It had taken less than ten minutes from the time Rei started fighting until every soldier inside the cave—and those waiting outside, unable to fit in—was wiped out.
A few soldiers had sensed the danger and fled, but Rei let them go, deciding there was no need to pursue.
Among the soldiers, many were dead, but others had a limb severed and could no longer fight.
There were also plenty who had lost consciousness and collapsed, knocked out not by Rei but by Byune's attacks.
The nation's objective—slaughter everyone in this cave and erase the evidence of Reblurina's atrocities—had been reduced to ashes.
"...So even if you deal with Jaya's people in this cave now, the government must have known there were Giants here, right? What did they intend to do with that many Giants?"
Rei posed the question to one of the soldiers.
This soldier had been the first to figure out Rei's identity when he appeared on the battlefield.
Rei figured the man probably knew a thing or two, which was why, when Death Scythe struck him, Rei had used the pommel instead of the blade to knock him out. A lucky soldier.
That is, if being deemed a potential information source by Rei counted as luck.
"Th-that's..."
The soldier, still seated, tried to scramble backward, desperate to put distance between himself and Rei.
Perhaps because he'd been brought out from inside the cave, the summer air combined with his nerves caused sweat to bead on his face.
As he frantically tried to get away from Rei, the cold feel of the soil against his palms was the only thing keeping his mind anchored.
If not for the grounding sensation of the earth and the sharp sting of small stones digging into his hands, the soldier might well have lost his mind from the sheer alienness of Rei's presence.
Being well-informed, this soldier knew about Rei. ...Or rather, he had merely known of him.
For instance, he'd heard the reports that Rei had single-handedly annihilated an entire army.
But knowing that in the abstract versus witnessing it firsthand—only now did he truly understand what it meant.
On top of that, Rei showed not even a hint of being winded after facing hundreds of soldiers.
Of course, Rei hadn't killed every soldier who came to this forest himself.
Before Rei's group arrived, Ryutas and his guards had fought hard and taken down a significant number. Byune, too, had dispatched many with weapons like Hakumo and her Long Needles.
Some soldiers had even fled when they realized they were no match for them.
Even so... there was no denying that the majority of the soldiers had fallen by Rei's hand.
This soldier, deliberately kept alive for information, had some confidence in his own abilities.
But "some" was exactly that—just a little. Standing before a true monster like Rei, all he could do was cower in fear.
He'd thought himself a predator, one of the hunters. Seeing Rei's strength up close forced him to realize that was nothing but arrogance.
As if to set the soldier at ease, Rei spoke up.
"You're an important source of information. I have no intention of killing you, so relax."
Rei had meant to calm the soldier down and get information out of him, but upon hearing this, the man's face twitched.
To the soldier, being spared because he was an information source meant that once Rei got what he wanted and he was no longer useful, he'd be killed.
Under normal circumstances, he wouldn't have read that deeply into it.
But this soldier had just witnessed Rei's combat up close.
Knowing that, nothing Rei did would seem off the table.
"Hic—hiiii... p-please help me... I'll tell you anything I know! Just spare my life!"
Desperate to cling to whatever mercy Rei might offer, the soldier screamed.
His body was smeared with his comrades' blood, large patches of his uniform stained red.
Despite that, there were no visible wounds anywhere on his face or limbs.
"Ah... it's fine. I won't kill you. I promise. So can you just calmly tell me what you know?"
Rei felt genuinely glad he'd stored Death Scythe and the Twilight Spear in his Misty Ring.
It was easy to imagine that if he'd been holding his weapons in the current situation, the soldier before him would have been far too terrified to speak.
...Though to be fair, for the soldier, it wasn't about the weapons. Just Rei being there was enough to send him into sheer terror.
"Alright, alright, Rei, step back for a moment. Look, he's terrified. As things are, we won't get any information out of him."
With those words, Rei was pulled back.
And in his place, stepping forward to stand before the soldier, was Ryutas.
Before Rei arrived, Ryutas had been in a desperate life-or-death situation, gasping for air from an unfamiliar kind of combat. ...But now, his breathing was already steady.
While stronger than the soldiers in terms of raw ability, fighting a real battle—especially a handful of people against hundreds—had clearly placed an enormous weight on him.
With the battle over, he now intended to get information from the soldier in Rei's place. That was what he'd decided and what he was acting on.
It was a move born precisely from his awareness that he'd been next to useless in the fight.
"Please don't worry. Rei may look like that, but he doesn't raise his blade against those who are friendly toward him."
As always... no, making a conscious effort to calm the soldier, Ryutas offered an even softer smile than usual.
Putting on a gentle front, wearing a mask... for a man like Ryutas, that came easily.
In fact, this was more his true forte than the combat skill he'd displayed moments ago.
Sure enough, seeing that smile full of almost maternal warmth, the soldier's demeanor noticeably steadied.
"Ah... yeah. Okay. Understood."
Seeing the soldier's speech go from half-panicked stammering to clear and articulate, Rei felt genuine admiration.
(Impressive.)
Watching Ryutas casually pull off something he could never do himself, Rei glanced down at his own hands for no particular reason.
