Chapter 77: The Witch Gets Angry

Mana exploded.

The stone slabs beneath Kargas's feet ripped free from the floor, thrown upward by the shockwave. Debris scattered in every direction.

He swung his right fist. The gauntlet, flooded with mana, had swollen to nearly double its original size. Every spike stood erect. The whole mass descended toward the Witch like a falling meteor, carrying enough kinetic force to flatten a watchtower.

Another collision.

This time—the sword tip.

The Witch thrust the western sword forward in a flat line, blade tip contacting the dead center of Kargas's gauntlet. A slender tip against a massive metal fist. By any normal logic, the sword should have shattered. Instead, it was Kargas who got flung.

The instant steel met steel, his punch lost all momentum.

It was as if something had simply stolen the power from his fist. Crimson mana drained from the gauntlet. Then his entire body launched backward, back slamming into the stone wall hard enough to spider-web the surface with cracks.

The Witch withdrew the sword. Blade angled toward the floor. Her hem swayed once and went still.

Kargas peeled himself off the wall. A thin line of blood traced his chin. He stared at the woman across from him, and somewhere from the depths of his brain, a ridiculous thought surfaced.

Forcing a peak Mithril-rank fighter into absolute helplessness. Pushing basic swordsmanship to levels that defied common sense. Standing unmoved through his full-power eruption. In the entire capital, setting aside Estella, he genuinely couldn't think of a second candidate.

"Your real identity." Kargas dragged the back of his hand across the blood at the corner of his mouth. "Who are you?"

The Witch paused.

She thought about it.

Uriel had taught her. In moments like this, the correct response was to announce her identity first.

She ran through the lines Uriel had written for her, confirmed she had them memorized, then raised her eyes.

A faint, cold smile surfaced on a face that had shown nothing until now.

"We are the Witch Brigade. We travel wherever fate leads us. Any evil we encounter shall be brought to justice."

Each word landed with clean, unhurried weight.

Both people in the corridor heard it clearly.

Seraphina murmured "Witch Brigade" under her breath, reaching into her considerable noble education for any record of an organization by that name. She came up empty. Her shoulders began trembling slightly. This woman had just spent the last several minutes crushing a near-Orichalcum fighter without breaking a sweat—and then she opened her mouth and said that.

The problem was the contradiction.

This woman had just crushed a monster-level fighter without breaking a sweat.

And then she introduced herself with the most embarrassing line Seraphina had ever heard.

Seraphina didn't know which part was harder to believe.

Kargas had no interest in critiquing the literary merit of the speech. He looked down at his gauntleted hand. The metal surface was fracturing. He'd pushed too much mana into it, exceeding its structural tolerance. Cracks spread from the knuckles across the fist face like a dried riverbed. He kept forcing mana in. The gauntlet had stopped accepting it.

He threw his last scrap of restraint into the fire alongside everything else.

"Witch Brigade, whatever." He reached into the leather pouch at his hip and wrenched out a syringe. "I haven't lost yet."

The syringe. Barrel slightly larger than standard. The liquid inside was a deep, murky violet, catching the dim light with an oily, inauspicious shimmer.

Seraphina's pupils snapped tight. She recognized it.

That drug.

The administrator had injected her with it.

The researcher had become that thing because of it.

"That's—" She shoved herself off the wall. The calm shell she'd maintained cracked open in her voice. "He's injecting what they used on me. It turns people into—into those things. Don't let him use it!"

Kargas drove the needle into the side of his neck.

His thumb pressed the plunger down. The violet liquid emptied in seconds. The syringe slipped from his fingers and shattered on the floor.

There it is. That feeling. Bones expanding. Muscles tearing and reknitting. Every breath tasted like iron pulled up from somewhere deep in his throat.

His upper body began to inflate.

His bones expanded. His muscles twisted and grew at the same time. Shoulder blades spread outward. Collarbone thickened. Pectoral and back muscles tore through his uniform. Blue-black veins crawled across his skin. His arms gained a full size. His fists grew to match the gauntlets he'd just destroyed, metal fragments pinging off the floor as the steel split open.

His lower body barely changed.

