Project GB is an official initiative by Re:Library.

“Being ‘Clara’ is an Embarrassment.”

The moment I declared that, for some reason, I caught Cestlavie sighing awkwardly in the corner of my vision, even the usually shameless Coppelia averted her eyes uncomfortably, and Regulus fidgeted with an expression of sheer frustration.

“…………”

And as for Eliza herself—her face twisted into something beyond words… If I had to describe it, it was the look of someone who had just lost all their money trading forex. But in the next instant—

“YOU FILTHY BIIIIITTCCCHHHH!!!”

With words and a face no Shrine Maiden Princess should ever wear, she hurled a fist straight at my face.

Whoooshhhhhh—!!!

The blow came screaming in, her slender-looking arm seeming a hundred times larger under the sheer force of her killing intent.

“Kya—wah!?”

I reflexively parried with a circular block, but the punch, like a rifle shot fired at point-blank range, carried so much power that I couldn’t fully deflect it. The recoil alone sent me flying five or six mertes back from where I’d been standing.

“—…gh!?”

I braced myself, expecting Eliza’s immediate follow-up strike, and struggled desperately to right my posture. Fortunately, she seemed unaccustomed to her new physical abilities. After overextending with that punch, her stance broke, and she stumbled back three or four mertes before barely managing to steady herself.

“Jill! —Wait, what the hell is this thing, some kind of sea-monster!?”
“—Tch, out of my way!”

Cestlavie and Regulus rushed in to cover me, but before they could reach my side, wastebeasts hauled themselves out of the pool of alkahest. They looked like bipedal giant salamanders—disgustingly, their limbs were proportioned eerily close to a human’s. With surprising speed, they blocked the path and planted themselves between us.

Grinding his teeth, Cestlavie snapped:
“Damn it—take this! 「Vajra 」!”

“Haah!!” roared Regulus, unleashing a blast of pure magical force at the same time.

“Ggghhhiiiiiiiiiikkkkk!!”
“Gyyaaaaauuuuuuuuhhh!!”

The wastebeasts struck by lightning convulsed, staggering for only a moment, while the others’ bodies were slashed by countless invisible blades of magical energy. Purple ichor sprayed from their wounds—yet instead of faltering, they howled in rage and charged at Cestlavie and Regulus with renewed vigor.

““Wh-what!?””

The two of them were visibly shaken.
It was true that the spells those two had just used weren’t the kind that focused all power on a single target, but rather techniques that spread their effects over a wide area. Even so, the fact that they’d inflicted only this paltry amount of damage was unexpected. Judging from their aura and the amount of mana they carried, these abominations should have been about on par with Gyurinus—in other words, among outside monsters, at best comparable to an orc brute.

And yet Cestlavie and Regulus together had managed no more than a few scratches. Under normal circumstances, such a result should have been impossible.

“—Hey, Regulus. You put a fair bit of mana into that just now, didn’t you? Enough to grind up a whole pack of orc brutes into mincemeat, at least.”
“Yeah. But all it did was slice through a bit of hide and flesh on the surface—the rest of the power was dampened.”
“My lightning, too… wasn’t it just me, or did it look like it was deflected at the skin?”
“It wasn’t your imagination. The moment it struck, the lightning—no, the mana itself—was dispersed across their surface.”

Facing the abominations pressing in from all directions, the two men instinctively fell into a back-to-back stance, analyzing the situation even as they prepared to fight.

“In other words, our spells do activate properly. But since the damage is still being reduced, that means they’ve got some sort of resistance to magic. Which suggests physical attacks would work better… but that’s a bad matchup for us.”

Cestlavie was, if anything, a pure magic specialist with paper-thin defenses, while Regulus, though his race gave him greater physical durability than humans, was still little more than a novice when it came to close-quarters combat.

And in situations like this, the one who acts without hesitation is Coppelia.

“Times like this, the best move is to take out the boss first! So here we go—die already, Elizaaarrrr!!”

Rocket punch, launch!

“—W-wait! I’m not Eliza, you know!”

The rocket punch that had been fired straight at Eliza—
for some reason veered off midair, wobbling uncertainly before finally homing in on me instead.

“…Huhhh? That’s odd. My shots usually hit one hundred percent of the time.”

At the very last moment, I managed to deflect the punch with my Ari di Luce.

“This is not the time for a casual ‘huh?’! I was this close to being sunk by friendly fire—”

Before I could even finish protesting, Eliza recovered her stance and closed the distance in an instant, unleashing a flurry of blows with both fists and feet.

“—Kh! She’s fast!”

I thought it would be a series of clumsy amateur punches and kicks, but I was sorely mistaken. Her reflexes and speed were anything but ordinary, and even I could only dodge half of them by sheer guesswork.

What’s worse, it wasn’t just speed—her raw power and durability were monstrous. Each step shattered the sturdy stone floor beneath her, and when her fist only grazed one, a nearby stone golem was blown apart into rubble.

To be on the receiving end of that was nothing short of unbearable.

Her appearance aside, her insides were pure gorilla… no, more like fighting a life-sized kaiju at this point.

“Lady Claraaa, that’s a boomerang of a statement, you know. The fact that you’re trading blows evenly with her means that, from an outside perspective, this is nothing less than two kaiju duking it out.”

Coppelia, having retrieved her rocket punch and flexed its joints experimentally, pulled yet another massive, spiked morning star out of her apron pocket. While fending off the stone golems swarming around her, she responded to my muttered complaint with a lightning-quick—and thoroughly unnecessary—retort.