At the very least, if asked whether he could do what Ryutas was doing right now, the answer would be no.
Of course, when dealing with someone who hadn't just seen his fighting up close, he could manage something similar.
Thanks to his slight build and the kind of face people might call feminine, Rei's appearance went a long way toward keeping people off guard.
...Though if someone could read his true nature beneath that exterior, it would be a different story.
"So then, I'd like you to calmly tell us what you know. Oh, and you can relax. Just like Rei said earlier, once we're done, we'll let you go."
"R-really? You'll really let me go? I can assume you won't kill me once I'm no longer useful!?"
The soldier's shout echoed through the forest.
Amidst the sound of wind rustling the leaves and the distant calls of birds and animals, Rei watched the soldier with a thoroughly exasperated expression, the admiration he'd felt moments ago already gone.
They'd come to kill everyone in this cave, yet the moment the tables turned and they became the prey, they squirmed and pleaded.
From Rei's perspective, it was a pathetic sight.
Still, they were soldiers. Following orders from above was only natural. Keeping that in mind, he supposed it wasn't entirely incomprehensible. He told himself as much and tuned in to Ryutas's conversation with the soldier.
...As if to comfort Rei, Ielo, who had been cradled in Byune's arms, took flight and landed on his right shoulder.
Ielo's consideration? he wondered for a moment, but immediately turned his attention back to the soldier. Right now, information mattered more.
"What we were ordered was that everyone in this forest is a criminal, so we were to kill them all without question. We were also told not to let a single one escape."
"Hmm. Quite thorough."
Rei agreed with Ryutas's murmur.
(If the order was to kill everyone, that means Jaya's people were to be slaughtered too, right? But Jaya was more or less an organization backed by Reblurina's upper echelons. If this is the order they were given... does that mean the upper echelons decided to cut Jaya loose?)
Rei had already heard about the national army's attack from Ryutas's guard, who had come to request reinforcements. He'd expected as much the moment he arrived and combat began.
But that was only speculation. Now he was hearing it confirmed straight from a soldier's mouth.
"Inside this cave, there's something you might call Jaya's secret weapon. Did you hear anything about that?"
"Secret weapon? No, unfortunately I don't know anything about that. Someone higher up might have known, but..."
Trailing off, the soldier scanned his surroundings.
What lay spread out before him were corpses, corpses, and more corpses.
If the bodies weren't cleared soon, the summer heat would ensure decomposition set in without fail.
But the bigger question was: who would clean up this many bodies?
A few had managed to escape, but only a handful.
There were also a fair number who were gravely wounded but still alive.
Even so, the dead numbered in the hundreds.
That was far too many to deal with as an afterthought.
Before the Giants went berserk, they could have been made to dispose of the bodies.
But with the Black Crystal destroyed, that was no longer an option.
In fact, it was all but certain that the Giants themselves would be wiped out by Rei's group.
Which meant someone else would have to handle the cleanup.
(Honestly, having Reblurina—the country that caused all this—deal with it would be the best option.)
Telling a nation that had suffered heavy losses to clean up the mess would be humiliating for them.
But circumstances demanded it.
This forest wasn't far from places like Mejougo and Rossi.
Leaving corpses in a place like that would almost certainly result in undead.
A country where the undead wandered right next to its capital.
If neighboring nations caught wind of that, it would be a massive embarrassment.
Given how proud Reblurina's upper echelons were, there was no way they'd tolerate it.
"So the only objective was to slaughter everyone in this forest?"
"I think so."
"...What about the cave? Did they say anything about that?"
After a moment's thought, Ryutas asked the soldier.
If the order was to kill everyone in the cave, they would naturally need to send people to the area where the Giants were kept.
That meant they would inevitably encounter the Giants.
Given the soldiers' abilities, the gap in combat power between them and the Giants would be overwhelming.
On top of that, there were hundreds of soldiers, but over a thousand Giants.
If those two forces clashed, the outcome didn't even bear thinking about.
"No, nothing. Like I said, only my superior would have known the details..."
Once again, the soldier looked at the ground—then toward a corpse lying a short distance from where he was.
That corpse was wearing slightly... truly only slightly better equipment than the other soldiers. It was probably the superior the soldier kept mentioning.
Given that its head had been severed, it was hard to imagine it was still alive.
"Ah... sorry. Should've kept him alive a bit longer."
"Hic—n-no... that's... f-fine. I was allowed to survive, so..."
When Rei spoke, the soldier could only stammer his reply in visible fear.
Rei had probably become a full-blown trauma for the man.
...It was understandable. Reblurina's soldiers had plenty of training, but surprisingly few had any real combat experience.
For a soldier with so little real-world experience to witness Rei's fighting—someone who knew true battlefields and had survived countless fights—it was too much. And he'd seen it from the losing side.
It would have been stranger if it didn't leave a trauma.
"Rei, I'll handle the questioning."
For the soldier's sake, Ryutas pushed Rei further back.
Part of it was to avoid interfering with the information gathering, but another purpose was to distance Rei and make the soldier more friendly toward himself.
Rei didn't particularly sense any deeper meaning in Ryutas's actions, but figuring the man must have some plan, he stepped back from the soldier.