Thighs and calves stayed at their original dimensions. Below the waist remained the same size while everything above had doubled. The proportion was grotesque. When he stood, his body tilted forward, center of mass wavering before settling.

But there was nothing funny about the deformity.

He swung his right arm once, casually.

The wall where the fist wind swept through exploded into a half-meter gash. Chunks of stone sailed down the corridor for dozens of meters.

He didn't need the gauntlets anymore. His fists were the weapon now.

"The strongest—" Kargas's voice had stopped sounding human. Animal resonance surged up from somewhere below his chest. "Right now—I am the strongest—!"

Those two words hit the air.

And something in the Witch's expression shifted.

For the first time, something else surfaced—something closer to pure displeasure. The kind of expression that appears when someone says something deeply incorrect in your presence. Something that needs to be corrected.

The strongest.

That title didn't belong to him.

That title was meant for Uriel. Her precious child. The boy she treasured above anyone else. The one person in her life most deserving of every good thing, most worthy of being called the strongest. No one else could claim it.

---

Kargas charged.

His posture had become ungainly—upper body too heavy—but his speed had increased. Center of gravity pitched forward. Every step detonated the stone beneath him. The whole mass of him moved like a comet with a grudge.

He swung his right fist. The crimson mana packed into that enormous hand had thickened until it was nearly black. One punch landed, and the force tore through the entire underground corridor.

The Witch stood where she was.

She raised the western sword to meet it. No mana on the blade. The mana crystal in the hilt remained inert. She simply lifted the sword, aimed the tip at his fist, and pushed forward—gently.

A low, dense thud swallowed the corridor whole. Smoke billowed.

When the dust thinned, the man who had been screaming about being the strongest moments ago—Kargas, the grotesque monster who had torn through stone walls with a casual backswing—was on his knees.

Both oversized fists planted against the shattered floor. Knuckles driven into the cracked stone. His arms shook with the constant tremor of something fighting a force it had no answer for. The pressure simply didn't allow him to raise his head.

The Holy Sword Witch stood before him.

She slid the sword back into its scabbard. She didn't even want to use it anymore.

She raised her arm. Five fingers pressed together. Palm angled slightly down. A knife-hand strike fell onto Kargas's shoulder.

BOOM.

The entire underground corridor dropped half an inch.

Kargas's body drove into the fractured rock. All that inflated muscle tissue crumpled under one open-handed chop like it had been papier-mâché the whole time.

He leveraged his monster regeneration, forced himself upright, and rasped, "I can do this all day."

A whip kick answered him.

It snapped both arms he'd raised to guard his chest, then her body pivoted and a second kick drove into his flank, launching him sideways into the wall a dozen meters down the corridor.

---

The Witch didn't pursue.

She stood where she was and looked at the back of her hand. A small smudge of grit on her knuckle. She frowned. Looked down at the dress. Produced a handkerchief, cleaned her hand, then gave the skirt a careful once-over, smoothing out any possible contamination.

Then she started walking toward Kargas. Unhurried. Her heels struck a clean, measured rhythm against the shattered stone.

Her gaze had gone cold—colder than when she'd walked in.

She thought about Seraphina.

That girl. Uriel's girlfriend. She treated Uriel well. She was lovely. More importantly—anyone Uriel cared for was someone she protected. That was simply the rule.

This man had hit her. One punch that sent the girl rolling across the ground, crashing into a wall, coughing blood.

Then she thought about the knight order. This man wore their armor.

The knight order had held Uriel for three days. Three days on a hard chair, three days of bland mashed potatoes, his hair greasy. Dark circles hung under his eyes. The memory of his exhausted, locked-up shoulders—shoulders her thumbs could barely massage loose—made her own fingers tremble with grief.

Her fingers had been trembling the whole time she massaged his shoulders. From the grief of it.

The frame-up had his name on it. The interrogation had his name on it. Even if this specific man wasn't directly responsible, the institution was—and he wore the institution's armor.

And then he had called himself the strongest.

The golden light in her eyes, usually suppressed beneath the silver illusion, began to bleed through. She wasn't just annoyed anymore. She was furious.