If there is one thing I noticed about the remnants I’ve faced so far, it's that a huge majority of them would be inferior to me in terms of aina use.

It is quite easy to understand that since I was, I’d like to believe I am, very good at using aina, I had no other choice but to be good at it, and that a remnant, in general, shouldn’t be able to fully exert their former magical capability.

Facing a remnant should be like facing a mindless magical beast unable to use anything but its most basic instincts, but so far, the one we fought was, in my opinion, very conscious. If I were to take the example of the old woman, she adopted a strategy of retreating at a safe distance and letting her lightning snake and tornado take care of us. Maybe it was her primal strategy back in the days when she was still alive, but it doesn’t change the fact that she was good at adapting to a changing situation. It was like nothing described in the book. It was as if she was alive.

When I was fighting her, I didn't choose to engage with them in a battle. It was her that was heavily hostile against us, leaving us with no other choice but to get rid of her, but it wasn't until I had time to think about it that I realized how human-like, or at the very least sane, some of her actions were.

This is why I made the decision to not get involved with them anymore.

That is to say, the remnants we've fought so far exhibited a level of mastery and control over their magic unlike anything I've ever read before, but in terms of aina use, they were all inferior to me.

But this one remnant that I’m facing right now is on a whole other level.

Aside from the teleportation magic, he was already a monster with his sword skills and aina wielding.

This man was a fighter, and a very skilled one at that.

That technique, that hardship…

Behind each of these blows, I recognized I could feel the honing of the passing years.

Even now, after turning himself into a remnant, that feat wasn’t enough to change that belief, that fact.

The tip of his blade went right past my head.

With only the clang of our blades clashing, and the sound of the ground crackling under our feet as the surrounding melody.

His sword was larger and heavier than mine, so the reach of his was greater, and the strength behind it was more explosive than mine.

His tall body, particularly his armor, was, in my opinion, quite impeding him, but this greatly favored me.

He had the upper hand on three things: height, weight, and power.

Whereas I, I had the speed, dexterity, and, quite unexpectedly, my smallness, or at least the fact that I was of a smaller frame than him, he avoided me on several occasions, having my head severed from my neck.

When fighting oversized creatures like those in this forest, my small stature has a lot of advantages. Being able to sneak into a giant monster's blind spot can be quite useful when wanting to end a battle quickly. Being small also makes one a more difficult target to aim at.

However, against this remnant, these advantages were rendered completely ineffective.

I realized throughout this journey, the years I spent here, that past a certain level, especially against monsters deftly using their aina, where speed and strength go beyond and straight-up defy the laws of physics, no- it wasn’t that since the beginning, the whole aina thing was all about defying the laws of physics, it’s just that it was still believable, for it was still catchable with the naked eyes.

Past a certain threshold, eyes may not be enough to catch up with whatever is happening. On my part, I didn’t reach that threshold naturally, instead, I was forced to reach it to compensate for what was lacking.

Aina's particle scattering, airflow, sound, and surrounding pressure were all providing far more information than mere sight, and I was quite skilled at reading them.I trained myself for years to be good at it. However, against that remnant, with or without his teleportation, I must even say that he was primarily using his teleportation magic to simply close the distance between us. He primarily handled attacks by himself through Aina, and yet here I was barely capable of reading his moves and struggling to evade, block, and even less deflect his attacks.

I swung my sword at him from above, downward at him, but he blocked his blade. I kept pushing all the weight and strength I could into my sword, but then he pulled out his tricks once again.

I immediately repositioned myself to block the blade coming at me from behind with the clear intent of chopping me in half.

Despite having blocked his attack in time, my body was pushed back to the ground. I didn’t even have time to be dulled by that attack because another one was coming at me.

It was an upward slash, I was barely able to avoid it. In fact, I wasn’t able to avoid it. It managed to make a vertical on me from the chest to the shoulder.

I retreated a few steps away, just at a distance where I felt he wouldn’t deem it useful to use his teleportation to close the distance.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah, thankfully that slash didn’t reach the body but merely the outer skin."

I was breathing-no panting as if I had run a marathon,

My hands were trembling like leaves, both from exhaustion and from something I had long thought I had forgotten: fear.

From the remnant, not even a breath, not a single droplet of sweat or blood was shed, nor could an exhausted heartbeat be heard from him,

Even though I knew the remnants were just walking corpses, it was still a depressing sight to see.

I can’t keep this pace forever. He was the one who had the upper hand. Dragging this fight would only tire and strain me, and would eventually lead to my death.

Currently, my strongest attack is the one I used against the dragon from that day, but sadly, it was completely unusable against this remnant.

It takes too long for me to charge that attack.

This remnant would make mincemeat of me by the time I was able to launch it.

By the time I would be able to launch it, this remnant would already have made mincemeat out of me.

I had no other choice but to win and live or to lose and die against this monster.

Magic wasn't available so this magic sword, … I can only rely on a sword. There won’t be any help coming, no option to run away;

That’s it. I have to win with only myself, Aina, and this sword.

