You Want Me to Fight Kal'tsit? Seriously?

Perhaps that was a little rude to say, but the previous Mansfield prison doctor and her guardian had clearly failed to teach her how to make her life more colorful. Otherwise, she would not have ended up living right next to the morgue.

Yet this girl, whom everyone avoided, had truly brought Anthony salvation.

Seeing that the other man had nothing more to say, Gerald lost interest in provoking him further and treated Anthony's wounds according to the usual procedure.

He put on gloves and a mask, disinfected everything and took protective measures, stitched the wounds, then applied the bandages.

Honestly, Gerald was quite skilled at bandaging. The entire process flowed smoothly.

Once he was done, Anthony looked fairly close to his usual dignified self on the surface. His exposed skin was well hidden beneath the bandages, while the bloodstains seeping through from his earlier struggling made the big cat look even more ferocious.

Once all the wounds had been wrapped, Anthony finally let out a breath of relief. He looked up at the person beside him and said seriously, "Thank you. I'll be relying on you again the day after tomorrow, Teacher."

"Fine. Go back and properly digest what you learned today." Without turning around, Gerald sorted the medical equipment he had taken out and returned everything to its proper place. "Think about whether you'd still be this lively if your opponent had used a spear, a sword, or Originium Arts."

"Swords and spears would also be difficult to use in confined terrain."

Anthony did not wholly accept his reasoning. After thinking it over, he shook his head. "The same goes for Originium Arts. In that situation, close combat would offer more opportunities. If I had to face an enemy like that in open ground, I would choose to retreat."

Gerald's hands suddenly stopped moving.

"Close combat gives you an opportunity in a confined space?" He looked at Anthony with an odd expression, then could not help laughing. "The next time Mansfield gets close to Columbia, I'll ask whether they can bring a wooden sword for children. I hope you'll still be able to say the same thing then."

"...You really aren't a campaigning knight?"

Seeing the look on Gerald's face as though he had him completely figured out, Anthony could not suppress his doubts any longer. "Even among the contestants who participated in Knight Competition, I've never seen anyone who could fight barehanded like you—"

"Still going on about knights?" Gerald replied irritably as he continued working, laying another surgical pad on the bed. "Have you ever seen a knight who talks nothing but nonsense and gets thrown into prison? Aren't the protagonists in knight novels all polite and refined? Those are noble lords. How could I possibly be that prestigious?"

Perhaps knowing that he would not get anything out of him, Anthony merely shook his head. "What era are those knight novels from...?"

He knew that the other man probably had something difficult to speak about, just as Anthony had his own reasons for being here. They were both assigned to C Section, both cared for and valued by the guards. Something must have happened behind the scenes, and it had to have been something significant.

Usually, though, they considered each other's backgrounds and did not ask such questions. Asking now made him seem as though he had crossed a line.

As Anthony continued pondering, Gerald patted him on the shoulder, walked past him, and took the lead. "I'm leaving. Make sure you replenish your nutrition at dinner, or your body won't hold up."

Watching the man leave him with nothing but his back, Anthony was just about to move and stretch when he tugged at his wounds again. After a burst of pain that made him bare his teeth, he could only sigh and follow Gerald out.

The sun quickly exhausted the last of today's afterglow and slowly sank beyond the horizon, leaving the twin moons in the sky to illuminate the land.

The sealed room offered no view of the outside world. Transparent glass and wire mesh exposed every movement of the prisoners, while surveillance cameras faithfully carried out their duties, coldly and mechanically watching everything inside the cells at all times—those were the only things still moving within Gerald's field of vision.

At the time when deep night settled in, security in C Section was not as strict as advertised, because this area of Mansfield, used to imprison those serving life sentences, actually had its own hierarchy.

"A place that can imprison people can naturally protect people as well." With that philosophy in mind, Mansfield Prison's warden had clearly pulled plenty of strings behind the scenes. That included making deals with certain upper-class figures and sending members of their families who had made mistakes and required punishment and protection into this prison.

The goal was to line his own pockets with even more money, and one key rule was the unconditional indulgence granted to prisoners like them who needed "protection."

The cameras that appeared to be operating properly only existed because some prisoners possessed particularly outstanding abilities. The guards almost never came to this floor to concern themselves with its prisoners, focusing instead on the serious criminals who had actually committed grave offenses.

Thus, this level of C Section could practically be considered the freest place in the prison.

Anthony was like that, and so was Gerald.

It did not matter if they wanted to strip naked and run around their rooms. It was acceptable if they informed a guard and went next door to beat each other up. There was even a library in the lower levels of the prison built specifically for Anthony's use.

Naturally, no one would care about Gerald, drenched in sweat within his cell as he underwent inhuman training.

Exhaustion emptied his mind. It kept him from thinking about internal struggles or Fear of the future, postponing everything uncertain yet unavoidable, while allowing him to prepare for everything that might happen.

He poured cold water over his head, dried every drop from his ears to his tail with a towel, then got dressed.

