Luaos didn't even manage to let out that battle cry he'd been building toward — the command simply died in his throat.
He looked down at his own hands. Those hands — once strong enough to tear steel apart and grip divine armaments without effort — were trembling. Faintly, but unmistakably.
It wasn't fear that made them shake. It was something far more humiliating: the weakness of being ordinary. The sensation of having become exactly the kind of lowly insect he had always despised, flooding every inch of his body in an instant.
"This is impossible... a Gift suppression of this magnitude — even a Floor Master shouldn't be capable of..."
Luaos gasped for air, desperately reaching inward for his "Hero's Spirit Origin" — and finding only silence.
And it wasn't just him.
The elite riders who had been mounted on their Pegasi were toppling one by one, the loss of divine equilibrium sending them sprawling ungracefully from their now-motionless horses. The once-fearsome elite of Perseus looked, at this moment, like a pack of rats that had fallen headfirst into a mud pit.
"Hmph."
A cold, dismissive sound came from ahead.
Luaos snapped his head up.
From the shadows, the golden-haired vampire girl — the one he had regarded as nothing more than cargo, a commodity — stepped slowly forward.
It was Leticia.
Her small, slight frame still carried that somewhat delicate air, and her strength and condition were nowhere near her peak. But right now, at this moment, that was more than enough.
"You damned vampire... you're property. You're a mere attachment, a thing — "
"And yet you dare?!"
Luaos's face contorted with fury as he wrenched the longsword from his hip. It was a legendary blade passed down from his ancestor — but stripped of its Gift enhancement, the thing was so heavy he could barely hold it one-handed.
"Kill her! Her Spirit Origin must be bound by the Gift Game's rules too!"
"She's mortal just like us right now — get her!"
At his command, several dozen Perseus members — caught between the threat of what appeared to be a Demon Lord's Gift Game — charged forward, brandishing weapons that had once been divine armaments but now gleamed with the dull light of ordinary steel.
It was supposed to be a recreation of their ancestor Perseus's legendary feat: the slaying of the Gorgon.
Under the rules of this Gift Game, it was nothing short of suicide.
Leticia moved.
Even with only the barest sliver of Spirit Origin remaining to her, she was not so feeble that a mob of powerless mortals could pose any real threat. She didn't know why Suke had given her this opportunity — but it didn't matter. She had wounds of her own to repay.
She had once been a Little Garden Knight who had earned the title of "God of War" even in the four-digit tiers. Dealing with a crowd of ordinary humans who had lost their Gifts — men who had even forgotten the proper form for swinging a sword — required no grand technique whatsoever.
Fwsh——!
An afterimage flashed.
The two brawny men at the front of the charge didn't even see what happened. Their throats were opened by razor-sharp fingernails in an instant.
Blood sprayed outward, catching the moonlight in a crimson arc of terrible beauty — like a wolf descending upon a flock of sheep, announcing the opening of this Gift Game.
"M-monster... she's a monster!"
Screams erupted across the floor of Perseus's once-magnificent hall.
But under the rules of this Demon Lord's Gift Game, it could only ever be a one-sided massacre.
Leticia's small figure moved like a bolt of golden lightning, threading through the crowd.
Every flicker of her presence claimed one opponent — sometimes several at once.
No elaborate techniques. No showmanship. Just pure, distilled efficiency.
The Perseus members who had once strutted about as though they owned the world were, before Leticia, nothing more than lambs waiting for the blade. The shields they had carried as divine armaments were torn apart with ease. Their armor was paper-thin against her.
Before long, blood had stained the marble floor red.
Luaos stood frozen in place, watching his pride — his people — being cut down one by one like garbage.
"No... this — this isn't right! This isn't how it's supposed to go!"
He stumbled backward in a panicked frenzy, colliding with a row of ornate decorations and sending them crashing.
"I am a hero's descendant! I am the leader of Perseus! How could I die in a place like this?!"
Watching Leticia close the distance, watching those cold, utterly emotionless eyes bearing down on him, Luaos finally broke.
He remembered his last resort.
