The ice spears that flew in swiftly made a “kwajik-” sound as they sank firmly into the ice wall. Each time the tips of the intersecting weapons penetrated the angular sphere, the opaque ice interior was dyed red, and the roar of the struggling mother body leaked through the cracks of the splitting fissures.
Meterion’s sword and Isabella’s sickle dug deep into that gap and twisted. Charlotte, who flew in next, struck down with all her might with the tip of her sword, but her blade, unable to pierce the solid wall, slid off to the side.
“Aim properly!”
At that moment, Liner’s only hand reached out and grasped the handle of Charlotte’s sword together with her. The sword tip, now standing perfectly vertical, was honed even further as it hardened, and with the combined strength of the two of them, it instantly pierced through the thick ice and tough hide.
Like a hedgehog with its spines raised, the surface of the ice wall was being filled with sharp weapons without a gap. Leonardo, rushing in fast and aiming for one of the few remaining empty spots in the middle, increased his charging speed while lengthening his spear in impatience.
‘Please stay still. Let me end this in one go.’
Unable to use teleportation with his vision obscured by rain, the time it took to reach the creature felt as long as an eon. As the battalion commanders who had planted their weapons endured the creature’s violent struggles while looking only at him, Leonardo aimed at a single point with the momentum to pierce straight through and threw his weight into both arms.
But at that moment, the mother body’s blurred eyeballs watching him through the cracked ice wall came into view. Instinctively threatened by the sight, Leonardo twisted his shoulders in midair and angled his charge to the side. Then, before the creature could make any other move, he hastily thrust the lightning in his hand.
With his center of gravity thrown off and his acceleration slowed, the tip of the lightning grazed the ice wall and embedded itself diagonally. At the same time, a giant claw that burst through the shattered wall shot up to Leonardo’s chin, barely grazing his skin as it passed.
‘...!’
A stinging pain ran down his chin as blood mixed with rainwater flowed. However, Leonardo had no room to care about that now. The creature’s front paw that had just swept past was already coming head-on. Not only that, but the destructive beam of light he had seen before was now spewing in all directions from between the cracks in the ice.
‘Self-destruction?’
Leonardo, barely avoiding the creature’s grasp amid that glowing beam, hurriedly spread a barrier, raised his guard, and pulled away from the vicinity of the ice wall.
But the ominous rumble of an explosion quickly caught up as he retreated, and along with it came a scorching heat that felt like it could melt bone in an instant.
By the time he realized the world had flashed white, he had already been swallowed by the violent gust.
Kwaaang-!
The high-temperature wind pressure, which even momentarily blew away the heavy rain, carried shattered ice fragments that scraped against skin. Leonardo spun through the air, his dizzy consciousness caught in the blast, and heard chilling shouts and screams echoing through the chaos.
That sound, warning him something had gone wrong, jolted his fading consciousness awake.
As soon as he forced his eyes wide open, what unfolded in his hazy vision was the mother body’s front leg, its hide grotesquely stretched along it. And hanging from its long claws raised high was a human figure, its abdomen pierced through.
His golden pupils shook violently in disbelief.
“Liner Molten-!”
“Liner!”
Seeing what looked like something that had happened while trying to block his way, Leonardo’s thoughts stopped cold.
Shrill voices from unknown sources filled the surroundings. But the mother body, as if whatever was caught on its claws were merely annoying, flicked its front leg outward and casually threw the impaled human away.
At the sight of blood droplets scattering in the air and the limp figure, Charlotte called out to her superior in a strained voice and rushed toward him.
Meanwhile, Isabella, who now seemed to have truly lost her senses, charged at the mother body with a red-hot face, screaming at the top of her lungs.
But she too had been caught in the explosion at close range, her reflexes significantly dulled. Unable to avoid the creature’s tail whipping toward her, she was struck by the blunt, mace-like appendage and instantly flung in the opposite direction.
A “wajak-” sound, as if bones were being crushed somewhere, briefly echoed through the air. In the blink of an eye, a heavy impact—colliding with a rock wall—rang out from somewhere unseen behind the figure hurled away, through steam mixed with rain.
Kuung-
Meterion, trying to control the dust and steam in the midst of this miserable scene, struggled against the pouring rain. Soon after, the queen, noticing his suspicious movements, briefly threatened him by firing a few giant breaths in his direction, then immediately changed course and charged toward Leonardo once again.
As the Council’s battalion-commander-level figures were miserably knocked down in an instant, a cold anger began to boil up on Leonardo’s pale face. With his reason snapping like a broken string, he began to pour every kind of attack he had into the monster bearing down on him.
“...Why won’t you die, why!”
Out of frustration, tremendous heat and destructive power boiled in the two hands he raised above his head. Around /N_o_v_e_l_i_g_h_t/ him, the raging vortex and the thunder and lightning striking from the sky combined with perfect timing, unleashing savage momentum.
When the creature spewed its breath, he countered with equally dark red fireballs, and indiscriminately launched whatever he could cast within seconds—lightning spears, thunderbolts, anything.
Though each spell didn’t consume much mana, casting in rapid succession in his poor condition not only made him dizzy but drained his strength quickly.
