“Death! I will bring death to every single one of you who have made me feel this way! Come on, everyone!” Miyaji shouted, as if he hadn’t been planning on killing us all along. Even as I had that thought though, Miyaji continued. “But first . . .” He suddenly attacked Armor from behind.

“What are you doing?!” Armor shouted.

“Give me that weapon!” Miyaji shouted back. He grabbed the axe in Armor’s hand and tried to wrestle it away from him. It was such an insane thing to do we were all suitably shocked—even Rishia, who was still fighting. “I didn’t want a dumb musical instrument in the first place! But that was the only vassal weapon in this country, so I was told I didn’t have a choice. Now I do, so give that weapon to me! I have the power to control vassal weapons even without that accessory! I’ll make better use of it than you!” It sounded like he had a similar ability to Takt. But he was caught up in someone else’s summoning, right? Tracing that backward . . . this guy had to be a vanguard of the waves, no doubt about it!

In the moment after I came to that realization—

“Mountain Break IV!” Armor slashed his axe down hard at Miyaji! Miyaji howled in pain. With the loss of his vassal weapon, he couldn’t hope to withstand the attack, and he was promptly sliced in two with a single stroke. Blood vividly erupted from the pieces just after Miyaji gave a final scream.

“Master Hidemasa!” one of his women screamed his name as all of his allies involved in the battle were thrown into confusion.

“All your arrogant talk just reminded me of that fake over there! I hated it, and I hated you! Without a weapon, that means you are basically evil yourself! Your death is just the natural order!” Armor said. He swung the axe again, just to be sure—I mean, Miyaji was clearly dead.

“Raph . . .” said Raph-chan.

“Wow. He’s real mad,” Shildina said. It seemed they were both seeing the soul of Miyaji. Armor swung his axe around, slung it up onto his shoulder, and turned a taunting expression on us. “Ah! He destroyed it,” Shildina revealed. I almost felt sorry for Miyaji, for a moment. He had been caught up in all this, trying to look cool, and ended up dead, his soul destroyed.

I had to wonder if this was all some kind of psychological attack. It was all so pathetic—beyond pathetic—a farce I no longer wanted to take part in.

“Next, I’m going to do the same thing to you,” Armor gloated, turning the axe that had just killed one of his allies onto me.

“You just cut down your number of allies. Literally. Do you think you stand a chance?” I asked. Miyaji’s women weren’t going to cooperate any longer either.