I Became A Side Character Fated To Suffer-Chapter 53: Absolute Severance

"Because I don’t feel like stopping either."

His eyes locked onto the Chimera, and there was something deeply unsettling in how steady that gaze was, how completely unbothered he looked standing in the middle of all that destruction.

"You can regenerate now, but can you carry it infinitely?"

The Chimera lunged again, its entire body twisting violently as claws, wings, and tail attacked all at once.

The ground shattered beneath its weight and the air screamed from the pressure of it moving, but Noel stepped forward into it rather than away from it, and his presence seemed to drop like something physical and heavy, something that pushed against everything around him.

His smile deepened.

"Let me teach you something." His voice had turned cold, but underneath the coldness there was something else, something that sounded almost like excitement, like a person who had just found something genuinely interesting after a long and boring stretch of time.

"Regeneration only works..."

The stick moved in his hand, and a single clean motion was drawn.

"...if there’s something left to regenerate."

SHHHHHK!

The world split. A line carved through the battlefield and sliced through the Chimera’s body before the creature even registered what had happened, and the attack didn’t stop there.

It extended outward and tore through the ground and cut apart everything standing in its path, like reality itself had been peeled open along a seam that had always been there, waiting.

The Chimera froze, and then its body separated. Clean and perfect, with no resistance and no sound beyond the wet finality of it.

Before it could react, Noel moved again, faster and sharper than before, and each step he took left destruction behind him like footprints.

"You can grow it right?"

SHHHHHK!

A wing disappeared.

"You can adapt?"

SHHHHHK!

A leg was gone.

"You can devour?"

SHHHHHK!

Its torso split apart again before it could even begin to close, and the Chimera tried to roar but its voice broke apart the same way its body did, fragmenting in its throat as it kept getting cut faster than it could rebuild itself.

"Hehhe...Then show me?"

"Entertain me?"

It stepped back. Its massive body trembled in a way it never had before, a deep and involuntary shudder that ran through every part of it, and something shifted behind its eyes as it looked at Noel.

But it lacked the blind and furious hunger that had driven every attack until now. Something older and more desperate had replaced all of that, something that the creature had perhaps never felt before in its existence and did not have the framework to fully understand.

It hesitated, and in that hesitation it stared at him, , and what it saw standing there with that plain stick and that widening smile was not a fighter or an enemy or even a predator in any recognizable sense.

It was something worse than all of those things combined, something that did not follow the rules that living creatures understood, something that looked human but clearly did not think the way humans were supposed to think.

If it could have spoken, it would have screamed. What was wrong with this person? What were those movements? Why did everything it tried to hold together keep coming apart?

Noel saw the hesitation. His eyes lit up with something sharp and immediate, and a low laugh escaped from somewhere in his chest before he could or cared to stop it.

"Heheheh..." The laugh was quiet but it carried, and it was not a warm sound. "Do you feel fear?"

His head tilted slightly to one side as he looked at the creature with open curiosity, the way someone might look at an experiment that had just produced an unexpected and fascinating result.

That twisted smile widened even further.

"Good....You should."

He vanished.

He reappeared above the Chimera and the stick dropped straight down, and the moment it did, the sky itself seemed to crack above them.

A massive invisible force slammed downward with it and crushed the Chimera into the ground, and the earth caved in beneath the impact and formed a deep crater while shockwaves spread outward in every direction and destroyed what remained of anything nearby.

Dust and debris exploded into the air and swallowed everything in a thick and choking cloud, and for a moment nothing could be seen at all.

Then the cuts followed, and they were endless and relentless.

The Chimera’s body was no longer whole in any meaningful sense. It had been reduced to fragments, and each fragment was being sliced apart again before it could so much as attempt to crawl toward another piece of itself. Noel didn’t stop.

He kept walking forward through the dust and destruction, and each step was matched with another cut, each slow and steady breath with another line of separation carved through whatever was left.

"You’re not hard to kill." His voice echoed through the chaos around him, unhurried and almost conversational. "You’re just hard to finish right."

The Chimera tried to pull itself together again, and it almost managed it, its pieces straining toward one another with that terrible and stubborn biological insistence on continuing to exist.

But something had changed in how it moved.

It was turning around and was trying to run.

Every fragment of the creature’s awareness was consumed by a single and overwhelming need that it had never experienced before, not once in its entire existence, which was the need to be somewhere else, to be anywhere that was not here, not in front of this thing that kept cutting and cutting and cutting without effort or exhaustion or even the basic decency to look like it was trying.

It did not understand what Noel was.

It understood only that it needed to be as far away from him as possible, and it threw everything it had left into moving in the opposite direction.

Noel stopped and watched it go.

The twisted smile faded.

His eyes tracked the fleeing creature without blinking, and when he finally spoke his voice had dropped into something almost soft.

"Run?"

A pause stretched out behind the word.

"Where..."

"From whom."

The Chimera didn’t stop. It turned fully and dragged its broken and partially reassembled body forward as fast as it could manage, pouring every remaining impulse it had into escape.

Noel sighed, a genuine and slightly tired sound, and shook his head once.

"Haa." He looked at the retreating creature for another moment and then muttered, mostly to himself, "Seems like that’s it. "

"Not up to mark."

His gaze went briefly distant, carrying that particular quality of mild professional disappointment. "Whoever made this shit needs to experiment more."

"It’s not sturdy at all."

If anyone heard this they might start coughing blood.

He raised the stick and flicked it upward into the air, and as it rose and began to fall back down he moved his fingers into a sequence of precise signs and symbols, each one deliberate and exact.

The Chimera felt it before it saw it. Something changed in the air behind it, a pressure and a stillness that spread outward from where Noel stood, and the terror that had been driving it forward suddenly became something else entirely, and paralysing that stopped the creature mid-stride as every instinct it possessed screamed a single unified warning at once.

Running was not going to work. It understood that now with a certainty that went beyond thought, beyond the animal calculation of distance and speed. There was no direction it could move that would matter

If it could not escape, then it would at least end this on its own terms, and it shot toward Noel with everything it had left, crossing the distance between them in a single explosive movement.

A crazy smile stretched across Noel’s face as it appeared before him, and the laugh that came out of him was wide and eerie.

"I see. So you have chosen death itself." There was no mockery in it, just a simple and honest acknowledgment, almost like respect. "Then take this."

He flicked one finger and muttered two words.

"Absolute Severance."

SAWIISH!

The Chimera’s body stopped mid-air.

Everything stopped.

The world itself seemed to pause for a fraction of a second, and the silence in that pause was the total and complete kind, the kind that has no room in it for anything else.

Then those standing behind Noel saw something that none of them had words ready for.

Elderic, Reed, and Eleanor stood with wide eyes and bodies that had gone completely still, and what they watched was not an explosion, was not the creature being thrown or crushed or burned.

The Chimera simply started getting cut, and the lines appeared across its entire body one after another in a sequence that was countless and precise and utterly without mercy, and then everything separated at once.

The space around the creature seemed to split as well, as though the attack did not recognise any meaningful difference between living matter and the air that surrounded it. The Chimera was cut apart in a way that left nothing behind, and what had been there a moment ago simply ceased to be there, and a massive slash tore through everything in front of Noel and erased the last of it completely.

No pieces remained in thier.

The ground far beyond the point where the creature had stood cracked open and the crack stretched into the distance, as though the world itself had been cut and was only now beginning to notice.

Silence fell over everything.

Behind him, Elderic, Reed, and Eleanor remained exactly where they were, frozen in place, and the only thought that any of them could hold in their heads at that moment was....

Just what the fuck had they witnessed.