Climatic Battle
“Rurururuuuuuuu……aaaaaaaa!!”
“Government, Governance, Governance, Governance!! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, wonderful tax revenues! Our knights are invincible wherever they go! Glacelum, which lies in our peaks, is infinite! Under my rule, Ciel-Terra will stand shoulder to shoulder with the Great Powers, and my name will be etched in history forever!
Ghislain, transformed into a two-headed dragon, howled, and a corpse giant swung down a huge weapon.
A huge stake with its tip reinforced with metal … The “Breaking Hammer”, a siege weapon that would normally take several people to strike down even a solid city gate, was slammed into Ghislain by the monstrous power of Hilbert (… To be exact, Hilbert’s head was embedded in the meat tank, not moved by Hilbert).
Ghislain staggered, of course. But no damage was done.
Instead, a human-sized piece of white flesh lying at his feet exploded and scattered rotting bodily fluids. It had taken the damage and become a stand-in.
A deformed head like a distorted beast and a dragon’s head at the end of a long, extended neck.
A white light of holy energy dwelled in Ghislain’s mouth.
It was a prelude to a Breath.
Hilbert closed the distance.
The Morning Star and the Breaking Hammer were plunged into Ghislain’s two mouths.
Immediately after, the Breath erupted.
The breath failed to catch its target, Hilbert …, or the forces behind him, and was blocked by the giant weapons, which split into quarters and were ejected in strange directions.
The light from the aftermath scorched Hilbert’s arms. Regardless, Hilbert slammed his shoulder into Ghislain.
Wrapping around the city walls and crumbling its upper part, the two huge bodies overcame the walls and fell into the city.
The stone buildings shattered like pieces of wood, and the earth shook around them.
The two bodies rolled down the street, crushing two buildings and grabbing each other’s arms.
The corpse giant exhaled rotting breath from each of the heads built into its body parts, while Ghislain growled beastly noises with his two necks.
Removing his weapon, Hilbert combined two of his massive arms and slammed them into Ghislain’s head. Another piece of flesh popped off.
Bloodsuckers with appropriate weapons swarmed around the two.
The aim was Ghislain’s detached pieces of flesh. It was an instant holy beast that was shouldering their attacks.
Bloodsuckers began to attack the pieces of meat lying around.
Ghislain’s whole body trembled.
Tens of millions of holy energy light blasted out from Ghislain’s entire body.
The thin flashes of holy energy projected toward the entire area clawed at the cobblestones and rubble, turning every Bloodsucker that got caught in the fray into white ash.
Hilbert, who was in the middle of the melee, was of course directly hit as well.
But these flashes didn’t seem to have as much power as the Breath, and Hilbert caught Ghislain’s dragon head by the neck while his body was being chipped away like raindrops scraping the ground.
He then slammed it to the ground, swinging it around as hard as he could.
One church at the point of Ghislain’s fall was crushed to nothing. The tall bell tower easily collapsed, and the vibration was so strong that the nearby rubble floated away.
This damage was of course covered by the pieces of meat, but Hilbert still held Ghislain down like he was applying a joint technique.
The flashes of light still emanating from Ghislain’s entire body were turning Hilbert’s huge body into ashes little by little, but the corpse giant continued to hold Ghislain down.
*
On the tiled roof of a tower on the side of the city wall, far enough away from the scuffle.
“I was hoping to see this kind of thing as a spectator.”
It was Everis, who had hauled magic power from the veins of the royal city and had rushed there with a long-distance teleportation technique.
Standing on the roof, she was observing the battle through magic binoculars.
Tracy, who had been standing in the rear but had been pathetically summoned, was standing beside her, looking somewhat bewildered.
“It sure looks like Ghislain’s body is rotting away too… Could this be the effect of taking in undead soldiers?”
“It’s affected.”
Udanosuke, who had taken refuge in the rear command post, responded over the call mark to Everis.
Undead are a mass of evil energy, and holy beasts are a mass of holy energy.
Normally, if the holy beast ate undead, the holy energy and evil energy would cancel each other out and it itself would collapse.
The reason why this did not happen to Ghislain was because he had a vast store of holy energy that was more than enough to cancel out the evil energy of the undead he had absorbed.
Of course, there was no way it could do no damage.
“It would be like drinking poison to quench one’s thirst. As the saying goes in the Far East, “The food tastes better on the plate than the poison.” … If left unchecked, it will destroy itself in the near future.”
“But we don’t know when that will be. The amount of undead that Ghislain has eaten should have offset the holy energy in his body and weakened him, so I’d like to finish him off in one fell swoop.”
Outside the city walls, the undead soldiers were taking shelter.
For the undead army, the current Ghislain was too much of an opponent. If they were to meet Ghislain’s rampage head-on, they would lose all their strength.
This battle would not be the end of everything, and they could not afford to lose the excellent undead they had created from knights, much less an ace with a high-ranking adventurer in his body.
No matter how close he was to self-destruction, they could not leave Ghislain alone.
They would nail him to this spot until they finished him off or until he self-destructed.
“Let’s take a look first. I’ll burn the scattered pieces of meat. …≪Lava Region≫!”
Everis snapped her fingers sharply, and instantly the landscape was repainted.
