Guided by the sounds echoing through the cavern, Rei and his party hurried deeper inside.
Eventually, a massive door came into view—much like the one they had encountered at their previous location.
However, there was a clear difference.
The door was noticeably warped.
And above all, it was shaking violently, as if something were ramming into it from within.
"As I suspected, your prediction was correct, Rei."
"Well, it's far more intense than I'd anticipated."
Even if the Giants were rampaging, Rei had held out a hopeful observation that without soldiers present—just as they had witnessed earlier—it might not escalate into such a major incident.
But judging by what they saw now, there was no mistaking that Giants were raging on the other side of that door.
If they were fighting among themselves, that would be one thing. But...
(Even if they've gone berserk, if they have no prey to eat in there and come bursting out to hunt, that'd be a real problem.)
The earlier carnage had made it painfully clear that Giants ate people.
The real question was whether Giants would eat other Giants.
Honestly, Rei would have preferred them to devour each other.
Even the door's shaking could be explained if it were merely the byproduct of them slaughtering one another.
But if the Giants weren't turning on each other—if anything, they were cooperating to break out, and that collective force was what was shaking the door—then it meant over a thousand Giants were swarming on the other side.
And given that they had been eating soldiers alive, they were in a hungry state, if not outright starving.
"The real problem is whether they'll ignore us the second that door opens and make a break for the exit."
"...I see. In that case, wouldn't it have been better to bring Marina along?"
Vihera's remark came as she seemed to be mentally savoring the prospect of her prey on the other side. Rei considered it for a moment.
She wasn't wrong.
If Marina were here, she could have used Earth Spirit Magic to raise walls or otherwise barricade the Giants and halt their advance.
She could even have reinforced the door to keep it shut and prevent them from escaping altogether.
If that were possible, they might have simply waited for the Giants to starve to death.
(No, with their strength, if the door wouldn't open, they'd probably just dig through the walls themselves. ...They might even collapse the ceiling. Sealing them in is a poor strategy.)
Caving in the cave was something Rei wanted to avoid at all costs.
Even if it were possible to collapse only the chamber where the Giants were contained, such precision was unrealistic.
He briefly entertained the idea that Marina's Spirit Magic might manage it, but he ultimately judged it impossible.
"It would've been nice to have Marina. But then I would've had to leave you behind to keep those people in check, Vihera. And Elena is here as the Noble's Faction representative—she needs to witness what happens here."
"Well then, shall we get to the other side of that door?"
Rei smiled wryly at Vihera's words, her attitude shifting without a moment's hesitation.
At that thoroughly Vihera-like demeanor, Rei thought to himself that she was just being her usual self, and his gaze returned to the door.
The door was warped from the impact of being struck from inside.
And warped meant that even if they wanted to open it, they couldn't.
(I'd think Giants would at least have enough intelligence to open a door... Ah, but if this was built to house Giants, it's possible the structure was designed so it couldn't be opened from the inside, just as a precaution.)
Muttering as he stared at the door, Rei weighed his options.
No—the decision to annihilate the Giants was already settled. The question was how specifically to go about it.
"Judging by the state of that door, there's no doubt a huge number of Giants are pressed up against it."
"Probably. In that case, I can handle it, you know?"
The one who said that with a confident smile was, naturally, Vihera.
"What exactly are you going to do? I was planning to use the Twilight Spear, myself."
Rei was confident that a single throw of the Twilight Spear would easily punch through a door of that caliber.
From the Giants' perspective on the other side, the Twilight Spear would suddenly come flying through the very door they'd been battering.
They'd never see it coming, and while it would punch a hole in the door, it would only be as large as the spear itself.
Given that, it obviously wouldn't destroy the door in a single throw—and the Twilight Spear had the handy feature of returning to his hand at his command.
That meant the Giants would be subjected to a one-sided barrage until the door was finally destroyed.
...Of course, with around a thousand enemies, it would amount to little more than a drop in the ocean.
Even so—just as the saying went that a journey of a thousand miles began with a single step—Rei had been thinking they needed to whittle the enemy down gradually. That was why he couldn't quite grasp what Vihera was suggesting.
"You can really do something about it?"
"That's right. Before you use the Twilight Spear, I can take down a fair number of them in advance."
With that, Vihera stepped toward the door without waiting for Rei's response.
Her attitude practically screamed that no matter what he said, she was going to do what needed doing.
Rei withdrew the Twilight Spear from his Misty Ring but said nothing further, choosing instead to silently watch what Vihera would do.
Elena and Byune likewise observed her in silence.
Vihera had a disposition that thrived on combat, but in terms of sheer fighting ability, she was undeniably first-class—no, super-first-class wouldn't be an overstatement.
("What one likes, one will do well." That phrase was practically made for Vihera.)
Beneath Rei's gaze, Vihera placed her hand against the door without the slightest hint of tension.
Even as the door shuddered violently from the impacts battering it from within, Vihera didn't seem bothered in the least.
The light Magic Items mounted around the door had already been knocked to the ground by the concussions from inside.
Miraculously, they hadn't shattered, and they continued to cast steady illumination across the area.