Other than several medical books, the empty room contained nothing else. Only a few scattered photographs on the wall held any color.

He pulled on his prison uniform and, following his daily routine, silently sat beside the bed and looked at the photos taped to the wall.

In the background, the parents of this world wore bright smiles and gently embraced his body with their hands. The neighboring couple had been very kind people. Their golden hair gleamed with Radiance beneath the sunlight, contrasting with his family's silver-white hair.

The eldest daughter of the neighboring family was about his height. She often sparred with him, yet lost to him most of the time. Her younger sister was small, with chubby cheeks, and might one day become as outstanding a knight as her sister. The one who always wore a cold expression was their uncle. He did not smile much and had a distant attitude, so Gerald had always been a little afraid of him.

He lightly scraped at his own face in the photo with his fingernail. That spot had already worn down so much that its original appearance could no longer be seen, yet Gerald kept scraping at it.

That moment had only been an utterly ordinary afternoon, but after that, the people in the photograph could never gather together again.

Today had also been an utterly ordinary day in Mansfield.

Tomorrow would be the same.

He threw himself onto the cold bed. The lights on this floor went out as the hands of the clock moved onward.

Accompanied by the bell signaling rest, Gerald closed his eyes.

What woke him was not the daily clamor of Mansfield Prison's bells.

It was the most natural sound of all, a sound Mansfield had never possessed: the wind.

The wind brushed over his face, bringing a cold yet vibrant sensation, as though some freedom he had never experienced before was whispering beside his ear.

Gerald abruptly opened his eyes. The mixed smell of gunpowder, blood, and dust pierced his nostrils, making him cough.

Only then did he finally process the sense of wrongness.

He did not even need to think. Every part of his body was screaming, telling him without the slightest doubt that he was—

At the center of a battlefield.

His gaze lowered. Blood stained his hands and clothes. His family's sword was somehow gripped in his hand, and the blood dripping from it had already soaked into the earth, spreading into shocking dark traces.

Looking around, corpses lay piled everywhere. Heads with open eyes, staring fixedly at him, were scattered around his feet. Pools of blood resembled black mirrors, reflecting his silver-white hair in a blurred and twisted image.

So he looked upward, toward the cliff not far away.

A cold brass gleam reflected a hazy brilliance beneath the sky. Victoria's ancient legend, its true trump card—the Steam Knight stood upon the earth.

Behind him, countless troops stood in formation along the cliff's edge, their war banners flying in the wind.

Then, a slender figure stepped out from the ranks before the Steam Knight.

She wore a hood. Dark cloth concealed most of her face, leaving only a pale, sharply defined jawline exposed.

Without any hesitation, she lightly leapt from the cliff. As she landed, a monstrous creature with a terrifying appearance suddenly emerged alongside her. Its twisted torso looked as though it had been tangled and torn apart by Thorns, while the ends of its limbs bore sharp claws glinting with cold light.

Two pairs of dark green pupils stared fixedly in his direction.

The two people and the monster stood where they were, confronting each other, until the figure hidden beneath the hood asked—

"Why are you helping Kazdel resist, nameless Pegasus?"

Who Replaced My Beginner Tutorial with a Mid-Boss?!

Resist?

His memories did not tell him why things had developed to this point, but Gerald understood one thing.

Smooth cuts, heads severed with a single stroke—the heads at his feet had been cut down by him.

The enemy's advance unit had been completely slaughtered here by his hand.

The current situation made one thing perfectly clear: surrender was meaningless. The army behind those advance troops would tear him to pieces, as though afraid they would not get to drink his blood and devour his flesh.

His scattered thoughts gradually returned, becoming a sigh from Gerald.

If it had only been the legendary Steam Knight, he might have considered breaking through the encirclement. But the mysterious person before him was clearly not an opponent he could handle. The bloody scent carried to him by the wind alone was enough to explain it: anyone who could accumulate such bloodlust on a battlefield could only be the most terrifying war machine.

Fighting for one or two exchanges was already his limit. Escaping from her hands was even more impossible.

The chances of any other escape route were low as well. The enemy forces had most likely already surrounded this place. Since his "former self" had not prepared to flee from the very beginning, it was even less likely now.

Gerald's eyes swept over the troops atop the cliff. They appeared gathered together, but were faintly divided into several different groups. The gaps separating the banners, along with their vastly different emblems, revealed as much.

The banner closest to the Steam Knight bore Victoria's crest of twin lions surrounding a crown. Farther away was Leithanien's symbol, resembling goat horns. At the center was a banner bearing a rapier and an iris—

Wait, an iris?

The hooded lady seemed to take Gerald's silence for resolve. She raised the sword in her left hand. The light at its tip dimmed for only an instant, then, guided by a fierce wind, that glimmer swept toward the young man's neck, just as Gerald had killed earlier.

His instincts were faster than his thoughts. He drove off with both feet, twisted sharply to the side, and swept out with the sword in his hand, violently colliding with that blinding light.

Clang!