But what made him even more anxious than that was the horrific sight of the creature thrusting out its head—rapidly regenerated even after its flesh had been blackened by a direct fireball hit, its eyeballs bursting from the pressure of being struck by lightning, or its body emerging from within blazing flames.
Leonardo gritted his teeth at the persistent shadow that felt like it would haunt even his dreams. The blood seeping from his cut chin quickened, but with that mountain-like mass closing to within arm’s reach, there was nowhere left to retreat.
As the red pupils locked on him and charged with its maw wide open, Leonardo wrapped his entire right arm in white sparks of ultra-high-temperature current. Then, prepared for his whole body to become a beehive, he thrust his arm toward the creature’s throat as it rushed him.
As if it had been waiting for it, the creature’s tentacles extended, constricting its prey’s neck and instantly yanking him into its mouth.
At that moment, a large hand flashed in from the side, cutting across in front of his face and unhesitatingly seizing Leonardo’s electrified arm. Then, with a force that felt like it would tear his arm off, it hauled him backward—shearing through the writhing monster’s tentacles—and mercilessly plunged a greatsword into its throat.
Then Hugo, who had spread a barrier in front of himself and Leonardo, instantly detonated the greatsword wedged in the mother body’s maw.
Kwaaang-!
Kyaaaak-
Shattered fragments dug into tender flesh, finely slicing it, and the queen twisted its body and hesitated for a moment, widening the distance. Leonardo, his arm still held by Hugo and not fully grasping what had happened, recoiled and hurriedly retreated when he saw Hugo’s hand, clearly burned and red-hot.
“Are you crazy? What are you-”
“What were you trying to do just now?”
Even though Leonardo blurted out in disbelief, Hugo cut in first, his voice cold. Though his face was just as pale under the rain, his chilling gaze and rapid breathing made it seem like Leonardo’s reckless move had shocked him, and Leonardo closed his mouth without finishing.
“...”
It might have stayed that way, but a destructive beam fired into the opening forced them to widen their distance again.
Hugo quickly shoved the other away and threw himself into close combat, blocking the creature to disrupt the mother body’s path, whose focus was solely on its target.
As he tried to fully brace against that massive weight, the internal injuries he’d suffered earlier flared with the heavy impact that coursed through him. And with so much stamina burned in the prolonged fight, it was hard to tell how much longer he could endure.
Enduring the pain and buying as much time as he could, he tried to deploy a grand magic circle once again in the distant sky obscured by clouds. At the same time, Leonardo, pushed away by Hugo, concealed his presence and accelerated, circling around the mother body.
The mother body, rolling its eyeballs instinctively, seemed to sense the hidden one would strike from behind. It shoved aside the annoying human blocking its front and hurled its massive body backward. Seeing that, Hugo—thinking it was about to target Leonardo again—moved instantly to block the direction it meant to advance.
But contrary to his expectation, the mother body’s target wasn’t Leonardo. The creature’s tail, bristling with spines, lashed out at mad speed toward the side of Hugo, who was gripping a thick shield.
‘Oh no.’
By the time he noticed the heavy mass of flesh right in front of him, his body—covered in shattered ice—was already plummeting toward the ground.
“Hugo!”
Leonardo’s eyes flew wide as he rushed in to catch him. But the queen was not about to watch quietly.
As the target that had been grating on its nerves revealed itself again, the mother body charged toward Leonardo’s projected position and thrust out its sharply protruding claws.
Leonardo, focused only on catching Hugo, belatedly changed course when he saw the claws coming for him. But his left upper body, paralyzed by poison and slow to respond, couldn’t fully escape the creature’s grasp.
The demon’s razor-sharp claws cruelly scraped skin that couldn’t even feel pain under the dulled sensation. Red blood splattered savagely, and torn scraps of clothing flickered before his eyes.
As the overly vivid smell of blood flooded his mind, Leonardo felt his body’s trajectory twist out of control. He felt nothing—yet his body still refused to obey.
“Leo-!”
Hugo barely reduced his falling speed by detonating an air sphere, then instantly redirected upward. He tried to reach Leonardo, who had lost his balance in midair, but the distance between the mother body’s open maw and Leonardo was overwhelmingly closer than the distance between himself and Leonardo.
He hurriedly gathered magic in both hands and fired at the creature, but whether his aim was off or the creature was too good at evasion, none of it landed. In the end, Hugo deployed a magic circle around Leonardo instead of dissolving the one in the sky. Then, after tightly wrapping his body in water streams, he himself rushed the mother body targeting Leonardo, greatsword raised.
Just as the greatsword’s blade barely wedged between the creature and Leonardo,
The “chilling energy of fire” he felt from not far away brushed along Hugo’s spine for a moment.
Kiing- Kwaaang-!
A massive flame that flew in at a speed his eyes couldn’t follow slammed directly into the mother body’s head. The mother body, instantly on high alert at the sudden arrival of another figure, widened the distance and rolled its eyeballs.
Hugo, too, instinctively turned his head as he sensed powerful mana approaching—strong enough that it wouldn’t have been strange if another battalion commander had come to reinforce them.
That contradictory energy of fire he had sensed just days ago—no, just hours ago. The trace of the powerful fire mage who had erased his footprints and deliberately collapsed the ceiling at the collapse site.
The black shadow that carried that energy snatched Leonardo, floating in midair, in a single swift motion.