I let out a loud and heavy sigh.

"Han."

"Hum?"

"If you want to do your thing, get moral support. It's now or never. "

"Haha, I was just joking when I said it."

"I guess I’ll have to do without it then."

Taking a long and deep breath, I readied myself for a charge.

Remaining still for several seconds, I cleared my mind, and mentally prepared myself to end this battle here and now.

I charged at him, I was slow at first, but my speed gradually increased as I got closer to him. The remnant didn’t move. He only put one foot forward, a foot which I knew carried the steadiness and the weight of a mountain with it, then swung his sword to clash with mine.

At that moment, from him, I got to see in him the embodiment of both an immovable object and an unstoppable force.

Our swords clashed, but only for a moment.

It was evident that what I brought behind my sword wasn’t nearly enough to face the power behind his.

So the most expected thing happened: upon contact, the blade was shattered in half.

But that didn’t stop me. Despite my sword being shattered, I continued my course toward my true target.

Using my smallness and my dexterity to my advantage, I grabbed the other severed half of my sword, which was flying in midair, and slithered my way through to a rather close distance to him, then sank the severed blade of my sword into one of the holes in the chest area of his plastron.

With all my strength, I pressed it in. I felt it. It went through his organs to reach the outer side of his body, where the tip of my B came into contact with the shield on his back.

The remnant slightly looked down on me.

I felt his gaze on me.

This battle was over, I won it.

Or so I would like it to be.

From the blade that was trusted in his chest, I felt something I didn’t want to feel.

"Hon, Get out of here. "

Some sort of energy explosion took place as I immediately retracted myself away from the remnant. The reach of the blast was small, but the power behind it was tremendous.

"What the hell was that?"

Earlier, when I impaled that remnant, I felt it. I impaled his heart. It was an inanimate one at first, but then I felt a waking heartbeat from it.

The surroundings were changing as if-

All the immense, scattered mana in the surrounding area was sucked back to him.

He was already a challenging enough opponent with aina and barely any magic, I couldn’t allow this to go more south than it already has.

I immediately started to condense my attack with the broken handle of my sword.

The man fell on his knee, then on all fours.

His armour began to desegregate, as if returning to dust.

Blood from his chest wound fell on his hand.

And revealed by the progressively desegregating armour, and washed by the blood dripping blood, something shiny appeared on one of his fingers.

A ring: a blue and golden jeweled ring.

The remnant took notice of the ring, then brought it up as if to compare it with the sky.

He then looked back at the egg-shaped sky-blue object.

And as the last shard of his mask fell apart, we finally got to see his face in its entirety.

Plastered on his face was a smile that I must admit would’ve been quite warming if he hadn’t attempted to kill us a few moments earlier.

A few moments after his formerly warm smile turned into a long and, I must admit, degenerate laugh, he then screamed his lung out toward the sky like a madman.

"Hahaha... Raissa!! Tu as vu, enfin,… j’ai réussi… Je l'ai fais... j’ai accomplis mon devoir-"

I didn’t allow him to finish his words that I had sent my attack.

Though it was quite complicated to pull off with a sword with a broken blade, I was still able to launch my strongest attack on him.

The chaotic mess of compressed wind and lightning fell on the remnant, engulfing him and the egglike object behind him.

"Guess who’s back?"

Han, having visibly retrieved his vessel's access, also fired a powerful lightning attack with his dragon form, an attack which was instantly joined by the easily recognizable light beam attack of Heon.

Apparently, magic and everything weird happening in this place disturbing the use of magic vanished the moment the surrounding mana started being sucked by the remnant.

The endless world we were trapped in has vanished, leaving behind a crackling blue barrier as seen from an outside perspective.

Our joint attack created an intensely powerful explosion, easily one of our most powerful joint attacks.

Nothing should be able to survive that.

That’s right, nothing should have.

But something did.

Once the fire and the smoke screen calmed down, a human silhouette slowly came into view, and behind that silhouette, the same egg-shaped thing was there, completely intact.

Soon, the face of the remnant was finally revealed, no longer hidden by the smokescreen.

A man may be visibly in his early twenties, with white bleached hair, golden eyes, strangely similar to one of a dragon.

Underneath his formerly full-body armour, he wore a rather scholarly white outfit, underneath which was a rather muscular body.

"Je ne saurais assez te remercier … Qu’est ce cette magie? Qu’est-tu donc?… Ca n’as pas d’importance. Il me faut du temps pour moi d’accomplir-que dis-je, de réaliser mon dernier voeu, Il me faut du temps, Il nous faut du temps... juste un instant. " The man retrieved the shield from his back.

Countless small sky-blue bubbles appeared out of nowhere around him.

"J’ignore ce que tu es, mais, je ne mourrais pas facilement de tes mains."

He was now holding a sword in one hand and his shield in the other.

With that, he raised his sword at us, saying, "Une épée pour défendre ceux que tu abhorre," and then barred his shield at us, adding, "Un bouclier pour protéger ceux que tu aime."