The one-short Hero's Party leapt street after street, threading through the rain of brick and stone Anawen's vines kicked up, and soon reached the blind spot at the foot of the city wall.
Baiye set down the cat-girl Black Mage in her grip and turned to look back at the district behind them, pulverized to rubble by the flying stones, her face grim:
"Ningning seems to have been right. From the start, this Anawen seems to have been lashing the wall with her vines and attacking the city with the shattered bricks, not striking directly with the vines themselves."
『You mean the attack power and range of Anawen's actual body are probably weaker than these wall-bricks?』
Hearing Baiye's analysis, Leilei raised her little blackboard and asked.
"It's possible. But we can't let our guard down."
Baiye gazed up at Anawen, who stood a full head taller than the wall, then glanced at the three utterly unreliable members before her, and drew her twin short blades from her waist:
"By the looks of it, right now the only ones in the whole city with their mobility restored are the four of us and Ningning."
"Ningning is healing the populace in the rear. No doubt other healed adventurers will come to help soon enough."
"In the meantime, we need to draw Anawen's attention as much as we can, get her to stop attacking the city's people, and cut down the casualties."
"And if possible..."
Without hesitation, Baiye drove the oppressive title of "one of the Ten Great Cadres of the Demon Lord's Army" out of her mind, her eyes blazing with brilliant light:
"We wipe her out with everything we've got."
"Ooh! Charge, charge!"
『Ooh! Chaaarge!』
The Hero, Winnie, and Leilei answered Baiye in their usual style, while Biluo, as ever, stayed still, only gripping her longbow hard to signal she was perfectly ready too.
For the who-knew-how-many-th time, Baiye resisted the urge to press a hand to her forehead — the fighting spirit she'd so painstakingly built up, ruined just like that.
"...Never mind. I'm used to it. Let's go!"
Baiye barked the order and once again seized Leilei by the scruff of the neck, leaping up and carrying her onto the wall like hauling a kitten.
The Hero, Winnie, and Biluo followed close behind.
The four of them landed on the already wretchedly battered wall, forming a Y-shape, and squarely faced Anawen.
***
Anawen had woken up today, opened her eyes in a groggy daze, and discovered she'd suddenly been transplanted to a different pit.
Ever since joining the Demon Lord's ranks, this happened to her all the time.
Probably some dark elf had gotten drunk and thrown around a botched grand spell again, accidentally flinging her from the Demon Lord's Castle all the way over here.
By Anawen's past experience of getting lost, the Demon Lord would soon notice she'd gone missing and send someone to transplant her back.
Though nominally she'd joined the Demon Lord's Army and become one of its Ten Great Cadres, Anawen was in truth an easygoing optimist who loved playing games.
So she wasn't the least bit anxious. First she sang a song to her heart's content, then extended the vines around her and set about amusing herself in this new home.
She mulled it over for a while, and finally chose to stretch out her vines and play skip-stones by whacking the city wall.
But just as Anawen was having fun, she suddenly noticed a few oddly shaped stones had appeared on the wall in front of her.
So Anawen blinked her terribly nearsighted eyes in puzzlement and reached her vines toward those stones, meaning to coil around them, feel out their shapes, and judge whether they'd make good skipping stones.
But what Anawen hadn't expected was for those few stones to suddenly spew fire and set her vines ablaze.
What a horrible feeling!
She couldn't feel pain, but this burnt-up sensation was really, really horrible!
Just as Anawen went to pull her vines back and put out the flames, her vines were shredded to bits by two edges of razor-sharp aura.
And after that, a few needles even came sneaking through the air, jabbing at her eyes!
Anawen blocked the sneak-attacking needles with a pair of sunglasses woven from leaves, and finally understood—
These stones weren't stones!
They were humans!
And super tactless, fun-ruining, bad humans at that!
Anawen got angry, and the consequences were severe.
She was going to let these humans feel the true meaning of play!
So Anawen closed her eyes, giggling nonstop, and a beautiful pink flower slowly bloomed open atop her head.
Before the bad humans could react, Anawen's flower had opened fully.
Then she shook her head, pouring all her pollen out over the city before her.
Come on, everyone, no more being bad kids, okay?
Let's all get hyped together!
***
Back inside Tati City, Ningning wasn't busy saving anyone. Instead she sat leisurely on a rooftop in a corner, swinging her feet, playing spectator and, incidentally, commentator to the four fighting Anawen in the distance:
"Ooh, here we go, here we go."
"Black Mage Leilei opens with a low-tier fireball, setting Anawen's vines ablaze, super effective!"
"The Hero and Baiye pull off a combo — Bladewind Strike, and shred the burning vines completely... no, you should've just let them keep burning, you cut them all up, so wasn't Leilei's spell just now for nothing?"
"And then Biluo's Hidden Triple Shot goes straight for Anawen's eyeballs, and gets, gets blocked by a pair of sunglasses!"
"Wah, come on... that stick-in-the-mud elf, Anawen's eyeballs are just for show, why are you shooting them? A couple more severed vines would be way more useful!"
Though Ningning grumbled nonstop, her body was quite honest, dancing about in excitement like a rabid sports fan up in the stands, hollering and calling the shots as if she were right there on the scene.
Meanwhile, on the street not far off, the ordinary folk knocked down by the sonic wave were crawling back to their feet one after another and, guided by the city lord and the adventurers, beginning to evacuate.
Ningning had long since finished her healing work.
At her level, resurrecting an entire city's worth of the dead might take a bit of time.
But right now, people had only been shaken and wounded by Anawen's sonic wave, not killed.
So all she'd had to do was aim at the whole city and let loose a single wide-area heal, and the healing work was done.
In theory, Ningning hadn't needed to leave the party at all.
Yet she'd bolted anyway.
For one reason only: Anawen had one more move, not very offensive, but extremely super-effective against Ningning specifically.
"...Ah, yep, that's the one."
Ningning watched with dead-fish eyes as a vivid pink flower sprouted atop Anawen's head and began scattering pollen.
That pollen was the seriously nasty part.
Ningning still remembered what the game she'd fallen into fundamentally was.
Sure, the system was thorough, the mechanics reasonable, the CGs exquisite, the plot superb...
But it was an eroge.
And in a game like this, Anawen's pollen had one and only one use.
Namely — to force everyone into the other combat system, the one that wasn't normal fighting.
Heh. Which was exactly why she wanted nothing to do with getting close.
She'd really die.
In both the social sense and the physical one.