The Death Mage that doesn't want a fourth time

104 There's nothing that can be done, but I want rice

There were several men on a mountain in the region that was formerly the Sauron Duchy, now occupied by the Amid Empire.

Tentacles were twisting and crawling around in front of them, hitting the water surface and sending muddy water into the air.

"This thing, it's still alive?!"

"F-fire, fire!"

The panicked archers hastily nocked arrows with their tips covered in a green fluid in their short bows and pulled back their bowstrings.

"Don't panic, it's already dead!" shouted a young man with characteristic bangs and a well-featured face, but several arrows fired by the archers buried themselves in the ominously-quivering creature with thudding noises.

But the tentacles wouldn't stop writhing. The young man clicked his tongue and reprimanded the archers.

"I explained this beforehand; the lower bodies of these things don't stop moving for a while even after they've died. Even if you cut their heads off or split their upper bodies in half, they keep squirming around for a bit. Octopuses..."

The young man was about to explain that octopuses were the same, but stopped himself. He had grown up in a coastal town, but he had just remembered that many of the archers were from inland regions, so even if they knew that creatures called octopuses existed, they would have only seen them as dried food products or pickled in vinegar.

"They're like lizard's tails," the young man said. "They flail around for a while, don't they?"

This was actually for a completely different reason, but what the young man needed to give the archers right now was not proper education, but composure.

"I-I see."

"Indeed... As expected of Vice-captain Rick, you're so knowledgeable."

This goal was accomplished; the archers regained their composure and lowered their bows. The arrows that they used and the poison coating the arrowheads were special, so they couldn't be fired wastefully.

"Don't relax too much; we'll have to put it on display once it stops moving," said Rick.

"What will we do about the Magic Stone and materials?" asked one of his subordinates.

"Don't touch them, of course," said Rick. "We're short on money, but it would be bad if by some small chance someone found out that we were the ones who have been killing these things."

"That's true, too."

Seeing his subordinate return his disassembling knife to its sheath, Rick waded into the marsh towards the creature that had lost its balance and toppled over... the Scylla woman.

Her eyes were still wide open in disbelief as Rick grabbed her loosely-hanging, mud-covered hand.

"Sorry, but I'll take this back," Rick murmured. "I'll be using it for the next one as well, you see."

And then he took the ring, which he had given to her just moments before, from her thin finger.

"Dispose of her."

The archers obeyed Rick's order and switched from their short bows to hand axes, and set about turning the Scylla into a repulsive mess.

They severed all of her tentacles and hacked into the upper body below her neck, with their blows particularly focused around her breasts.

"Vice-captain Rick, this occurs to me every time, but why do we cut their chests up so much? And wouldn't it be faster to use Axe Technique to cut them from the waist below in one go rather than cutting their tentacles off one by one?" another subordinate asked.