Vandalieu plunged both of his arms into the angry Sercrent’s chest.

「Gagah?!」(Sercrent)

With【Spirit Form Transformation】applied to his arms, he moved them around inside and extracted his spirit while he was still alive.

「I’ve never met my father, so I can’t say that I love him. I don’t even know if I respect him. So even if you ridicule my father, even if you’re the one who killed him, I can’t hate you on his behalf.」(Vandalieu)

And I’ve learned the hard way on Earth and in Origin that blood relatives aren’t always your allies.

And then Vandalieu began to tear the spirit that he had pulled out.

「GYAAAAAAAH! AAAAAAAGH!」(Sercrent)

「But my mother loved my father. And the fact that you have connections to the Mirg shield-nation means that you’re not entirely unrelated to her death. I’m sure you were involved with the extermination force that was sent into the Devil’s Nest forest, too. That’s why I hate you bitterly. I’ll never forgive you; I don’t want to be liked by you. You make me sick. I’m not going to let you have another life.」(Vandalieu)

His spirit-form arms found a shining sphere, the size of a marble that he could pinch between his fingers.

And then he seized it.

「S-stop! Anything, anything but that!」(Sercrent)

This sphere was a soul. The core of a spirit, covered in spirit form. If compared to a cell, this was the part that would contain genetic information.

Sercrent understood this instinctively and pleaded with Vandalieu, but Vandalieu wasn’t listening.

He crushed Sercrent’s soul with all of his strength.

「GAAAAAAAAAH! GIHYAAAAAAAH! GYA –」(Sercrent)

With a cracking sound, it crumbled and fell to the floor.

The base fragments that made up Sercrent danced in the air like particles of light.

Sercrent, who had been screaming for his life, stopped moving at that moment. His heart was still beating and he was still breathing, and if there were machines available to perform electroencephalography, they would probably be able to detect brain waves.

However, Sercrent would never move again.

「What a nice sound… I’ve always wanted to do this.」(Vandalieu)

He had broken a soul. In manga and light novels, Vandalieu had occasionally seen spells or items that could『break』or『destroy』souls, but he had always wondered ever since his time in Origin whether it was really possible to do it.