This was likely the first change this land of death had ever seen in its existence.
Wind and snow began to intertwine.
The ashen, barren ground underfoot began to be eaten away and blanketed by ice and snow, turning white with frost.
And this was only the beginning.
The pool of viscous black liquid still welled beneath Isagi's feet, and within it, several ghastly weapons had begun to take shape in reflection.
Silently, he drew one out.
What the young man now held was a blood-red longblade in the Far East style. Even a light swing left a visible afterimage like trailing crimson ink — thick, disorienting, and impossible to trace the edge within.
Isagi simply cut toward the girl before him, as plainly as that.
The result was—
A geyser of blood-red light surged skyward in an instant, forming a single unbroken line. For a moment it brought back to Ais's mind how the boy had once swung his blade as that colossal being called the Divine Dragon.
"It's just like it..."
No — it was exactly the same.
The girl's figure vanished from where she stood in an instant. That slender form wrapped in a faint black breeze now shimmered and glowed, like the morning sun about to break through heavy cloud.
Small as it was, the light reached a kind of blinding extreme — hard even to look at directly.
Even Isagi found himself narrowing his eyes against it.
The longblade in his hand — forged in imitation of the blade techniques he remembered from the Mortal Blade, "Open Gate" and "Bow of Tears" — instantly split into countless soaring crimson afterimages, scattering in every direction and streaking after the girl's black-wind-wrapped form.
Yet no matter what, they couldn't catch her.
From Ais's perspective, though, these successive waves of blood-colored strikes were dense to a genuinely terrifying degree — any ordinary Monster would surely have been shredded to pieces long before now.
Only she herself—
Riding the raging wind, utterly disregarding the freezing domain radiating from the boy's body, she closed the distance in an instant — the Fianna Knights' banner bound to her longsword fluttering as the blade itself became a streak of pure white light, arriving before Isagi almost the moment she moved.
Fast enough that even Ais herself was startled.
It wasn't pure speed like Allen Fromel's. It was a "mechanism" — right now the girl seemed to have merged with the wind spanning thousands of meters around her, able to exist at any point her thrust might land, and yet exist nowhere at all.
The wind was everywhere, and nowhere.
Isagi noticed this too, of course — which was why the longblade in his hand moved in step with Ais's own form, not the wind.
No matter how fast she was, she still had to actually land the strike on him.
So there was no need to rush. He only had to wait for her to come to him.
The longblade wrapped in boundless blood aura clashed against the pure white blade, and in that instant Ais seemed to see countless pitch-black shadows crawling up along her own sword's edge — weeping, wailing, howling as they climbed toward her.
An illusion?!
Such a thing couldn't possibly exist in reality — but even if it truly was an illusion, everything unfolding before her had already happened, and she needed to find some way to deal with it.
She couldn't just ignore it!!
The darkness threatened to swallow everything whole. Beneath it flowed a calm, boundless river the color of blood; above it bloomed red spider lilies of impossible splendor — a sight so beautiful it left no room to even blink.
And within all that beauty—
black silhouettes gathered and crawled, mouths gaping into hollow black voids, muttering something utterly incomprehensible as they crept toward her.
In that instant—
Ais felt her body turn colder than she'd ever known.
It wasn't the cold of the ice and snow. It was a fear of death itself that locked her body into a state where she simply couldn't "move."
But in that same instant, the longsword in her hand erupted with towering white light, purifying everything at once.
An indescribable warmth welled up from deep within her — countless fragments of belief and courage bound together as one. Ais saw through the darkness and finally caught sight of the boy holding the longblade once more.
A moment later—
the girl's figure vanished, and when she appeared again, she was already far away, suspended high in the air.
That whole clash had lasted only an instant.
Yet the new weapons in both Isagi's and Ais's hands had each displayed some outrageous form of Divine Power.
Watching from a distance, Cecil could only think, "Whoa, so cool, so cool!"
After all, that was a Divine Artifact she'd forged with her own two hands! And more than that — she was watching a Divine Artifact forged by the God of Smithing himself clash against equipment she had made!!
And from the looks of it, Isagi clearly had the upper hand!!
The moment the girl put distance between them, Isagi had no intention of letting up. Bone-piercing cold chased after her at once — beneath that dragon-shaped armor, the sheer Magic now bursting forth had reached a genuinely terrifying scale.
By now, it could not only wring the boy's own body past its limits, forcing him into movements beyond anything ordinary—
it could also wring out his very mental strength, forcing him to unleash a vast Magic that shouldn't have existed at all.
And on top of that, it could forcibly keep his mind stable throughout.
That was, of course, a strain on him — but for Isagi, who could die and come back to life more than once, it wasn't a problem at all. Worst case, he'd simply die and revive again.
He was making full, deliberate use of his own mechanic!
The ice sheet began to rise.
No matter how strong the wind, it couldn't break through solid ice — so if he froze everything around her, he could shrink Ais's range of movement.
But the girl seemed to have already seen through that plan.
The pitch-black gale spread out all at once — no longer confined to gathering just around her — and under that black wind's touch, the ice and snow born purely of Magic melted away instantly. Here and now, just like Alfia, Ais too had learned to use her Black Wind to form an absolute "anti-magic domain" around herself.
And the shameless part was this — unlike Alfia, whose domain silenced herself along with everyone else, this girl's anti-magic domain affected only others, never herself.
Isagi could see it — within that black wind, a golden wind was blowing as well.
A tremendous resistance pressed against him head-on.
As if trying to pin him firmly in place, unable to move at all.
He couldn't move — even speaking became agonizingly difficult. The wind, it turned out, could "freeze" things in place too, though through purely physical means.
Suppress. Suppress. Suppress again!
And it was at that very moment that Ais unleashed the power of the [Sword of Rising, Unfading Sacred Radiance] in her hand, the blade wrapped in the Fianna Knights' banner.
Pure white light bloomed outward.
And within that golden wind, thousands upon thousands of soldiers and horses seemed to take shape — countless rivers of them, spears in hand, charging forward in perfect, unbroken ranks.
It was magic.
An absurdly, wildly exaggerated wide-area spell — its range covered absolutely everything in sight. Isagi had no doubt at all: this single strike of hers could level an entire nation.
This was also exactly what Lefiya and Riveria had been researching all along.
How to systematize and refine "Explosion Magic," transforming it into an even stronger, more devastating "ultimate spell"!
____
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🔥 New history: DanMachi: Inheriting the Legacy of Alternate Versions — posted on The_Mikudayo