As Eiji tightened his grip on the hilt of his magic sword, Relicta Inspectio activated on its own.
"Rock Bear. Physical Strength: Herculean Arms, Robust. Collectible as materials."
"Aged specimen. Master of this area."
Without him even asking for it, the words flowed straight into his head.
A rock bear, huh... Well, that's certainly on the nose.
In a corner of his tense mind, a single, foolish retort surfaced, then vanished.
What he had assumed was an ordinary boulder had the word "rock" stamped right onto it by the world itself.
An aged specimen, and the master of this area. In other words, it was a creature with so few natural enemies in this forest that it could curl up right out in the open for an afternoon nap. Those two lines of appraisal served as an immediate testament to its caliber.
Can we run...?
He weighed the thought for mere seconds before abandoning it.
If he were alone, he might have been able to outrun it with his magic wolf legs, but not with Yuna in tow. Carrying her in his arms while trying to escape the master of the forest on its home turf was next to impossible.
Behind them lay the stream; to their left and right, dense brush. The only open path was along this very bank. If they ran, it would just chase them down it.
Which meant there was only one choice: fight.
"Yuna. Get back."
"...Okay."
Releasing her grip on his sleeve, Yuna stepped back several paces upstream along the bank. She stopped near the stacked wooden plates, close by the buried remnants of their fire.
The rock bear moved.
Contrary to its massive frame, it was fast. Its thick forelegs slammed into the shallows, kicking up a wall of spray as a beast three times Eiji's mass charged straight across. With every step, the thunder of its paws through the water reverberated in his gut. He had no intention of meeting that sheer weight head-on from the start.
Before it could fully haul itself onto the bank, Eiji dashed in. Whenever a beast climbed out of the water, its posture naturally dropped.
His target was the base of its foreleg. With a blade that had severed magic wolf bone clean through, it ought to reach.
However—the blade came to a dead stop.
"...Damn, that's tough!"
The curse slipped out unbidden.
Thick fur, dense fat beneath it, and an even tougher slab of hide under that. The three layers pinched the blade tight, completely killing its momentum. It hadn't reached the bone at all—it had barely pierced the hide.
A counter-swipe from its foreleg swept in from the side. Eiji leaped back using his magic wolf legs. Without them, that single blow would have killed him on the spot.
The foreleg cleaved through empty air and slammed into the rocks along the bank. Stones shattered, scattering jagged shards and spray in all directions.
A second strike followed, this time sweeping at an angle designed to cut off his retreat.
"O holy shield, protect us—Holy Shield!"
At Yuna's call, a white membrane erected itself before Eiji. It was the same barrier that had repelled the magic wolf's charge.
The massive foreleg crashed down upon it.
However—
Shatter!
The membrane fractured right down the middle.
The shield that had easily deflected the magic wolf couldn't withstand this blow. Swept away by the residual impact, Eiji went tumbling across the stony bank.
He took the blow in his flank. His shirt tore, followed by a delayed wave of scorching heat. At the very least, a rib felt cracked.
"O holy light, pierce our enemy—Force!"
Yuna's follow-up attack cut in between the tumbling Eiji and the rock bear. A bullet of light detonated against the beast's cheek.
Yet, the rock bear didn't even flinch. Its advance didn't slow by so much as half a step.
"No way... It didn't work?"
"Not in the slightest."
"What do we do...?"
"Who knows. We'll just have to figure it out as we go."
Clutching his side as he pushed himself up, Eiji replied with deliberate lightness. Her voice had been trembling.
This was the first time Yuna had faced an enemy completely immune to her magic. If panic took hold of her, it could easily turn the battle fatal.
Eiji put some distance between them. Falling back with the power of his magic wolf legs, he easily outpaced the creature's forward charge. The pursuing behemoth gave him a few paces of leeway, and in those precious seconds, he formulated their next strategy.
Yuna's magic had no effect, and his sword couldn't land a fatal blow. A frontal breakthrough was out of the question.
Yesterday's battle flashed through his mind. That victory against the magic wolf had only been scraped together because a new skill awakened at the eleventh hour. But he couldn't bank on a miracle like that happening again.
Even so, they had to survive this somehow.
New tricks don't just pop up when you need them!
Skills didn't just fall from the sky. He had to make do with what was already at his disposal.
In his head, he laid out his assets.
The magic sword, the magic wolf legs, his storage, collection, and Yuna's magic. When laid out, all his cards were already on the table. What was missing was how he played them.
At that moment, Eiji lowered his gaze.
Not at the rock bear, but toward his feet. He searched desperately for anything broken, loose, or out of place.
