Chapter 20

“Witch slayer…”

Alexis whispered the words back to himself like he was trying to confirm what he had heard.

Monette flipped the book in her hands closed before turning to Percival.

“Percival, do you remember what we talked about last night? That if a witch is beaten upside the head with a brick, they will die?”

“Ah, I remember.”

“Wait, what were you guys doing last night?”

“I told Percival that you can kill a witch by beating their skull in with a brick. If a witch has their skull caved in by a person repeatedly hitting them with a brick, they would obviously die.”

“I see… So the witch slayer is a brick?”

“Wait. Don’t just advance the story on the premise that you would be able to just hit a witch with a brick.”

Monette waved off Alexis’s idea, but contrary to the overall joking atmosphere, Alexis was staring at her with a serious look. His eyes were boring holes into her armor, and the same could be said for Percival as well.

The gazes of the two were hard for Monette. She could feel their gazes bouncing off the armor wrapped around her causing a resonating *jii~*¹ to bounce around inside. Rather than hearing what the person inside had to say, were they trying to figure how to slay armor instead?

Cold sweat dripped down Monette’s back, and she sunk further into the cushion to put a little distance between them. Her eyes were swimming inside her helmet. She could not escape from the gazes focused on her, but her eyes still kept darting around through the iron as if some way to escape would magically appear.

Noticing that Monette had sunk into the cushion and sensing her apparent discomfort, the two men took a breath, lowered their eyebrows, and diverted their gazes to another part of the carriage. Alexis tried to keep his voice calm as he brought the subject back on track.

“So Monette, do you have something like a curse that can take down witches?”

“…No. Witches are immune to another witch’s curse. Besides that one fact, witches are the same as other people and will die when hit upside the head with a brick.”

“I’m starting to think you have a weird thing with bricks, but if that is the truth, is there a way for an ordinary person to get so close to a witch?”

Monette silently nodded to Alexis’s mutterings. Although it is not a pleasant thing to talk about how to repel witches such as herself, Alexis’s remarks were correct.

A witch slayer is just an ordinary person, not even another witch. As soon as the person recognizes that magic does not work on them, they can be considered witch slayers. It is not impossible for a witch slayer to sneak up and take a witch off guard.

“It is always possible to attack a witch while she is sleeping. Nevertheless, before a certain incident, witches never really paid any attention to anything like a ‘witch slayer,’ and they always wrote that off as just a random incident. The country acted as an intermediary and recorded these extremely rare incidents.”

“…A certain incident?”

“Yes, actually, a single witch was assassinated in her sleep.”

It was a few hundred years ago. At that time, ‘witch slaying’ was not known by that name, and there was never any reason that would warrant giving out such a name.

At that time, a witch slayer, the first person to be known as a witch slayer, was hired when a woman’s husband fell in love with a witch…

At least he pretended to. In the end he was just using the witch to kill time. An entanglement of indecency that he enjoyed in his own snobbish way.

The man tried to take advantage of the witch’s magical skill for his own self-interest. He tried to toss her to the side when he was done with her, but he ended up being tortured and killed instead. For men, a witch that falls in love with you can give you anything given her mood, so it is synonymous to having a convenient woman with the best usability.

In the wife’s grief, the woman hired a man immune to magic, and he easily killed the witch in her sleep.

After that, anyone who was immune to magic became known as a witch slayer, and a long fight began between them and the witches.

Even with absolute power, a witch cannot onesidedly kill regular humans on their end. Humans create, and witches rely on them for food, materials, and other daily necessities. No matter how good of friends a group of witches are, they would never sacrifice time that could be spent researching magic to procure these things for each other making it impossible for them to be self-sufficient.

That is why the witches had to locate the witch slayers specifically, leading many witches to have to hide what they were, which led to them being killed in their sleep. Even if you were to call it fighting, most of the deaths were the result of the two sides just cleverly assassinating each other.

“Such a fight… obviously ended with the witch’s victory.”

Although witchcraft is ineffective against witch slayers, it was still effective against everyone else. If a witch has a country backing her, then a few ordinary men with a knife are no match for her. Sometimes they would curse a king, sometimes they’d threaten the people, and sometimes they’d deceive a village to lead a witch slayer to their inevitable death.

In the first place, the only reason why the dispute lasted as long as it did could be said to be the whim of the witches. The first witch slayer was hunted down for retribution, but everything after that was mostly for killing time and providing a fun show. Since they were written from the viewpoints of witches, the records that the Idira family left behind certainly held a surprising tone about the time period.

However, even though it ended nearly a few hundred years ago, the witch slayer’s eradication is still known and talked about.

Monette spoke about all of this quite lightly, and she gave off a smug smile when she saw the Alexis and Percival’s faces pale. Have you finally realized the horror of a witch?

Of course, I am also a witch, so I showed my pride by rising gracefully from the cushion and showing off my majestic figure. Confusion arises in Alexis and Percival’s eyes. It seems that they finally recognized the poor armored girl that had been carefreely accompanying them until now had become one of the magnificent and terrible witches that were in the story.

It felt good, so I smiled in my helmet and pulled out a sugar confection from my pouch. I picked out the most tasty looking one and threw it into my mouth … … … … but it was a little slippery.

“Ah”

I raised my voice without thinking.

However, it was already too late. The sugar confection would never take its rightful place in my mouth and instead rolled down the inside of my helmet, lodging itself with a loud *KONG!*

When I reflexively stood up from my seat, things only got worse as the confection fell further down my armor with a *Kon* *Kon* *KONG!* … … … Everyone turned their heads to my iron covered foot. We could not see the skin through the iron, but everyone knew that the confection had fallen all the way down onto my foot.

……………………………………

“Pfft…”

Percival was the first to break the silence.

Even though he covered his mouth with his hand and looked away, his shoulders were still trembling quite grandly.

“Kuu……”

Alexis made a noise as he stared out the window.

His hand was grasped so firmly over his knee that I could see the whites of his knuckles.

It was quite obvious that they were enduring their laughter. They were quite close to their limits as far as I can see.

Towards such two people, Monette narrowed her eyes inside her helmet and pulled out a piece of parchment and an ink pen from her pouch. *Sari sari* She quickly drew up an angry kitty-cat with fumes being expunged from its nostrils. Its gleaming fangs and inflated tail appealed to the extent of its anger.

Monette finished the drawing in almost a second before shoving it in front of the two’s faces.

“Go ahead and laugh, but whoever laughs first, I will beat this monster upside your head.”

“Mo- Monette …. …. … no one’ going to laugh…. …. … Look, we’ll turn around, so go ahead and take it off and take it out.”

“Yes, Monette. The curse is … … … the sugar candy is going to disappear, so let’s buy some more at the next town.”

So while two people continued to fruitlessly make their cases while trembling, Monette spoke the words of her magical invocation underneath her helmet.

1. This is probably the first Japanese sound effect I knew without having to look it up. It’s a pretty common one in anime; it’s meant to be the sound effect for intense staring.