A tremendous crash exploded. The vibration of metal traveled along the blade into Gerald's wrist, then his arm, nearly numbing his bones. Yet his opponent's sword merely turned lightly, changing directions in an instant and stabbing toward his flank like a nimble snake.

He did not retreat. He knew there was nowhere to retreat to.

Facing that deadly second strike, he merely twisted his body with inhuman ease. His sword slashed horizontally in reverse, forcefully blocking the longsword like an iron wall.

Her blade closed in with steady, precise ferocity. The strike originally aimed straight at his chest rapidly adjusted upon meeting Gerald's edge. The sword nearly slid across the flat of his blade and went directly for his shoulder. It moved so quickly that even the air seemed to emit a low hum—the ultimate sound of metal at the intersection of speed and power.

Gerald had no time to think. He suddenly stepped forward, his right foot grinding across the ground and kicking up fragments and dust. His body dipped slightly, then he spun with his left foot, rising with the motion as his sword swept out in an arc and sharply cut toward her hilt.

Yet his attack only sliced through an afterimage—her movements were even faster than he had imagined.

In the narrowest possible gap, the hooded woman lightly lifted her sword and swept toward his neck at a vicious angle.

Screech.

With a slight turn of the hilt, his blade shifted from defense into a diagonal lift, barely catching her sword tip. But the block numbed his right arm, and the force nearly knocked his weapon from his grasp.

This would not work.

Every breath of respite in high-speed weapon combat was precious. He should not have been distracted by other thoughts at a time like this... but Gerald clearly realized that no matter what he did, the outcome had already been decided.

The gap in skill was too great. Continuing would only mean that, within the next three strikes, she would break his stance to raise her army's morale, then kill him by severing his head as well.

That monster had not yet joined the battle. Her usual fighting style was probably not this broad and forceful swordsmanship either. Whether she had kept him alive until now out of the perverse amusement of a cat playing with a mouse, or out of mercy restrained by certain considerations, he did not know.

But there was no longer any meaning in continuing to struggle desperately.

So, on the next move, Gerald suddenly stopped merely blocking and instead launched a counterattack with an equally vicious angle.

His sword abruptly thrust forward, its slashing trajectory sweeping toward the hooded woman's knee at an unnatural, twisted angle.

Her sword tip, meanwhile, slid across the incoming sweep. At a slanted angle, it pierced through him.

Gerald's attack seemed to have failed. The hooded woman's sword accurately stabbed into Gerald's flank.

The sensation of the blade piercing flesh made her brow crease faintly, but she quickly regained her composure, preparing to cut straight through him at the waist along with his ribs.

But at that moment, Gerald's free left hand forcibly grabbed the hand holding the hooded woman's sword.

Then he clenched down hard, trapping the sword between his ribs.

"...Cough. You've guessed what my Originium Arts are, haven't you?" The pain from his body was suppressed by surging adrenaline. Gerald spat out the blood in his mouth and grinned at the enemy before him. "Pegasus Arts, Storm, Radiance... I'll assume you've seen all of them."

The surrounding air suddenly grew heavy.

It was as though an invisible barrier had begun forming around Gerald, sealing off the space and compressing it madly.

Fine cracks began to appear in the ground beneath his feet. Dust gathered under an inexplicable force, clinging to the earth instead of drifting through the air.

The ring on Gerald's ring finger now blazed like the scorching sun, its indigo light so brilliant it was impossible to look at directly.

"Pegasus... a Pegasus can travel a thousand miles in but a day and night, galloping from Kazimierz to the center of the battlefield."

He muttered to himself.

"Mon2tr!"

The sudden turn of events caught the hooded woman off guard for a moment. Then she decisively sent the monster that had been watching from the sidelines into battle.

The monster's roar accompanied the crystalline spikes on its body as they met the sword in Gerald's right hand. Metal and crystal collided in a burst of blazing sparks. Together with the blood blooming across his shoulder and flank, they became the backdrop to the ring on his ring finger.

"So the Pegasus you've encountered may have mostly relied on their speed, swinging those insignificant slashes at you—slashes you could block one by one—until they exhausted themselves... or realized they were outmatched and fled the battlefield without looking back."

Perhaps finally realizing the error in her judgment, the hooded woman decisively released the trapped sword and tried to put distance between herself and the man before her—

"But I don't think so. I think, if things have truly reached this point..."

The time had come. The light on Gerald's ring overflowed.

"Then I shall Give Up My Flesh, Break Your Sinews and Bones."

And time stopped in that instant.

The compressed air instantly reached its critical point, and the entire space collapsed with it.

An incomparably violent shockwave erupted through the air, as though all the power in the world had poured forth at that moment. The invisible barrier shattered into raging currents, carrying countless rocks and clumps of dirt in all directions. Wherever the shockwave passed, the ground was torn open, massive cracks spreading outward like a spiderweb across the battlefield.

Mon2tr's roar was drowned out by the shockwave. Its massive body was violently thrown back by the gale, but it steadied itself in midair, then planted all four limbs firmly against the ground and barely shielded the hooded woman behind it.