"Get back!" The guard who heard the shout initially didn't realize the warning was directed at him.
That was why, when the words rang out, he reflexively turned his gaze toward Daridora—the person he was supposed to be guarding.
Only when he noticed Daridora looking back at him did it finally click that the warning had been meant for him.
Right beside him, someone who had looked like nothing more than a corpse mere seconds ago was now standing at his side, fixing him with a stare full of unmistakable killing intent.
Why hadn't he sensed any presence? The question was bizarre, incomprehensible.
Those fragmented thoughts had barely crossed his mind when the former corpse thrust the blade of his short sword toward the guard's neck—
A strange pyun rang through the air, and in the next instant, the attacker vanished from right in front of him.
"!?"
Realizing he had just been saved, the guard kicked off the floor almost reflexively, leaping backward to put distance between himself and where he had been standing.
Only after all that did he grasp what had happened to the man who had tried to kill him.
Several small, arrowhead-like objects were embedded in the man's body, and blood was flowing freely.
Despite bleeding from over a dozen places—including his face—the White-Coated Man showed no sign of caring about the pain. His eyes were locked on the prey that should have been his.
(What? He doesn't feel pain? Is he like those three from earlier today, then? No, wait...)
Having created enough distance to calm down, the guard studied the White-Coated Man and muttered inwardly.
By then, the other guards had already drawn their weapons and formed a perimeter around Daridora. More guards blocked the room's entrance, leaving the White-Coated Man with no avenue of escape.
Yet despite being cornered, the man only leveled his short sword at the guard he had failed to kill.
Watching him, Daridora and his guards understood at once that this man was fundamentally different from the three who had attacked them during the day.
Those three attackers, who had felt no pain, had possessed no light of will in their eyes.
But the White-Coated Man now standing before them had an iron conviction burning in his gaze.
"...Who are you?"
Rei muttered, releasing his hand from the Eye of Nebula equipped beneath his Dragon Robe.
Since Rei hadn't encountered the three men who attacked Daridora, his only read on the White-Coated Man was this: an opponent who showed no outward agitation despite having just been struck.
(I've fought enemies who couldn't feel pain before, but... I never expected to run into one in a place like this.)
The moment his hand left the Eye of Nebula, Rei gripped the Twilight Spear, drawn from his Misty Ring.
The Death Scythe, with its wide slashing arcs, was ill-suited for use inside a research facility room, even a relatively spacious one.
He judged the Twilight Spear—capable of thrusting attacks—to be the better choice here.
If they had been outside, where collateral damage didn't matter, he would have summoned the Death Scythe instead.
Or the Twin Spear Style... The thought crossed his mind, but he dismissed it with a self-deprecating smile. It wasn't refined enough for real combat yet.
Shaking off the thought, Rei stepped up beside the guard the White-Coated Man had attacked, Twilight Spear in hand.
"Leave this one to me. You focus on protecting Daridora."
"No, but—"
The guard couldn't immediately accept Rei's instruction. He had been hired as a skilled adventurer, yet he had completely failed to detect the White-Coated Man's attack. He was desperate to redeem himself.
But as the White-Coated Man inched slowly forward, Rei kept the spear tip trained on him and spoke.
"What's your real purpose here? To take down that White-Coated Man? Or... to protect Daridora, your actual charge?"
Phrased like that, the guard couldn't keep insisting on his own way.
He was hired to guard Daridora. Daridora's safety was his top priority, plain and simple.
"Understood. I'll leave it to you."
The guard muttered in frustration and returned to Daridora's side.
Confirming this from the corner of his eye, Rei exhaled in relief and kept his spear aimed at the White-Coated Man.
He knew the guard had a decent level of skill.
But while that might suffice outside, swinging the Twilight Spear inside a laboratory—even a spacious one—would only make him an obstacle.
...In truth, Rei's mention of Daridora's safety had been a calculated move to keep the guard from interfering during the fight.
The guard half-saw through Rei's reasoning, but knowing full well that his own abilities fell far short of Rei's, he swallowed his pride and went along with it.
Though there was also the simple fact that he would get to witness the true strength of Rei—the Alias Holder known as Crimson—with his own eyes.
"Now then, who are you? ...You could at least tell me that much, don't you think?"
Rei spoke with the Twilight Spear in hand, but the White-Coated Man said nothing.
His eyes held nothing but killing intent, fixed on Rei.
"I'll be straight with you—I have no intention of letting you go. Talk quietly about why you attacked this facility, and I'll treat you accordingly. It seems your people were also behind the attacks on Augusto and Daridora today, so any information is valuable."
Rei delivered the ultimatum, but he was already near-certain the man wouldn't listen.
The man's eyes held an unshakable conviction that wouldn't bend to anyone's words.
People like that rarely listened, no matter what was said.
Proof enough—the man was ignoring Rei entirely, still watching for an opening.
"Tch. Figured as much. ...Can't be helped, then. This is going to get a little rough, but try to understand—here!"
The moment the words left his mouth, a single flash erupted from Rei's hand.
To Daridora, it looked like nothing more than a streak of red light.
Among the guards, almost no one could follow the spear's movement with their own eyes.
That was how fast the strike was.
A blow that could truly be called a red flash shot straight toward the White-Coated Man.
Naturally, Rei had no intention of killing him.
With information so badly needed, he had aimed for the man's arm—specifically the hand gripping the short sword—gambling that even an uncooperative prisoner might yield something useful.
"Guh!"
