“You somehow need to run out of here at full speed. Then go inform the professors about this.”
“What are you talking about?! Then what about you?”
When Rona practically shrieked, Ruite lightly covered his ears.
“I’ll buy enough time for you to widen the distance. You’re unbelievably bad at running, after all.”
At Rona’s desperate plea asking what that had to do with anything and telling him they should run together, Ruite pushed against her back.
There were two necessary roles right now.
One person to notify the professors of this critical situation, now that the crystal magical tools were no longer functioning properly, and one person to hold the monster back here, even if only briefly.
Without needing to think deeply, it was obvious which role suited himself and Rona.
Rona was slow at running, so it would take time for her to deliver the message, but it was still certainly better than having her face this evolved monster.
So the one who needed to hold it back, even briefly, was him.
“Once it seems like you’ve gotten far enough away safely, I’ll run too.”
It was not as though he was insane enough to try subjugating a monster that looked at minimum Grade 2 all by himself. For now, he was confident in his running ability, so once enough distance existed between himself and Rona, he fully intended to flee immediately.
“……Really?”
“Yeah. I want to live too. So hurry and go.”
After hesitating briefly, Rona grabbed Ruite’s hand and told him he absolutely had to follow after her. Then, gritting her teeth, she began running like mad.
The evolved monster seemed to flinch as it watched Rona, but its gaze soon shifted toward Ruite standing before it instead. The creature had probably instinctively realized which of the two possessed stronger magic within their body.
The moment Ruite took a deep breath and drew his sword, a gigantic shadow fell over him.
The monster raised one enormous front paw high into the air.
Then it slammed it down toward the ground where Ruite stood with terrifying speed.
Boom—!
A tremendous explosion rang out, kicking up a storm of dust. Having leaped far backward in an instant to avoid the attack, Ruite pressed a hand against his startled chest.
“At this rate, I’m not going to die from getting hit. My heart’s going to stop first.”
With the sound of stone fragments scattering everywhere, the monster lifted its paw once again. The ground struck by the attack had caved deeply inward in the exact shape of its footprint.
Ruite heightened his senses.
Rona still had not managed to widen the distance very much. If he did not keep this thing occupied a little longer here, it would be dangerous.
He tightened his grip on the sword again, but the monster attacked mercilessly, as though it had no intention of giving him even a brief opening. When it swung its front paw widely, sharp blades of wind flew toward Ruite.
Ruite was fully occupied with merely deflecting the attacks and changing their trajectories with his sword.
Seriously, he had been trying so hard not to get killed by Chester in the future, and who would have guessed his life would instead be threatened by a monster right in front of him?
“Hah…… haa…….”
Ruite glanced down at his sword.
The blade had already been badly damaged from blocking the sharp wind attacks just now. And those attacks had been simple, straightforward strikes. Meanwhile, what about the monster?
It looked so lively that it was hard to believe they were even fighting. No, was it just his imagination, or did it actually seem more energized than before?
Either way, merely defending would make it difficult to stall for time. It seemed advantageous to inflict at least a little damage somehow, if only to buy himself time to escape later.
Ruite once again dodged the vicious attacks flying at him from every direction while widening the distance between himself and the monster. Even in those moments, there had been more than one occasion where his life had nearly been in danger, leaving him drenched in cold sweat.
At present, the monster resembled a wolf standing on two legs, with another pair of legs protruding from behind. In appearance alone, it resembled the centaurs from mythology.
In that case, there was only one place where a blind spot would appear in its field of vision.
Its rear legs.
The larger its body became, the more advantages it gained, but it also naturally developed clear weaknesses.
Ruite gradually closed the distance toward the monster’s rear legs before plunging his sword into its thigh and injecting magic into it.
Red flames burst fiercely around the sword before rapidly spreading large enough to engulf the monster’s entire body.
As the monster writhed and let out a painful cry, Ruite flopped heavily onto the ground.
It’d be nice if this level of firepower could burn it as easily as those Grade 4 and 5 monsters.
“……”
As the creature began thrashing violently, the flames Ruite had unleashed were sucked into the monster’s body and vanished completely. Despite pouring in quite a lot of magic with determination, the only damage he managed to inflict was the sword wound in its thigh and the mane burned away by the flames.
“Hmm, figures.”
Ruite energetically dusted the dirt from his palms as he stood back up.
