(Odin's POV)
"It's not like you'll be fighting alone."
I remembered her voice brimming with confidence back in that forest.
And I remembered my own reply, amused but half believing her.
"More often than not, I find myself doing just that."
[Called it.]
The memory snapped in half, torn away by the present.
From above, the city looked like a carcass drowning in ants.
Every alley was vomiting claws and wings as thousands of monsters poured in from every direction, all of them sprinting toward a single point.
Toward me.
And here I sat after who knows how many minutes since that fall…
In the middle of a wide street paved with cracked stone, surrounded by overturned carts.
Legs stretched out, with the left one lacerated deep with bite wounds.
My gut skewered with a jagged shiv some goblin had been lucky enough to shove in before I painted its skull on an adjacent wall.
My face too was a ruin with three claw marks carved raw across it, blood dripping steadily, matting everything red.
Burns still screamed across my back.
While lungs hurt with every breath.
The pistol rested in its holster with only ten rounds left.
The sword sat sheathed back.
I had even lost the rifle somewhere in that damn horde.
And in my hand instead?
A bottle of rum covered in my own blood.
I tilted my head back, and stared at the tsunami of bodies rushing in.
Goblins clawing over orcs, hell-hounds exhaling fire in frantic bursts, harpies shrieking above, gargoyles winging low.
All of it in a storm of death collapsing toward me.
And I grinned my final grin…
Blood mixed with saliva dripped down my mouth, turning the smile into something even more disgusting.
"Bottom's up, bitches."
I lifted the bottle and drank.
Rum scorched its way down, mixing with blood still fresh in my mouth.
It burned my throat hotter than the fire-gal's violet flames ever burned my back.
And still I drank, throat working in greedy gulps, while the tide of monsters thundered closer.
The bottle's neck clinked against my teeth one last time before I raised it for that last empty cheers to this short one-day isekai.
And just as I did -
"The Way of the Sword Saint."
Astoria's voice tore through the chaos as she invoked whatever the hell that was, freezing my raised hand in place.
And then the sky fell.
—BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Flaming swords and frozen blades came screaming down from above, hundreds of them, each one a streak of wrath.
They smashed into the street in a storm of fire and frost, tearing the front line apart.
Goblins split in half, trolls froze mid-charge only to shatter a second later, hell-hounds burst into pillars of steam as fire met ice in a single brutal instant.
The shockwave rattled the stones beneath me, spraying monster blood and snow-ash in every direction.
For a heartbeat, I forgot how to breathe.
And then she landed.
Light as a step off a stair.
Boots whispering against cracked stone, blood still dried across her clothes and face from hours ago.
Lyra.
Before I could even reel, her hand clamped my wrist and yanked.
Pain ripped through my gut and leg as she hauled me upright.
The bottle clutched in my fist slipped out of my grip.
Then I was weightless.
No, carried.
"Like I said," she muttered, voice hard as steel, "you're not fighting alone."
"Oh, come on…" I groaned, face red with both blood and shame as she hefted me into another damn princess carry. "Give me back my dignity!"
And just like before, she ignored me as her boots flared with the spell roaring alive.
And in the next blink, we were airborne, the street below drowning again in monsters too slow to catch us.
Lyra's wind spell carried her in vast, weightless arcs.
Each leap looked less like a jump and more like she was gliding with the air bending around her frame.
From my unwilling vantage in her arms, I caught sight of the battlefield.
Astoria and Faris stood side by side, blades blazing, their silhouettes holding the line like dams while the sea of monsters crashed against them.
An army of two.
Or maybe just two fools thinking themselves as such...
Then we landed.
Her boots touched a flat rooftop, the spell fading into silence as she crouched, lowering me down like a child into its crib.
Before I could breathe a word, she grabbed the shiv buried in my gut.
"Wait, wait—"
She yanked.
"The hell!" I screamed, body arching. "I'll bleed out faster!"
"Not if I can help it," she shot back.
Her hand pressed against my wound as she began her chant, words thrumming with alien weight:
"By the breath between stars,
By the thread that binds marrow,
Blood still thy endless river,
Pain sleep, if only a while,
So life, return to thy vessel.
- Vitae Nexus!"
Warmth surged from her palm, not holy like the priest's prayers, but elemental, the kind of magic that stitched by force rather than grace.
The kind of magic I was used to.
My blood slowed, heat tightened under the skin, and the sharp pain in my gut dulled to a heavy ache.
The warmth spread.
It crawled out from my gut wound, slow at first, then faster, lancing through every nerve until it spilled across my whole body.
My back, my face, my leg - hell, even cuts I hadn't noticed lit up.
Within seconds, I was whole again.
Lyra wasn't.
Sweat poured down her brow, soaking the crusted blood that still clung to her skin.
Her breath hitched as she pulled a mana potion from her belt and downed it in huge gulps. The blue liquid glowed faintly before vanishing into her veins.
While I sat there, reeling.
My body still screamed with pain, but when I looked, there were no wounds left to scream about.
It was all phantom.
My brain hadn't caught up to the fact I wasn't dying anymore.
Though it was beginning to catch up.
"Odin," she said, voice trembling but steady enough. "Can you still fight?"
"Yeah," I muttered, flexing my hands. "The wounds are gone."
"I… I didn't mean physically."
"Heh," I sneered. "You know who you're talking to?"
But inside, my thoughts didn't match my mouth.
[Motherfucker, I'm scared shitless! This isn't the game. It never was… And I knew that. What the hell was I thinking?!?]
While a soft smile cracked across Lyra's face before she nodded once, as if she'd heard both answers.