As the last assassin remaining at the scene, the White-Coated Man no doubt had confidence in his own skill.
But unfortunately for him, he had completely misjudged Rei's strength.
The razor-sharp thrust didn't merely pierce the man's arm—the Twilight Spear's edge and Rei's physical prowess were enough to sever it clean through, even without magic power flowing into the weapon.
The cut was so clean that for the first few seconds, the White-Coated Man didn't even realize his arm was gone. No blood even flowed.
"Wha—!?"
A beat later, the missing arm registered, and blood gushed from the stump in a torrent.
"Well, that takes care of the weapon. ...Next, shall I take a leg so you can't run? Or the other hand? I'd rather not damage the head you need to decide your next move, though."
"You... monster!"
The White-Coated Man screamed.
Rei ignored the outburst and held his stance with the Twilight Spear. Behind him, though, Daridora and the assembled guards nodded in agreement with the man's words.
That was how overwhelming the strike they had just witnessed was—in power, in sharpness, and above all, in speed.
"You made an enemy of that monster. You know you can't win anymore, right? How about you surrender?"
"Idiot! Like I'd ever do something like that!"
The White-Coated Man shouted and plunged his hand into his clothing.
Rei surged forward the instant he saw it.
"Tch!"
What flew were not spear strikes, but arrowheads from the Eye of Nebula.
Slicing through the air, the arrowheads launched toward the White-Coated Man in rapid succession.
Fired with Rei's physical abilities behind them, the man had no chance of dodging.
Several arrowheads struck his remaining left arm, and the impact jarred something loose from the hand he had slipped inside his clothing.
It appeared to be a glass bottle, but oddly enough, it rolled across the floor without shattering.
Curious about its contents, Rei glanced at the bottle for a split second—but the next moment, he swung the Twilight Spear once more.
This time, not a thrust, but a horizontal sweep.
The blow streaked toward the White-Coated Man and, remarkably, struck him without smashing any of the desks or walls inside the laboratory.
The White-Coated Man seemed to recognize the power behind the swing and tried to dodge—but even as a sweep rather than a thrust, the speed was beyond anything he could evade.
"Gaaah!"
The sensation of ribs shattering traveled up the Twilight Spear into Rei's hand.
The man was launched sideways by the force, slamming into the wall hard enough to crack it before he finally went still.
"H-Hey... he just flew sideways... and for several meters..."
One of Daridora's guards muttered that from behind him, but Rei paid it little mind as he approached the man crumpled against the wall.
(Based on that impact, he shouldn't be dead.)
His ribs were broken, but it shouldn't have been fatal.
Operating on that assumption, Rei observed the man, who showed no sign of movement—until an expression of utter confusion spread across his face.
"Huh?"
At Rei's bewildered exclamation, Daridora's guards found it odd as well. A few of them came over.
"What is it?"
"...Look at this."
One of the guards followed Rei's murmured words and turned his gaze to the White-Coated Man.
What he saw was the man vomiting a green liquid along with blood.
His eyes were wide open, and from any angle, he was dead.
"Doesn't look like he died from your strike, Rei."
"Yeah."
Rei nodded immediately.
His blow had been powerful enough to inflict serious injury, certainly.
But it hadn't been the kind of lethal strike that would kill a man outright.
"For starters, if he died from my strike, what's the green liquid coming out of his mouth? The blood is red, as it should be..."
"True... so then what is this green stuff?"
"That's what I'm saying—I don't know either. It's not like I did anything beyond hitting him."
"You hit him with that spear."
They went back and forth for a moment before something suddenly occurred to Rei.
In the manga and novels he had read back in Japan, assassins would sometimes ingest poison before a mission and take an antidote upon success.
(No, even then, that death was too fast. So... suicide poison?)
The realization hit him, and another somewhat dumbfounded sound escaped Rei's lips.
"Ah..."
"Hm? What is it? Think of something?"
A nearby guard naturally picked up on the sound and asked.
Rei wore a troubled look, but spoke anyway.
"Maybe... and this is really just a maybe, but... did he accidentally swallow suicide poison he'd hidden in a molar? Not because he chose to take it, but from the impact of hitting the wall when I struck him—"
"No way... No matter how you look at it, I can't see someone dying from something that stupid."
Swallowing hidden suicide poison because of collision impact, then dying.
From any angle, it was nothing short of pathetic.
The guard said as much—but when Rei's gaze shifted to the wall, to the cracked surface where the White-Coated Man had slammed into it, the guard was convinced.
No one would normally anticipate taking an impact like that.
Of course, even if someone else received the same blow, they wouldn't necessarily swallow poison in the same way.
In the end, it was simply bad luck. There was no other way to describe it.
"Setting that aside... was this guy the one who attacked the facility? Pretty anticlimactic way to go out, if so."
The man was dead. There was no point dwelling on it further.
Rei muttered as much, but the guard responded in exasperation.
"Listen. It's precisely because it was you, Rei, that you took him down so easily. Against anyone else, he would've been a real handful."
"You think so?"
"Yeah, I do. You're already strong enough as it is, and on top of that, you're carrying Magic Items that powerful. Honestly, I feel sorry for the enemy."
For someone whose side had just lost every researcher to a massacre, the words carried a striking lack of attachment.
Sensing this, Rei shot him a questioning look. The man gave a small shrug.
"I only got hired by Daridora-san recently. I barely knew anyone here. ...More importantly, aren't you curious about that bottle he dropped?"
With that, the man set off toward the bottle rolling on the floor.