Leaping off Set's back, Rei plummeted straight toward a Dragonias battling a Centaur, carried by his own momentum.
He had aimed for the spot where the Centaur side was at a disadvantage.
Normally, when Rei jumped from the air, he would use his Sleipnir boots to slow his descent. This time, however, Set had not been flying that high—and catching the Dragonias off guard was part of the plan—so he let himself fall without braking.
Pulling off such a maneuver was only possible because of Rei's physical abilities. An ordinary human falling from this height would likely have died.
As he dropped through the air, he channeled magical power into Death Scythe and brought the blade crashing down on the Dragonias in a single overhead sweep.
Combined with the speed of his fall, the blow cleaved the Dragonias from the crown of its head downward, splitting it clean in two.
...That said, while the Dragonias's upper body was humanoid, its lower half was lizard-like. Rei couldn't cut through the entire lower body—only the front portion was severed, and the rest collapsed to the ground.
The Centaurs who had been fighting that Dragonias couldn't comprehend what had just happened. They could only stare at Rei, who had appeared before them, in blank astonishment.
The Dragonias had scales that Centaur spears couldn't pierce even with a direct hit. Yet the man standing before them had sliced through one with ease—scales and all.
It was a sight they could scarcely believe. But looking at the Dragonias corpse lying right in front of them, it was clear that what they had witnessed was neither a dream nor an illusion.
"You all should fall back and get your wounds treated," Rei told them.
Since he had charged into the most dangerous spot, some of the Centaurs before him had sustained severe injuries. One had his abdominal flesh torn away, leaving his internal organs visible. Others had arm bones shattered by the Dragonias's monstrous strength, and some had been struck in the face so hard their eyeballs had been crushed.
The missing eyeball—had the Dragonias eaten it?
A thought briefly crossed his mind about a certain warrior who had plucked out his own arrow-pierced eyeball and eaten it. He recalled that from his time in Japan but immediately pushed it aside—now was not the time for such distractions.
I have potions and the like, but would Elgin's potions even work in this world? Or rather, would using them cause any adverse effects?
He wanted to hand some over, but with those concerns in mind, he couldn't do so carelessly.
For the time being, he told the wounded to fall back, then scanned for his next target.
Some of those ordered to retreat looked dissatisfied, but apparently recognizing that they would only be a burden in their current state, they reluctantly obeyed.
Rei glanced at those Centaurs, then surveyed the area for the next danger zone—and spotted Set sending an enemy flying with a strike of its front leg.
Set normally fought emphasizing the raw power of single strikes, and its claws were more than formidable. As if to prove the point, the red scales that Centaur spears, longswords, and arrows couldn't even scratch were effortlessly torn apart by Set's front leg blow.
The Dragonias blown away by that strike managed to stagger upright on six trembling legs. But even after rising, the next moment it was sent flying once again by another strike from Set.
In terms of size, there wasn't much difference between Set and the Dragonias. In terms of weight, the Dragonias was probably heavier. Yet even with that degree of difference in build, Set's strike was more than enough to deal fatal damage—and in the next instant, the Dragonias's head was effortlessly crushed beneath Set's front leg.
"Set's doing great out there. Can't let him show me up," Rei muttered.
He sought his next enemy and spotted a group of Centaurs struggling some distance away. They had the Dragonias outnumbered, but even so, a single blow from the creature was devastating. Several Centaurs had already been wounded, diminishing their combat power and gradually forcing them onto the back foot.
"But there's no way I'd let that happen so easily!"
After a short running start, he hurled the Twilight Spear he had drawn from his Misty Ring.
The spear shot forward in a dead straight line, slicing through the air, and in the next instant pierced clean through the Dragonias's chest.
Come to think of it, this is a belated question, but... where exactly is a Dragonias's heart?
Was it in the humanoid upper body, or in the lizard-like lower half? Logically, it would be in the humanoid torso. But this was another world, and the opponent was an unknown species called Dragonias. Whether its heart sat in the humanoid left chest was, at best, an open question.
Even so, the Dragonias whose humanoid chest had been pierced crumpled to the ground.
The Centaurs who had been fighting it were startled by the creature suddenly dropping, but gave it a few more jabs with their weapons just to be sure. When it still didn't move, they apparently accepted that it was dead. They glanced toward Rei, but quickly remembered themselves and rushed off to support comrades engaged with another Dragonias.
Rei watched them go as he recalled the Twilight Spear to his hand.
"Now then... next is over there."
His gaze settled on a Centaur who had been blown back with a deep gash on his arm from a Dragonias strike. Rei kicked off the ground and moved.
He closed the distance in the blink of an eye, but as luck would have it, the Centaur lunged forward to attack the Dragonias right into Rei's path.
"Whoa—!"
Rei twisted midair and leaped diagonally, forcibly rerouting his trajectory.
"Gah—!"
The Centaur, clearly not expecting anyone to come flying from behind him, let out a startled yelp and was a beat slow to react.
For the Dragonias about to attack, that was all the opening it needed. Using its lizard lower body, it surged forward and raised its claws to strike—
"You think I'd let you?"