The forbidden object — the one that had let him bully and dominate the lower tiers at will, the one that had drawn even the Floor Master Shiroyasha's wary attention.
"Die, you worthless wretch!"
Luaos roared, tearing a tightly wrapped cloth bundle from inside his robe and hurling it with all his remaining strength against the floor.
"Come forth, Alger — turn everything in this place to stone!"
The bundle split open in midair.
A head rolled out — features locked in a snarl, hair writhing with venomous serpents.
It was the head of the Gorgon: the vessel that housed the will of Alger, one of Little Garden's mightiest Stellar Spirits.
In that moment, a look of near-manic triumph flashed through Luaos's eyes.
He waited for the light of petrification to sweep across the floor. He waited for Leticia to shatter into dust before him.
And yet.
One second passed.
Three seconds passed.
The head lay quietly on the floor, its serpentine hair pooling in a puddle of blood. Not the faintest twitch of a reaction.
"How... why isn't it responding?"
"Even under a five-digit Demon Lord's Gift Game, it shouldn't be — unless..."
Luaos lunged at the head in a frantic crawl and began striking it wildly, as though the sheer force of his denial could chase away the horrifying possibility taking shape in his mind.
"Move! Move, damn you — you're a Stellar Spirit, you're the mightiest Demon Lord there is! Kill her for me!"
Leticia stopped walking.
She looked down at him from above — not with anger in her eyes. Only the quiet pity one reserves for a clown.
To think that creatures like this had wanted to destroy No Name, had wanted to rule over the lower tiers of Little Garden — when she remembered what His Lordship had told her, she found the whole thing at once pathetic and laughable.
An afterimage flashed.
Luaos's eyes went wide. His lips moved, still trying to form some plea for mercy.
Leticia turned her wrist.
There was a dull, heavy thud — and the leader of the Perseus community went down like a dead dog.
In that instant, the screaming that had filled the air was extinguished completely.
Within the Perseus stronghold, the only sound left was Leticia's quiet breathing — and the thick, nauseating reek of blood.
"...It's over."
Leticia lowered her hands. Blood dripped from her fingertips.
She hadn't killed anyone in a very long time.
But the rules of the Gift Game demanded it — she'd had no choice but to kill, even if it might earn her the enmity of the Greek pantheon. Though, if she were being honest, that lord of hers felt considerably more frightening than any group of gods.
"Hmm?"
"His Lordship's Gift Game... it hasn't ended?"
Leticia tilted her head, puzzled.
And then — in the very next instant —
The vampire instinct built into Leticia's very being lurched with a sudden, violent premonition.
She hadn't even had time to react.
The Gorgon's head — that motionless thing lying quietly in its pool of blood — began to shudder. Violently.
Hisssssss——!!
It was the sound of countless serpents shrieking at once, as though rising from the deepest pit of the underworld.
The Gorgon's head — the one that had shown not the slightest response — moved.
"?!"
An ill omen bloomed in Leticia's chest.
Creak... creak...
The head was producing the sound of grinding bone.
And then, beneath eyelids that had been sealed shut — a pair of violet pupils of breathtaking, otherworldly beauty slowly, slowly opened.
"Oh my... what a thoroughly unpleasant nap."
A girl's voice drifted through the Perseus stronghold: languid and unhurried, and yet carrying a strange, magnetic quality that made the hairs on the back of the neck rise.
The mightiest Stellar Spirit. Alger.
Leticia suddenly recalled a certain event from the distant past — the War of the Twin Goddesses, which had ended in such a messy, inconclusive fashion, and the loser of that conflict who had been absorbed into the Greek pantheon as a diminished, subdued Spirit Origin.
But even in defeat, she had once touched the three-digit tier — the realm of the truly omnipotent.
In an era where the Omnipotence Paradox had kept Little Garden from producing anyone at that tier for a very, very long time — her arrival was simply something Leticia could not overcome.
"Now, who..."
The Demon Lord in the body of a girl tilted her head to one side. Those violet pupils — capable of petrifying gods and Buddhas alike — finally came to rest on Leticia.
"...was it you, little vampire, who interrupted Al-chan's beauty sleep?"
____
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