In the shallows lay a half-submerged fallen log. Flotsam washed ashore, tumbled stones along the bank, and scattered dead branches. All of them had already served their purpose in nature. Which meant they were all objects Eiji had the right to touch.
This might just work.
The spot to lure it, the object to make it step on, the timing to make it vanish. In his head, three sequential steps clicked firmly into place.
"Yuna. When I give the signal, blast everything you've got right into its face."
"Its face?"
"Yeah. First, we blind it."
"Okay... Got it."
A single, brief exchange was all it took for her to understand.
There was no time to explain the fine details anyway.
"Come and get me, you overgrown bear!"
Eiji deliberately stomped with heavy footsteps as he retreated into the shallows.
He kicked stones, splashed water loudly, and turned his back as if fleeing in panic.
The rock bear took the bait. With a low growl, it wheeled around and lunged into the water, throwing up a towering wall of spray.
In the stream, even that massive frame was slightly hindered. With every stride, the stones along the riverbed clattered, slowing its footing by a fraction of a second. Meanwhile, Eiji, bolstered by his magic wolf legs, cut diagonally across the shallows. The water reached below his knees, yet his speed never wavered.
Just a step before reaching the bank, he came to an abrupt stop.
Turning around, he made sure to display a panting, exhausted expression—a deliberate act to make the beast think it had cornered its prey.
The rock bear closed in. On its way to the bank, it planted its full, crushing weight onto the half-submerged log with its front paw.
Now!
—Relicta Collectio.
The fallen log vanished without a sound. No flash of light, no hum of mana. The rock bear couldn't possibly fathom what had just occurred beneath its foot. The very foundation supporting its massive weight had simply ceased to exist.
Its foreleg clawed through empty water. With nowhere to redirect its sheer momentum, the colossal body pitched forward. A massive pillar of water erupted, and its outstretched neck dropped down near the surface of the stream.
"Yuna, now!"
At Eiji's shout, Yuna nodded with fierce determination.
"O holy flame, destroy our enemy—Saint Flare!"
A sphere of fire surged from the bank.
It wasn't Holy Flame. The fire had condensed into a dense, solid projectile, streaking straight forward. Pushed into a corner, her skill had evidently evolved to a whole new level.
The fireball slammed squarely into the lowered face, detonating right across its eyes.
The rock bear roared in agony and thrashed its head. Its forelegs scraped fruitlessly against the slippery riverbed.
"...Perfect."
Grinning, Eiji closed the distance in a single, explosive bound.
His target was the base of its neck. Over their brief clash, he had already identified where the fur was thin and the fat sparse.
Right into that exact spot, he drove the magic sword home.
A gust of wind propelled the blade. Parting the fur, rending the fat, and cleaving through the hide, the steel bit deep into the vital tissue within.
Silence descended.
At first, only the gentle babble of the stream returned to his ears.
Before he could even watch the massive carcass settle entirely into the shallows, Eiji's knees buckled. He was completely out of breath. The searing pain in his flank surged back all at once, catching up to him.
Kneeling in the shallow water, he took a moment simply to steady his ragged breathing.
"Eiji-kun!"
Splashing through the water, Yuna came running over.
"Are you okay?! Let me see your wound!"
"I-It's just a scratch, really."
"Never mind that, show me!"
Without waiting for a reply, she yanked up the hem of his torn shirt.
Across his flank stretched a nasty bruise scraped by jagged stones, oozing with blood. With every breath he took, it creaked with a dull, sickening ache from within.
All expression vanished from Yuna's face. Then, her features instantly hardened into a deep scowl.
"...You liar. Where on earth is this just a scratch?"
"Ahaha... Y-You caught me, huh? To be honest, it actually hurts like hell."
"If you lie to me again, I won't heal you next time."
"I'm sorry."
When he apologized without hesitation, Yuna let out an exasperated sigh and held both hands over the wound.
"Heal the wounds of this person... Heal."
Warm light seeped into his skin, and the grinding ache dissolved. Within a single breath, the wound was completely sealed.
Standing up, Eiji turned back toward the fallen beast in the shallows. As he approached, the appraisal text flowed into his mind once more.
"Armatura possible. Requires forelegs and shoulders."
With the magic wolf, it had consumed the entire creature, but with a frame this massive, just the forelegs and shoulders were enough.
Even if the required material remained the same, the sheer volume of leftover resources was on a whole different level.
Holding his hand over the corpse, he chanted the words.
"O lost life. Dwell within this body as power—Relicta Armatura."
A shroud of light enveloped the beast's forelegs and shoulders, dissolving them before flowing directly into Eiji. When the light receded, those specific parts had cleanly vanished.
