I Became A Side Character Fated To Suffer-Chapter 52:So You Are The Kind Who Refuses To Die

Noel didn’t look back. He grabbed Eleanor by the arm and lifted her as though she weighed absolutely nothing, his movements careless and almost rough with indifference.

She barely had time to understand what was happening before he swung his arm and released her, and her body launched through the air like she was nothing more than a loose object he’d decided to set aside.

"HEY—!"

The scream tore out of her throat before she could stop it, raw and panicked, as the wind rushed hard against her face and the ground below her became a blur.

Elderic saw it happen and didn’t hesitate. He shoved through the pain that had been grinding at him for the past several minutes and threw himself forward, and he caught her just before she could hit anything solid.

The momentum forced him backward, his boots scraping against the cracked earth, but his arms locked around her and held on. For a moment, neither of them moved or spoke. They both stared at the same thing.

Noel had already turned away from her completely, as though she had never been relevant to begin with.

His eyes were fixed on the Chimera, and nothing else existed for him.

The creature roared and lunged, its massive tail whipping through the air with a force that bent the surrounding trees and sent dirt scattering across the ground. It was the kind of strike that could snap stone, the kind that left craters, and it moved directly at Noel’s body. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

But it stopped.

There was no dramatic sound, no explosion of effort.

The tail simply stopped in the air, and Noel stood with one arm raised, his fingers wrapped around it like he’d caught a piece of drifting cloth. His expression didn’t shift by even a fraction. He held the enormous limb steady while it trembled against his grip, and then he pushed it away with a slow, almost bored movement of his hand.

The tail snapped back and slammed into the dirt behind the Chimera with a sound that shook the ground.

Noel reached behind his back and pulled out a stick. It was a plain and utterly unremarkable thing, the kind you’d find on the forest floor without giving it a second thought, and he pointed it toward the Chimera with the same casual energy someone might use when gesturing at something mildly interesting across the street.

"Come here, baby."

The words came out flat, almost gentle, and somehow that made them worse.

The Chimera’s rage became something almost primal.

It lunged again, its claws slashing down in rapid and relentless succession, each strike fast enough to blur.

Noel moved through all of it without apparent effort, his body swaying left and then right, drifting between the attacks with the kind of calm that didn’t belong in a fight. At one point, his hand shot out and he slapped the side of the creature’s face with an open palm, and the sound of it rang out sharp and clear above everything else.

The Chimera paused for just a fraction of a second, something almost like confusion crossing those enormous, furious eyes.

Noel kept moving, kept dodging, but something in his face had started to change. His eyes had narrowed slightly, and they were tracking the creature with a focus that hadn’t been there before. He saw it now, clearly and without question.

The places where his attacks had landed were healing and growing.

The Chimera was getting larger, its body pulling in on itself and rebuilding into something denser and more erratic, and the pattern of its regeneration had the quality of something deeply wrong. Noel slowed just enough to mutter under his breath, though his voice carried no particular alarm.

"The hell is going on?"

He turned his head slightly toward Reed, and Reed, who had been watching with a tension that had turned his whole body rigid, understood the question immediately. He pushed himself upright and called out across the distance between them, his voice strained but steady enough.

"It regrows whatever gets cut, and it absorbs energy attacks by swallowing them whole. To actually kill it, you have to cut it into pieces first, then destroy everything at once before it can pull itself back together."

Noel turned that over for a moment, his gaze drifting back toward the Chimera.

"Ah," he said simply, as though someone had just explained why a door was sticking.

He looked at the creature. The creature looked at him. And then the stillness that settled between them had a different quality to it, something that made Elderic tighten his hold on Eleanor without fully understanding why.

His figure blurred, and the stick passed through the air once, then twice, then several more times in a sequence so precise and so rapid that the individual movements became impossible to follow.

There was nothing theatrical about any of it. No charging of energy, no visible buildup, no sound beyond the faint displacement of air. The cuts appeared across the Chimera’s body in long, clean lines that crossed each other in a pattern too deliberate to be anything but intentional, and the air itself seemed to split apart at the edges of each one.

Trees at the far end of the clearing fell without any sound at first, severed through their trunks before the crack of it even reached the ears. The ground fractured along strange angles.

The Chimera stood completely still.

Then the blood came, all at once, erupting from every cut simultaneously, and its body came apart in clean and terrible sections that hit the ground in heavy silence. The surrounding area had been reduced to fragments, the destruction reaching out in every direction from where Noel stood, and he hadn’t moved from that spot.

He lowered the stick slowly.

"Now that makes more sense," he said, and exhaled once through his nose, something almost like relief in the sound of it. "Still annoying, though."

But the Chimera was not done.

The pieces were already moving. Chunks of flesh dragged themselves across the torn ground, bones snapping back into alignment with sounds like breaking branches, veins stretching between the separated masses like threads being pulled taut on a loom. Its roar came out distorted and fractured, but the fury in it had not diminished by even a degree.

Noel watched it without moving.

"Finish it!" Reed’s voice cracked with urgency, and the sound of it clearly irritated Noel in a way that was quiet but unmistakable.

"Shut up and step back," Noel said, and his tone was flat and unhurried, though it carried something underneath it that made stepping back feel like the only reasonable option. "Let the man enjoy himself for a moment."

He turned his attention back to the regenerating mass before him and studied it.

"So you’re the kind that refuses to die," he said quietly.

His grip on the stick adjusted, just slightly.

The air around him changed in a way that was difficult to name, a pressure that settled against the skin and made the breath feel heavier, a shift in the atmosphere that had no visible source but was undeniable to everyone standing within range of it.

"Good," he said, and a faint smile appeared at the corner of his mouth.