"Forgive me, Father, for I have devoured the gods' supper. Revel in it, tongue of hellfire. Consume all, burning fang!"
Zard's magic incantation rang out.
His already impossibly massive frame swelled further, like a great volcano on the verge of eruption.
But this time, something was different.
Because——
The color of the flames had changed.
Acting almost on pure instinct, Ryuu grabbed Adi by the arm and sprinted away into the distance.
This was no longer a place where either of them could remain.
And then.
Isagi witnessed something he could scarcely believe. What erupted from Zard's maw was less a roaring blaze of fire and more a slow, viscous torrent of magma.
And its color was utterly bizarre.
A vivid, indescribable shade of blue-violet.
Isagi's mind flew at once to that colossal wound carved into the surface of the earth — the trail of catastrophic poison left behind by the [Land King].
Identical. There was no mistaking it.
This was the power of Behemoth — the singular, supreme power Zard had claimed by devouring its flesh and blood.
The power of the [Land King], one of the legendary Three Great Quests.
Isagi very nearly held his breath without thinking.
Behemoth was a creature whose mere existence radiated a toxic miasma — a poison utterly beyond any possibility of cure.
While its effects on high-level adventurers were limited, they could not be ignored entirely.
But what happened next was beyond anything Isagi had anticipated.
The blue-violet magma Zard spewed forth had an effect that beggared all belief——
The countless star-and-moonlight blades Isagi had unleashed with the [Moonlight Greatsword].
They were being "dissolved" by the toxic mist rising up around them.
He could see the magical energy dissipating with his own eyes.
Behemoth's toxic miasma was no mere poison. Its effect went far beyond inflicting status ailments. It could dissolve anything tangible or intangible — matter, magical energy, even the air itself.
The instant Zard breathed it out,
everything in the surrounding area began to slowly dissolve — including Zard himself.
The already charred ground began to sink.
All of it — every last thing — was consumed bit by bit beneath the spreading cover of toxic mist and blue-violet liquid, vanishing completely.
Naturally, that included every attack Isagi had launched at Zard.
In a sense, this was absolute defense — and it couldn't even be approached. An unrelenting, infinite AOE that perpetually ravaged everything around him.
Its only flaw.
Was that Zard himself continued to take damage from it.
But that wasn't a weakness of the [Land King]'s power itself — it was simply that Zard was not Behemoth.
Isagi didn't even want to imagine what manner of absurdly broken existence a true Behemoth would be, wielding this same power without suffering any of its cost.
What was he supposed to do?
He had virtually no ideas. Zard's "secret weapon" had blown far past what Isagi had imagined — it hadn't even appeared in any of the intelligence he'd gathered beforehand.
During the Great Dispute, Zard had fought only Ottar, the captain of Freya Familia.
A showdown between the strongest in the city and the strongest outside it — no other adventurer could have intervened, and so records of that battle were exceedingly sparse.
Ottar himself had never spoken of it to anyone.
Even so.
Thanks to his good relationship with Miss Heith, Isagi had managed to piece together at least a rough picture of what had happened that day.
No matter how he looked at it, Zard had absolutely not used this power at that time.
Which, in a way, made sense.
Regardless of anything else, their battlefield back then had been the city.
Had he unleashed the power of Behemoth there, parts of Orario would have been rendered permanently uninhabitable — zones choked forever by lingering toxic miasma.
But now.
Zard had no such concerns to hold him back.
This farmstead was nothing more than their hideaway. If it was ruined, they'd simply find somewhere else.
The fields that had already been burned out couldn't grow crops anyway.
"Ha — hahaha——"
From within the toxic mist came the man's hoarse, rasping laughter.
Just as before, Zard stepped forward, his entire body wreathed in "flame," and as the great sword in his hand swept through the air, waves of thick blue-violet toxic mist surged and churned in its wake.
The already bear-like and terrifying powerhouse of a man was now twisted and grotesque beneath that shroud — transformed into something monstrous, something almost impossible to look at.
Even so.
Isagi did not retreat. He kept walking toward his opponent. "Good!"
Zard roared and charged.
In that moment, Isagi felt as though the thing bearing down on him wasn't any sort of adventurer — but some colossal, sky-blotting monstrosity.
How was one supposed to fight something like this?
Isagi felt utterly at a loss.
But even so, he couldn't fall back. Battle had always been like this — no matter how impossible the odds, you had to meet it head-on.
And so, Isagi ceased the storm of star-and-moonlight slashes being discharged from the [Moonlight Greatsword].
Against a truly powerful opponent, a wide-area magical barrage of that density had, in truth, very limited effect.
More importantly.
The character card he was currently using wasn't "Land of Reeds" — without the skill boost from [Sword Saint's Secret Art], he couldn't actually dual-wield all that effectively.
And that was to say nothing of the fact that his two weapons were completely different from each other.
The staff-sword in particular demanded precise, deliberate control. Wielding it in his left hand, it was genuinely difficult to draw out its full potential.
And so, quickly.
Zard noticed it too — the sky-spanning cascade of star-and-moon slashes had stopped. In its place came the sharp cry of something slicing through air——
"Fwsh"!
The sound of a chain blade cleaving through the night sky was almost sharp enough to burst one's ears.
But what struck Zard as stranger still was the cold gleam threading through the toxic mist — it seemed to carry a kind of "distortion" about it.
No.
Everything before him had distorted.
The toxic mist, the flowing liquid, the distant young man, even the great sword in his own hands.
All of it had taken on some quality of wrongness — bent and skewed, their very existence impossible to pin down with any accuracy.
Where exactly were they?
What would he actually make contact with?
Zard squeezed his eyes shut — then immediately snapped them open again, because he had already realized: this was no mere visual malfunction. It extended to his hearing, his perception, everything.
All of it had fallen into chaos.
And the culprit was the greatsword that the young man had shifted onto his back.
The [Moonlight Greatsword] continued to radiate its impossibly gentle light. The blade, forged from magic gems, pulsed softly — the force it was emitting was not magical energy, but the power of Cecil's [Mystery].
And beyond that.
Isagi's own divine power.
Beyond comprehension, beyond any means of detection — an absolute force that transcended everything.
Under these conditions,
Zard found himself completely unable to accurately block Isagi's chain blade. His sight, his hearing, even the razor-sharp perception he had honed over long years as an adventurer — in this moment, all of it was wrong.
Nothing could be trusted. Nothing at all. It was utterly inconceivable.
With things like this — how was he supposed to fight?!
As a seasoned veteran of incomparable experience — one of the exceedingly few adventurers in the entire world who had survived the harrowing trials and completed all Three Great Quests.
Even he.
Zard was lost.
____
👻🔥Walnut-chan🔥👻
🔥 New history: Danmachi: Summoning Ruri Gokou, And other Chuunibyou Brats
🎯 100 Powerstones = +1 Bonus Chapter for everyone