Chapter 70 70: “Desperate Situation, About to Experience the First Return by Death?”

The tornado still raged deep in the forest, but for reasons no one could fathom it lurched left and right without any discernible pattern — which, at the very least, had slowed its advance toward the village considerably.

Natsuki Subaru's first move was calm and deliberate: he sent Ram to organise the villagers in the name of Count Mathers and begin evacuating them toward the manor.

Then, without wasting another second, he gathered around him everyone who could hold their own in a fight and turned his mind to a plan.

Elsa. Meili. Betty. And himself.

His heart sank. Of that entire list, the only one he could honestly call his own was Betty.

As for the other two — their loyalties were unclear, but there was no harm in trying to bring them on side.

"Elsa!" Subaru raised his voice, calling out to the two sisters not far away. "I want to hire you both. The target is to slow down that Great Spirit over there — stop it reaching the village. Name your price."

"For Subaru, we'd be talking repeat business." Elsa's silhouette stood utterly unmoved in the howling gale, and she smiled as she answered. "Hiring us both — I could waive the fee for now."

"But," she went on, "you'd have to make it up to Subaru in other ways later."

"I've got a bad feeling about this — deep in my gut." Subaru bit down on his back teeth. "But I'm not exactly drowning in options right now."

He made his decision without a moment's hesitation.

"Elsa — deal."

He thrust one finger out toward the monstrous tornado churning above the distant treeline.

"I really have gone and sold my soul to the devil, haven't I. All right — time to earn it, Elsa!"

At those words, Elsa didn't move herself. Instead she reached out and gave Meili a small, unhurried pat on the top of her head.

Meili's eyes lit up instantly. She understood at once. She reached into her pocket, drew out a whistle, and blew it with a bright, cheerful energy.

— Pheeeee —

A piercing, penetrating note cut through the air.

The forest surrounding the village fell first into a strange and total silence, as if every living creature had held its breath at once.

And then the entire forest erupted.

Birds burst from the trees in great startled flocks, wheeling upward into the sky.

Subaru's expression sharpened. Deep in the undergrowth directly before him, hundreds of red lights blinked into existence.

Each one was the eye-glow of a magical beast — bloodthirsty, and powerful.

There were over a hundred of them visible from here alone, with countless more still converging.

[Stop the wind-attribute Great Spirit invading the forest!]

Meili poured every scrap of mana she had into the command and scattered it through the minds of nearly every beast at once.

The moment the order landed, the canine-type beasts — by far the most numerous — were the first to move.

Something among them acted as a leader; the ones at the front surged forward, and the rest followed without hesitation, launching a suicidal charge straight at the tornado.

The other beasts poured in behind them. Together, the two swarms merged into a single roiling dark tide of creatures.

From a distance, Subaru watched the collision — and it looked like nothing less than two natural disasters meeting head-on.

Hurricane against flood tide. The impact was staggering to behold.

But this was no real tide. The moment it struck the tornado, the wave of beasts was fed straight into a meat grinder.

The savage wind tore apart everything it touched — trees, earth, and magical beasts alike, without distinction or mercy.

Blood rained down from the sky. Where the tornado and the black tide had collided, an enormous crater yawned open in the earth, its bottom lost in darkness.

Over a thousand beasts were swallowed up and obliterated in that one terrible clash — but a portion of those who hadn't yet arrived managed to survive.

And it was thanks to the sacrifice of those beasts that the terrible tornado on the horizon at last began to slow. To weaken. And as it did, a figure became visible at its centre.

"The Wayfaring Demon — Zarestia. The most tragic of the Four Great Spirits." Betty watched the form taking shape against the sky, her voice low and weighted, as she explained the enemy's history to Subaru.

"She is not whole. The people she once trusted took an axe to her limbs, stripped her of her elemental power, and locked her away."

"So what remains is only Zarestia's head — and inside that head, a hunger for slaughter that never ceases. Not even after she killed those who betrayed her. The killing urge never stopped. It never could."