Vihera, clad in garments as sheer as a Dancer's or a Prostitutes's, was lit from below—and the shifted lighting gave those around her a glimpse of a side to her that was somehow different from her usual appearance.
Ethereal—that would be one way to put it.
The fact that simply moving the light source could transform her presence so dramatically came as a genuine surprise to Elena and Byune.
...Rei alone had once seen a pole dance scene in a movie or something of that sort, where the lighting had shone from below in a similar fashion. So while he found his eyes drawn to Vihera in this moment, it didn't render him utterly speechless.
Her hand resting against the shuddering door, Vihera—without a trace of tension—let out a sharp exhale alongside her voice.
"Hah!"
Thud.
The sound rang out through the surroundings in tandem with her cry.
A dull impact, like a slab of meat being struck with a club.
Then, from the other side of the door: the scream of a Giant, followed by the heavy thud of something collapsing.
"Magic Impact Palm could do that as well?"
Elena murmured with genuine admiration.
Magic Impact Palm was a technique that channeled magical power to deliver an impact directly into the target's body.
Everyone present knew just how devastating it could be.
But to transmit that force through the door and still deal damage on the other side—that was clearly unexpected.
Perhaps catching that startled murmur, Vihera pressed her hand to the door once more and flashed a bewitching smile toward Elena and the others.
Seeing Elena's astonished expression, she nodded in satisfaction and unleashed another Magic Impact Palm with a sharp exhale.
Each strike was followed by the sound of a Giant that had been pressed against the door being cut down, or the thud of its body crashing against the door as it fell.
Smiling once more, Vihera repeated the process several times over.
After a few minutes—or perhaps closer to ten—Elena suddenly spoke up.
"What could the Giants possibly be thinking? They should be capable of understanding that touching the door brings them harm."
"Who knows. Whether they truly grasp that touching the door alone is what's causing them to be attacked is a fine question. Did the Giants rampaging and devouring soldiers look like they were thinking anything at all? If anything, I'd say it's precisely because they lose the capacity for such reasoning that we call it a rampage."
"...So even while berserk, they don't wonder why their companions are falling? They just don't care?"
"Probably. You've been on countless battlefields yourself, haven't you, Elena? Then even if not to the same degree as Giants, you must have seen people go berserk before, haven't you?"
At Rei's words, Elena seemed to recall something and nodded.
But when she looked back at the door, she spoke again.
"What Vihera is doing is remarkable, but at this rate, won't the door give way?"
"Probably so."
The rampaging Giants showed no sign of relenting in their assault on the door, behaving as though their fallen companions meant absolutely nothing to them.
No—if anything, the sight of their allies collapsing only seemed to fuel their frenzy, and the blows against the door grew increasingly savage.
The door was already thoroughly warped, reduced to a state where it looked like it could blow off at any second.
But Vihera, acting as though that were of no concern whatsoever, kept felling Giants on the other side through the door with Magic Impact Palm—over and over and over.
The Magic Impact Palms fired in rapid succession had already approached a hundred in count.
Vihera had likely never unleashed that many in a row before.
Where she had been smiling with bewitching confidence just moments ago, she was now breathing slightly harder.
That she could still move freely was a testament to her monstrous stamina.
Not that she'd appreciate being called monstrous, of course.
"Phew... How was that?"
"Yeah, that's plenty. Come on back. Staying there any longer is going to get dangerous in more ways than one."
The door was warped from the Giants' onslaught and could give way at any moment.
The door itself hadn't been breached, but the cave wall housing it was now on the verge of collapsing.
Rei figured it might only be a few more minutes—perhaps even less—before the door was ripped out entirely, frame and all.
That was why he called Vihera back.
She, too, must have understood the door's condition perfectly.
She looked back and forth between the door and Rei... and through the gap created by its warping, she caught a faint glimpse of a Giant's face, twisted in a mindless frenzy. Looking slightly disappointed, she nevertheless returned obediently to Rei's side.
What Vihera really wanted was to fight the Giants firsthand—ones even more berserk than those they'd fought before, driven to a state better described as frenzy than rampage by gnawing hunger.
Even so, she'd complied with Rei's order because she instinctively sensed that doing so would lead to something far more interesting.
Returning to Rei's side with a light step that belied her shortness of breath—a stride so airy it could easily be mistaken for a skip—Vihera smiled and spoke.
"So? What's the plan? The Twilight Spear, I assume?"
"That's right. That door is going to give way before long anyway."
"...It will. If they were a bit more docile, we could have thinned their numbers further."
"Do you have any idea roughly how many you took down?"
As Rei readied the Twilight Spear, Vihera thought for a moment, then shook her head.
"It was through the door, so I couldn't really tell how much damage each strike actually dealt. But even so, I'd say a significant number took fatal blows."
Unlike a direct attack, there was an intermediary—the door—cushioning each strike this time.
That was likely why even Vihera couldn't gauge exactly how much damage she'd inflicted.
Vihera began mulling over whether she should incorporate indirect-attack training into her combat regimen.
...Had Rei known that, he would have certainly quipped about whether she was blazing a trail as an assassin rather than a warrior.
In any case, Rei nodded at Vihera's assessment, readied the Twilight Spear, and in the next instant, took a few running steps and hurled it at the door.