered, bracing the Death Scythe.
He had faced a fair number of opponents who could dodge, block, or deflect his attacks over the years.
But he had never encountered something this absurd—an entity that regenerated the very instant it was struck.
The restorative ability... no, the regeneration ability of the red Cyclops before him couldn't be dismissed simply as a trait of its species.
(There's definitely some trick to it.)
Rei's gaze shifted to the hammer—the likely source of that trick.
The red Cyclops was pressing its severed right arm back against its shoulder.
"If it can regenerate from being bisected, then reattaching a severed shoulder is trivial. How troublesome."
Right before his eyes, the arm fused back into place with disturbing ease, and the red Cyclops gave the hammer an experimental swing.
From its demeanor, it was impossible to imagine that its right arm had been severed just seconds ago.
Maintaining his wariness of the creature, Rei took a brief moment to scan his surroundings and furrowed his brow.
He had expected the five normal Cyclops to come rushing back now that their leader was under attack, but there was no sign of them whatsoever.
In fact, their presence was growing ever more distant.
Either they had absolute faith in the red Cyclops's power, or they were so single-mindedly fixated on chasing Mirene and the others that they had already forgotten about it entirely.
Recalling how the Cyclops had behaved when Ekril's arrows were harassing them, Rei judged it was likely the latter.
For a fleeting moment, he considered activating Flame Emperor's Crimson Armor, but decided against it—using it in the middle of a forest would be far too dangerous. He would face the creature in his base form.
"Gaaaaaaah!"
With a roar charged with fury, the red Cyclops charged at Rei, hammer raised high.
As Rei moved to intercept the blow with the Death Scythe, a memory flashed through his mind—the moment the hammer had struck Ekril's tree.
Lightning had arced outward from the point of impact.
He instantly deduced that this was the true cause of the sharp pain he had felt earlier.
"Tch!"
Driven by a bad premonition, he abandoned the idea of blocking the hammer and tried to leap clear—until the fallen figure of Ekril flashed into the corner of his vision.
If he dodged and the lightning coursed through the ground as before, Ekril would take the full brunt of it.
Making that calculation in a heartbeat, he forcibly redirected his jump—charging straight toward the red Cyclops instead of away.
He spun the Death Scythe half a turn in his grip, angling the pommel toward his opponent...
"Penetrate!"
The instant the skill activated, wind coiled around the pommel.
Carried by the momentum of his launch, Rei drove the Death Scythe's pommel squarely into the red Cyclops's raised right arm.
The wind-wreathed strike, its piercing power amplified, punched clean into the red Cyclops's right elbow.
"Gaaaaaaaah!"
The red Cyclops's scream tore through the air, and the sensation of bone splintering beneath the blow traveled up through the Death Scythe into Rei's hands.
No matter how rapidly it could regenerate flesh, it couldn't ignore pain.
Moreover, while it was likely accustomed to the sting of being slashed, having its bones crushed was an experience it had probably seldom encountered.
The average adventurer favored longswords, and among all the foes this red Cyclops had fought, none had likely employed a crushing attack over a cutting one.
Hence the scream.
And with its elbow shattered, it could no longer maintain its grip—the hammer tumbled to the ground.
(That hammer is in the way!)
The hammer with its lightning-generating ability was what made the red Cyclops before him so overwhelmingly powerful. He had to deal with it first.
With that resolve, Rei closed the distance to the fallen weapon.
If he were an ordinary adventurer, such a gambit would have been meaningless.
But Rei was an Item Box User—anything that wasn't a living creature, he could store inside his Misty Ring.
Just as his hand was about to touch the hammer, he caught the red Cyclops's single eye flaring with light. Abandoning the attempt, he threw himself backward.
A searing heat ray erupted from the Cyclops's eye.
It swept through the space Rei had occupied a heartbeat prior, instantly scorching everything it touched.
"Troublesome. ...Set, Ekril!"
"Gurururuu!"
At Rei's command, Set—who had been circling, waiting for an opening—dived to the ground. He hooked his two front legs into Ekril's leather armor and beat his wings, carrying her away from the battlefield to safety.
And so, Rei found himself facing the red Cyclops alone.