Subaru's hands balled into fists.

"Why is it always betrayal in this world? And what makes it worse is that we're the ones left to deal with the fallout."

"Wayfaring Demon… the name fits. Everywhere she passes, she leaves nothing but ruin."

Cold sweat crawled across Subaru's forehead as he stared, transfixed, at the howling wind now almost close enough to reach out and touch.

BOOM.

With a single thunderous crack, a barrage of wind blades tore through the trees and buildings before them and reduced everything to splinters.

Then, carried aloft on the trailing breeze, a figure in pure white came streaking down from the sky and landed before Subaru and the others in an instant.

Subaru took her in.

Milk-white hair. A pure white kimono. A skirt cut to mid-thigh that left her long, long legs entirely on display.

Long, sharp eyes blazed with a pale blue light — the gaze within them wild and violent and utterly unmoored.

Those eyes swept deliberately from face to face — Elsa's, the others' — and then locked onto Subaru and didn't move.

"Hee hee!"

Zarestia's lips split into a delighted grin — and then the wind screamed, and more than a dozen wind blades materialised from nothing and came slashing straight at Subaru.

"Oh my. Letting you kill my client right here would be rather inconvenient for me."

Elsa was smiling as she spoke — and she was already moving, throwing herself forward and intercepting every last wind blade before they could find their mark.

But when she raised her head again, coiled and ready to go on the offensive, she found the Wayfaring Demon's face already right beside her own.

"That speed — how is that possible—"

Elsa reacted in a fraction of a second and swung, but the blow met nothing.

Because Zarestia hadn't been aiming for her at all. She had simply used a burst of wind-attribute mana to blow straight past her — and was already driving headlong toward Subaru.

"El — Veil!"

Betty had been closest to Subaru and was already prepared. She threw up the Veil — a curtain that blinded the enemy's sight and scrambled their senses.

But it was almost hopeless. Even disrupting the attacker for a single instant was a struggle.

Zarestia simply vented her wind-attribute mana outward in a raw, savage burst, and the black fog was blown away entirely.

But the moment her vision cleared, she found more than a dozen violet crystal blades — formed from mana — already waiting in front of her face.

"…Mia!"

Betty's gaze was calm. She had known from the start that the Veil wouldn't stop this being in her tracks.

But all she had needed was one instant — one instant of blocked sight — and that was enough.

"Time-frozen mana arrows. Savour them."

Betty's eyes were cold as ice, her voice perfectly level.

She didn't know why this Great Spirit had set its sights on Subaru. But anything — anyone — that hurt Subaru could go ahead and die.

Zarestia had no room to dodge. She could only twist her body and take the full force of the strike head-on.

The violet mana crystals punched clean through her, leaving wounds all across her body. And they didn't stop there — the crystals carried a vicious corrosive property alongside their sharpness, and wherever they had pierced they began eating away at the surrounding flesh.

Zarestia staggered. It looked, for a moment, as though she was about to go down and not get up again.

Every person watching let out a breath — instinctive, almost involuntary — as the sense of crisis began to recede.

Then Zarestia moved again.

She surged forward toward Subaru with every scrap of her previous speed still fully intact.

Looking at her now, there was hardly a trace of injury to be read in her bearing.

There was injury — there had to be, because her body was in tatters. But for some reason, none of it was slowing her down. Not even a little.

Betty understood this in an instant, but she had no time to think through why her attack had failed to affect one of the legendary Four Great Spirits.

She only had time to turn — to reach out toward Subaru beside her, the Wayfaring Demon's chosen target — and look at him with eyes full of despair and grief as she screamed his name.

"Subaru!"

____

Danmachi: Summoning Ruri Gokou, And oth

👻🔥Whant more?: Walnut-chan🔥👻

🔥 New history: Uchiha Reborn in Jujutsu Kaisen: The System Thinks I'm in Konoha, but I'm Not

Let's reach these milestones together:

🎯 100 Powerstones = +1 free chapter for all readers