Fire seemed to ignite in the area below them, and it spread in an instant.
A path of flames had formed to the spot where the two giant beasts were grappling with each other.
Flames flowed down the streets, illuminating the city in a pale red. The remaining buildings seemed to have sunk into the river of flames.
Red-hot flames burned beneath Hilbert’s feet.
It burned Ghislain’s back as he was being held down.
It burned the surviving Bloodsuckers.
And it burned the scattered Ghislain fragments.
One after another, the flesh-piece holy beasts disappeared into the flames.
In the midst of all this, Hilbert, who was mounted on Ghislain, swung his long, spider-like six arms and hit Ghislain in a bullshit manner.
Stripped of the shield of his impromptu flesh-piece holy beasts, Hilbert’s huge arms seemed to be about to crush Ghislain …, but then.
A white-blue light shot up to the heavens with the force of a geyser.
Ghislain, who had been knocked down and beaten, released a Breath in return.
The light of the holy energy that billowed up hit Hilbert right in the area of his uppermost shoulder, instantly melting it.
One shredded arm fell off with a thud.
Everis quickly operated a button attached to her magic binoculars and switched to magic-sensing mode.
This was something that Everis had modified herself, and she had added various functions to it that were not available in ordinary magic binoculars.
If seen through the magic binoculars, both Ghislain and Hilbert had magic power flowing through their entire bodies like a blood flow diagram of the human body.
In such a situation…, several independent flows of magic power like lumps were visible in Ghislain’s body.
“Oh, that’s cheating! How is that even possible!?”
“W-what?”
“Maybe he cut off his flesh and spawned a new holy beast. Inside.”
“In his body?”
Ghislain was alive and well.
His back was burned by the magma, but he leapt up, flapping his wings, and grabbed Hilbert’s breastplate when he was off balance.
Then, on the reverse end, he slammed Hilbert to the ground.
Hilbert collapsed on top of the magma, crushing about four stores.
“Oops!”
The huge, rotting body burning to a crisp, sending up a plume of black smoke.
With a flick of her finger, the magma that had covered the ground disappeared, leaving Hilbert with only a charred surface.
“I’ll let Mearanze do it. I’ll just have to stall for time until then.”
“If we keep attacking with magic, won’t he run out of flesh?”
“I wonder if that’s possible… Let’s find out. ≪Inspection Bullets≫”
Small, colorful magic bullets were released from Everis’s hands and raced across the Terra Kaine’s night sky.
They landed on Ghislain’s back, which was covered in scales, and bounced off without causing any damage.
The damage was not shouldered. This was the nature of the magic from the beginning.
Steam erupted from the gauntlet attached to Everis’s right hand, and the protruding gear spun at full speed.
A holographic light rose from the back of her hand, drawing letters in the air.
Everis read the numbers of blue-white light flowing at an alarming rate.
This was Everis’ unique magic, which used non-damaging magic bullets to read reverberations and examine the nature of the opponent.
The results of the analysis being spit out showed that Ghislain’s outer skin had considerable magical defenses.
There were ways to use physical damage magic or purely evil magic to neutralize the holy energy, but Everis decided that there was no need to stick to magic attacks when the offensive options were limited. There were more reliable ways to do this.
“I’ve got it all figured out. This is not a good match for a witch. I should have made about a hundred more “Wedges of Fallen Heaven”. … If we wait a little longer, Mialanze will do something about it. I’m sure we can buy some time until then.”
“Rephrased…! Hey, does that plural include me!?”
“That’s right. Otherwise, why would I have called you? I want to make sure we win, and I want to win safely.”
Countless flashes of holy energy burst from Ghislain and disappeared into the night sky.
Ghislain was scattering holy energy and chipping away at Hilbert’s massive body from the edges with his claws, fangs, and breath.
The city trembled each time a blow was struck that sandwiched between them and the ground.
“… My… Ciel… oh… why…”
An interrupted louder voice rang out, then the voice broke off completely.
“Holy energy attacks are especially effective against monsters and the undead. I’m a human, but I’m an unholy witch, so getting hit by it is hard for me. But if I were an ordinary human being, it would be surprisingly easy. Even if you were hit head-on with a Breath of holy energy, it wouldn’t do much damage.”
Before Everis could finish, Tracy began to nod with his head.
The honey-colored pigtails brushed against his own cheeks.
“Impossible! Impossible, impossible, absolutely impossible!! I have the “S*ave Core”, so I have no choice but to fight if I’m ordered to! Even if I fought, I would definitely lose! I can’t win against that thing!!”
“Of course, I don’t expect to win for free either. But you are good enough to be a 6th class, aren’t you? That’s good enough.”
Naturally, Tracy was buckling, but Everis grabbed him firmly by the shoulders and smiled at him.
“Magic doesn’t seem to work very well with that holy beast, and I’m evil to the bone and don’t want to be anywhere near that fully automatic holy energy launcher. So I think I’ll just pour my magic into you instead.”
Everis’ gauntlet on her right hand flashed, and a magic circle appeared beneath Tracy’s feet.
Like a pair of tigers that capture their prey the moment it sets foot on it.
“Receive the full-length support buff of the Great Witch Everis! …«Tragedian»!”
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