"%#@￥!￥@#"
An ancient, incomprehensible language was chanted from the mouth of that hideous "Spirit Monster."
Magic power began to gather.
Lefiya first strained to raise a barrier of magic power, helping her companions block the magical assault of this "counterfeit Black Dragon," all while continuing to rapidly condense her own magic power.
Explosion Magic required no incantation.
And so, while chanting another spell, she could gather it, condense it, and hold it like an arrow drawn to a full bow, ready to loose at any moment.
This was, of course, an extremely difficult thing to do.
Splitting her focus in two—chanting one spell while letting magic power begin to gather—she had to carefully stabilize it rather than let it detonate on the spot.
One careless slip.
And it could trigger a backlash of her mental strength, or cause the magic power to explode outright from instability.
But Lefiya had, by now, been "tempered a thousandfold"!
The elf girl commanded this technique of wielding magic power with peerless skill, and moreover, she believed this was not her limit—through her exchanges with Riveria, she had slowly begun to master it. Rather than pouring all of her mental strength and magic power in at once, she would take just a small, rough portion and "knead" it into a sphere.
Injecting only a fraction of her magic power, the destructive force was certainly far smaller, but it vastly enhanced her ability to sustain combat.
And moreover.
Beyond that, she could perform even finer manipulations.
For instance, she could first slowly condense several pure "orbs of magic power" like this, then use an ultra-short-verse attack spell to "trigger" them—one might also call it "detonating," for magic was an inherently unstable existence.
And the more chaotic it was, the more absurdly exaggerated the destruction it could wreak—which was precisely why Explosion Magic possessed such tremendous power.
Because it was simply too [Chaotic].
A magical explosion composed of pure magic power, without incantation or technique to sustain it, produced consequences that were impossible to predict.
And an orb of magic power that had originally been stabilized would naturally become extremely unstable under the influence of another spell.
Such "magic" was, to any ordinary mage, all but a pipe dream.
But Lefiya and Riveria had already reached this very level—and were even contemplating going "one step further."
"?"
Invisible orbs of magic power quietly gathered around the "counterfeit Black Dragon."
The enormous female Spirit avatar upon the Great Dragon's back had clearly taken notice of this as well.
But.
There was no time to deal with those things.
Because the offensive of Ais and Tiona was simply too ferocious—accompanied, no less, by Ryuu's ranged support.
Golden wind;
Crimson blood;
Ais, gripping her great dragon-slaying sword, wove through the air, always striking from above, borrowing the force of momentum to slam that heavy blade edge viciously into the Great Dragon's body.
Ais was already intimately familiar with this kind of battle.
The "wind" elevated the girl's speed to an uncanny degree—whether rising or plummeting, her sudden accelerations left her enemies utterly unable to gauge her form and presence.
It was as if the images could not be pieced together, completely "severed."
At the same time.
The "wind" was also obstructing the Monster's movements, letting it distinctly feel invisible resistance all around—no matter what it tried to do, it would surely be "stopped."
Even its spell-chanting suffered the same fate.
Opening its mouth, working its tongue, exhaling its breath—the incantation too would be hindered by the "wind," and this was the most troublesome thing of all for the counterfeit Black Dragon.
The incantation itself needed to be synchronized with the gathering of magic power; if the incantation was disrupted, then the condensing of magic power had to slow accordingly.
And the most "hateful" thing about Ais was this.
She could also suddenly control the wind to accelerate your incantation instead—one fast, one slow. That kind of interference was her strongest asset now.
And compared to the girl's powerful "mechanics."
What Tiona displayed at this moment was pure, raw numbers.
No magic.
Her skill, too, was quite plain and unadorned—simply enhancing her own [Stats]. And under this "perfectly ordinary" boost, once her stats rose to a certain degree, a terrifying qualitative transformation would occur.
The Amazon girl at this moment could only be described as firing at full power!
Every punch, every slash, was inevitably accompanied by an incomparably violent "volcanic eruption."
That crimson blood-aura coiled around her, like dragon and tiger, roaring, howling, ceaselessly hammering the Great Dragon's colossal body with resolute ferocity.
And then.
Leaving behind one massive, bone-deep cavity of blood after another.
Tiona had even fallen completely into a kind of frenzied state. For the girl, she had once needed to retain a shred of composure—after all, her skill grew stronger the lower her own "health" state fell, granting greater boosts to her stats and destructive force.
She had even needed to actively maintain a near-death condition to maximize her attack power.
But!
The current her could revive as well!!
Though Isagi had cautioned her to avoid using this revival ability as much as possible—since no one knew exactly how the "Dragon's Cough," its side effect, might manifest.
But this was enough. The most important thing was that it gave Tiona a safety net.
Because she could revive, she needed no caution—she could burn away every last shred of her reason, body and soul, keeping herself in that strongest of states.
The combat power she displayed as a result made even the distant Loki and Freya Familia feel a certain "dread."
There was no doubt.
Tiona at this moment had fully become the "main attacker"—the sharpest, strongest "spear" of the Astrea Familia!
"PIERCE!!"
Accompanying the girl's furious roar.
The blood-aura, vast as rivers and seas, was suddenly compressed, condensed into a line, and then a thundering punch drove through the Great Dragon's body, blasting it apart, boring clean through its frame.
At the same time.
Lefiya seized the opportunity, and before the Great Dragon's flesh could knit itself back together, she crammed all of the previously condensed orbs of magic power straight into its interior.
And then detonated them.
"Sweep away the enemy, O holy staff of exorcism!!"
"[Supreme God · Staff of the Wine God]!"
Through the ultra-short-verse spell once entrusted to her by a former friend.
Lightning-serpents roared forth, once more piercing at tremendous speed through the very cavity of flesh the Amazon girl had already blasted open.
And then.
It detonated all of the unstable orbs of magic power within.
"!!!"
A soundless roar suddenly spread outward.
Even separated by a great distance, Ryuu, Lefiya, and Haruhime and Heith all felt a powerful surge of force.
And the Great Dragon's body, once colossal as a mountain range, was torn to pieces, reduced to chunks of flesh scattered across the ground.
It still writhed, as if trying to heal itself.
And Ryuu simply found her moment, using the rapier in her hand to shatter the eerie Magic Stones scattered across the ground.
"Phew."
The counterfeit Black Dragon's body began to crumble into ash, but the battle was not yet over. The girls swiftly readied themselves, and then began preparing to go support Loki and the Freya Familia.
____
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