Entropy's Servant

Chapter 36 - Dubious Combat

In the dark lord's castle...

In the training grounds, surrounded by a barrier erected by a little dryad, two beast-children dressed in strange perversions of what appeared to be school uniforms faced a humanoid dog with beautiful white fur.

Their names were Asami, Nexu and Alpine.

As they were the newest members of the dark lord's army, quite a number of curious demons had gathered around, some of them literally climbing over one another to get a glimpse of the newbies' power.

The dark lord himself had decided that that rabble was below him and consequently used earth magic to raise a platform into the sky and watch from above.

Also on this platform were the girl who carried the legitimacy of the vampire crown, a mighty, though juvenile, Red Dragon, and the man who had trained the children up to the level they were now.

In addition, though she was concealed, the goddess of darkness, too, was watching this battle from the sidelines.

The only ones capable of it who weren't wearing some kind of amused expression were the three combatants on the sandy, earthen stage the dark lord had risen for them.

As always, the children's eyes reflected not the slightest bit of light, causing them to look particularly unmotivated and unenthusiastic about this. Despite this, they unsheathed their swords and took on a battle-ready stance.

Alpine, in turn, lowered its body to the ground, taking on a more 'feral' stance than its usual bipedal gait. Apart from its snowy white fur and starry black eyes, it looked like any other Kobold that happened to have found a collar somewhere.

Of course, the children's weapons were genuine, and Alpine wasn't wearing any kind of protector on its claws, despite this being a practice battle.

"As long as any injuries can be healed afterwards, it's fine."

With that sort of reckless mentality, the average practice battle between demons was far more bloody and painful than those between humans.

"Begin!"

With one word from the dark lord, the fight--

Didn't immediately start.

Instead, both parties remained stationary, observing each other.

The children stuck close to each other, though the positions they held their swords in didn't exactly display what would conventionally be known as teamwork.

Cautiously, Alpine circled them, for whatever reason exposing its teeth, despite its claws being its greatest asset.

After what must have been half a minute of this, Asami kicked off the ground without warning, kicking up a rather large cloud of dust as her figure disappeared from view.

Although Nexu seemed to have anticipated her movement, he didn't seem to have expected the cloud of dust, given he flinched momentarily and had trouble holding in a cough.

On the other side, Alpine looked around with narrowed eyes as it searched for Asami's location, and it took it several seconds to get the brilliant idea to use its highly sensitive nose to locate her.

Once it did get the idea, its nose twitched a few times as it closed its eyes to sniff the air...

And it sneezed due to the dust entering its nose, the unexpected action causing it to flop onto the floor, thus avoiding Asami's swords by virtue of pure luck.

The dark lord found it rather difficult not to bury his face in the palm of his hand, and the expressions on the faces of his companions were hard to describe.