A brand-new power surged through his veins.
With the magic wolf, it had granted the power to leap and kick. This time, it flooded his arms, back, and core. A sensation of pushing strength, supportive power, and enduring resilience layered themselves into the very foundation of his body. Just standing there, the solid earth felt completely different beneath his feet. It felt as though an unyielding pillar had been driven straight from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head.
As a test, he laid a hand on the torso of the carcass resting in the shallows. The immense mass that hadn't budged an inch earlier shifted toward the bank with a casual push of one hand. When he hooked his fingers beneath a boulder on the bank, it moved with effortless ease. As for the magic sword he picked back up, it felt as light as a feather.
"Whoa... This is incredible. It feels weightless."
Rather than lifting things, it felt as though weight itself was politely yielding to him. It was a bizarre sensation.
"Still, a Paladin like Gakuto could probably pull this off barehanded."
Eiji gave a casual shrug toward Yuna.
"Eiji-kun... That's..."
"Hm?"
"No, never mind."
Yuna started to say something, then let out a soft chuckle. She wore a fond, slightly exasperated smile.
"Hey, what is it?"
"I said it's nothing."
In the end, he couldn't figure out what she meant.
Giving up on pressing the matter, he stored the remainder of the carcass into his inventory with Relicta Collectio. Meat, pelt, claws, fangs, and fat. Beside the five magic wolves' worth of materials, a massive hoard on a completely different scale piled up.
He swapped his shredded shirt for one of the spare garments he had duplicated at noon. Making five of them had already proven to be the right call.
Slipping his arms through the sleeves, a sudden thought struck him.
"Wait, isn't bear meat dangerous if you eat it as-is?"
"Yeah. People say you have to cook it thoroughly or it's unsafe. I've also heard you need to simmer it for days to get rid of the gamey smell, but..."
"I wonder if it works the same as the magic wolf."
To test it out, he pulled a portion from his inventory, creating a small mountain of meat on the bank. Compared to a single magic wolf, the sheer volume was in a different league entirely.
Yuna rolled up her sleeves before the pile.
"For now... let me try."
Standing before the mound, Yuna held out both hands. She took a deep breath, then let it out slowly.
Her outstretched fingertips gently traced from one end of the meat to the other, carefully measuring the effective area beforehand.
"Cleanse all that is tainted—Purify."
A brilliant white light washed over the near half of the mountain.
However, it didn't finish in a single breath this time. Where one magic wolf took only a single cast, she had to segment the pile, cast, and recast.
Partway through the second cast, Yuna's chant faltered slightly, but she steadied her voice and pressed on for a third. Finally, the appraisal result flipped to "Edible."
"...It actually worked."
"Yeah. But that was pretty exhausting."
Wiping the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand, Yuna let out a long breath. Though she claimed to be tired, she clearly still had some energy to spare.
Still, this was a feat made possible only because she wasn't constantly expending mana to maintain Sanctuary. Had she been sustaining the barrier herself, she likely wouldn't have been able to use that new attack skill earlier, nor would this Purify have succeeded. If he did say so himself, that Barrier Keystone had turned out to be an incredible invention.
At any rate, dinner was about to see a massive upgrade starting tonight. Beside five magic wolves, they now had an entire rock bear. In terms of sheer rations, they wouldn't have to worry about food for quite some time.
"At this rate, maybe the soil in the field can—"
"That's way bigger... so probably not yet."
Yuna gently cut him off. An entire field was on a completely different scale compared to a mountain of meat. She had a precise grasp of how much mana she had left.
On their list of chores remained salt and the field. Neither task seemed achievable on today's expedition.
On the way back, they foraged as they walked.
Yuna gathered, and Eiji appraised. They harvested the familiar varieties they had learned on the way out until their storage was packed full. He hadn't forgotten to retrieve the wooden plates left in the shallows, either.
On the return trip, the forest was noticeably lively.
The birds had returned. It was just like on the way in... no, it was even more bustling than before.
Emerging from the grove of trees, they stepped out onto the main road. The sun was still high, though it had begun its gentle descent. The vibrant green gradually lost its luster, and grass faded to gray from the roots up reappeared. They had returned inside the contaminated zone. The desolate gray that had felt so bleak on their way out now served as a welcoming landmark for their journey home.
At the end of the road, the gateposts drew near. Resting atop the two stone pillars was the single crossbeam—the very stone the two of them had mounted that morning.
Eiji and Yuna passed through the gate side by side.
In the morning, from inside to outside. Now, from outside to inside. Though they had clearly crossed through the barrier, not a single gust of wind brushed against their skin.
Only the two of them were permitted to enter.