Though Rei was caught in something resembling a half-finished Triangle Jump, he used that very momentum to close the gap with the Dragonias and swung Death Scythe.
The blade sheared through scales and flesh alike, and the Dragonias's upper body went flying—severed clean from the waist. It looked as though the creature had no idea what had just happened. The lower half stumbled forward a few steps on sheer momentum before collapsing.
"You're..."
The Centaur who had been overtaken stared at Rei, eyes wide with surprise. It was one of Dratt's Flunkies.
Perhaps unable to believe he had just been saved by Rei, he shot him a questioning glance—Why did you help me?
That said, Rei wasn't sure what to do with that look. He hadn't acted solely to save the man in front of him; he was simply intervening wherever the battle against the Dragonias was most dangerous.
"Right now, just focus on bringing down the Dragonias. Save your pointless pride for later."
For Centaurs who placed such value on pride, those words were unforgivable. But having just been saved, the Flunky couldn't voice any complaint. In the end, he gave Rei a reluctant nod, then rallied his comrades and set off to support the others.
The number of Dragonias Rei had personally taken down wasn't particularly high, and the same went for Set. But with a certain number of Centaurs now freed from their fights, the tide of battle was unmistakably shifting in their favor.
Given the small number of Dragonias to begin with, even Rei and Set felling a handful of them constituted a massive proportional loss for the enemy.
If the combined combat power of both sides were set at one hundred, the Centaur side fielded roughly three hundred against about thirty Dragonias—ten to one per individual. Under those circumstances, with Rei and Set cutting down Dragonias one after another, there was no question that the enemy's fighting strength was plummeting. And with Rei and Set now in the fray, that gap would only widen as the battle dragged on.
"In any case, reducing their numbers is the top priority."
Every Dragonias eliminated tipped the scales further in the Centaurs' favor. At the same time, showcasing Rei and Set's power here would elevate Rei's standing among a people who prized strength above all else. At the very least, a sufficient display of power should ensure that no one like Dratt would try picking a fight with him again.
Scanning for his next target, Rei settled on a Dragonias some distance away.
Both Centaurs and Dragonias were highly mobile. When such agile fighters clashed and scattered across the field, the battlefield naturally expanded as time passed. The red-scaled Dragonias that had broken through Rei's magic weren't fighting in coordinated packs; each one operated as an individual. Which was precisely why the Centaurs were managing to hold their own—an undeniable fact.
All the same, with the battle spreading ever wider, Rei needed to carefully pick which enemy to take down next. If the Centaurs were winning in one area, he would leave them to it. What he needed to target was where they were taking the heaviest losses.
By that logic, the area he was now heading toward was extremely dangerous. A Dragonias had seized a Centaur and was about to sink its teeth into her head—no, tear it clean off.
"You think I'd let you!"
Sprinting across the ground—faster than even a Centaur could run—Rei hurled the Twilight Spear. The weapon flew straight and true at a speed that would normally be impossible to track, and in the next instant it crushed the skull of the Dragonias that had been about to tear off the Centaur's head.
But that wasn't all. Charged with Rei's magical power, the Twilight Spear continued on its trajectory and shattered half the head of a second Dragonias that happened to be standing in its path.
It should have obliterated the second head entirely; the fact that it only got halfway meant the spear had struck bone or something equally hard when crushing the first Dragonias's skull, deflecting its course.
They really are tough. I thought the same when cutting through them with Death Scythe.
Death Scythe and the Twilight Spear were both exceptional weapons as Magic Items go. But even among peerless weapons, there was an unavoidable gap in class between Death Scythe—forged from Rei's own vast reserves of magical power—and the Twilight Spear, crafted from an assortment of Magic Items and rare materials. Because of that, a Dragonias head that Death Scythe could sever with ease might, when struck by the Twilight Spear, be hard enough to deflect its trajectory.
"You're unharmed, I take it?"
"Huh? Y-yes. Um... thank you..."
The female Centaur, still reeling from the abrupt death of the creature that had been about to crush her skull, stammered out her gratitude to the man who had saved her. Even so, a faint tremor of awe bled through her words—she had seen Rei's magic with her own eyes.
The inferno he had conjured had annihilated the bulk of the Dragonias force. She didn't know the exact count, but everything except the roughly thirty that had broken through his spell had been reduced to ash. Understanding that the person standing before her was the one responsible, awe crept unbidden into her voice.
"If you're in one piece, go help the others still fighting. I'll keep crashing into the danger zones."
Recalling the Twilight Spear to his hand, he waved the female Centaur off. After confirming she had nodded, he surveyed the area for his next target—and an unexpected sight caught his eye.
A Dragonias noticeably larger than the rest, thickly muscled, its eyes burning with nothing but raw hunger as it fought. Its opponent, apparently having judged this creature to be far deadlier than the others, was a group of eight Centaurs.
But what surprised Rei wasn't the massive Dragonias itself. It was that among those eight Centaurs stood both Zai and Dratt. What was more, through seamless coordination, they were pressing the advantage against the beast.
"Well, would you look at that..."
Startled as he was by the sight, Rei decided Zai and Dratt could handle themselves just fine, and turned to hunt for his next prey.