Then he faced the monster, now thoroughly enraged by the previous attack, head-on.
“Do you know what the final trump card for winning a battle is?”
As though it actually understood human speech, the monster’s eyes rolled sharply.
“It’s running away.”
Ruite swiftly turned around and kicked off the ground, beginning to sprint.
Rona’s presence had grown fairly distant. He had succeeded in widening the gap to some degree. Truthfully, even aside from that, it was becoming impossible for him to continue dealing with that absurdly powerful thing alone.
To begin with, if the firepower of his attacks had been just a little stronger, maybe he could have somehow continued fighting it, but producing greater firepower was still impossible for him.
If only there were something that could act as a catalyst…….
But thinking about that was pointless.
Even though he had transmigrated into a fantasy novel like this, he had never dreamed of becoming some great hero. To begin with, the person he had transmigrated into was a villain destined to be killed in the future by the protagonist he fell in love with.
As long as he could avoid that miserable ending, he would be satisfied afterward whether he became an extra or some background nobody, as long as he could live comfortably.
“Ah, it’s ridiculously fast!”
Ruite shouted while looking back at the monster chasing after him.
He did not want to die unfairly here at this thing’s hands. Somehow, he wanted to survive, get his engagement annulled by Chester, avoid his death ending, and then live quietly like that.
With that determination, he ran with all his might, but the speed of the creature, now freed from its speed restriction, was truly incredible. On top of that, Ruite had already consumed a great deal of stamina in the earlier battle.
If only he could somehow run into the professors Rona had gone to fetch, that would be the best possible scenario.
The distance between the monster and Ruite repeatedly widened and narrowed by hair-thin margins. Ruite bit down hard on his lip while rapidly turning his thoughts over.
***
Deep within the vast mountain region, Chester lightly swung the sword he was holding.
Green bodily fluid splattered from the monster corpse onto the dirt ground with a wet plop.
After injecting a small amount of magic into the corpse of the third Grade 3 monster he had just killed, Chester rubbed his stiff shoulder. This amount of points was satisfactory enough.
He had heard terrible rumors everywhere saying the difficulty of tests rose dramatically starting in third year, so he had been worried, but it was better than expected. More than anything, battling monsters had somewhat relieved the stress that had built up over time.
Now that the thirty minutes were almost over, it seemed best to start heading toward the mountain entrance. There would be point deductions if one failed to observe the time limit.
Chester slowly walked while returning his sword to its sheath.
The path leading into the mountain’s inner region split into two directions. Chester, who had initially entered through the left path, was following the same route back when a chilling sensation suddenly wrapped around his entire body.
He unconsciously stopped walking, and at that moment, someone urgently burst out from the path leading to the right.
“Hah……!”
The other person also seemed startled upon seeing Chester, clutching their chest while breathing heavily.
It was someone unexpected.
If one concentrated even slightly on their senses, it was easy to realize that Grade 3 monsters were gathered in the inner region, yet the person emerging from there now was the somewhat eccentric Rona.
“Chester!”
But her condition seemed far from normal.
Her face was soaked in fear as though she had seen a ghost, sweat pouring from her like rain. Even the neatly braided twin tails of her hair had become disheveled.
“You…… did something happen?”
“Th-there’s a huge problem right now! Ah, no! This isn’t the time to be stopping you and—!”
Seeing Rona in such a panicked state that she was grabbing at her own hair, it definitely did not seem like an ordinary matter.
And in that instant, Chester sensed the powerful magic of a monster coming from the path to the right.
“What happened?”
“A-a monster evolved.”
“What?”
At the unreal statement, even Chester’s voice rose slightly.
“I-I don’t know what happened either. The magical tool restraining the monster’s speed stopped working, and there aren’t any crystal magical tools nearby. So right now I have to somehow go inform the professors about this.”
Witmore tended to educate students in a Spartan manner to foster exceptional talents. Even so, monster evolution? There was no way the professors had designed the test while accounting for something like that.
Moreover, if a Grade 3 monster had evolved, then at minimum it had become equivalent to Grade 2. How were mere students who had not even taken the mage exam supposed to deal with that?
In other words, there was only one answer.
This was an unforeseen accident.
“So you escaped from that monster just now?”
“That’s right. R-Ruite bought me time……”
“……Why is his name coming up there?”