The kitchen was a flurry of activity.
Lefiya maintained her ice-elemental magic, letting fine crystals of frost drift through the room to cool the whole kitchen down.
Having just been "dealt with" by Alfia, a certain Goddess of Beauty pouted with a tsundere sort of huff, but didn't dare make trouble for the woman — after all, Aphrodite, though she'd been away from the city until now, had been on the receiving end of plenty of "dealing with" from Goddess Hera back in the divine realm as well.
Speaking of which.
Though Hera Familia no longer existed, the old goddess herself had never returned to the heavens — and neither had Zeus.
In fact, some in the city had even begun to wonder whether Zeus and a reformed Hera Familia might one day return to Orario — and perhaps even go to "war" against Loki, Freya, and the newly risen Astrea Familia.
There was never any shortage of people eager to speculate.
Still, thanks to Alfia's brief show of "ferocity" a moment ago, more than half the crowd that had packed in to watch the spectacle had scattered, leaving everyone with a good deal more breathing room.
With Riveria and Ais pitching in as well — yes, from all their frequent visits, the two of them had long since become seasoned hands at the Hostess of Fertility.
The shop settled back into its usual rhythm.
As night deepened, by around ten o'clock the girls closed up shop and, as always, set off noisily toward their Familia's distant residence.
"Where in the world did that Isagi run off to? Not a sign of him all day."
"No idea."
"Maybe he went off into the Dungeon?"
"If he had, he'd surely have said something."
"Honestly, Goddess — we need to have a word with him when he gets back."
"Mm—"
Back at [Stardust Garden], the girls scattered to their own business — some bathing, some grabbing a late-night snack, some simply resting.
Riveria and Alfia, meanwhile, stood in the courtyard with Ais, gazing up at the great Golden Tree.
Compared to when it had first been planted.
The Golden Tree now stood tall and full-crowned, having grown into a towering giant well over ten meters high.
Its brilliant golden branches and leaves could be seen even from far off at Central Park — though that owed something to the fact that Orario didn't have many tall buildings to block the view.
Amid the ceaseless drift of falling golden leaves.
In this moment.
even the women and girls could sense some indescribable power lingering there.
Orderly, solemn, and somehow rigidly unchanging.
Isagi called it "the Law."
Just as people needed to eat, sleep, and drink water — it was the underlying law by which all things operated.
Though even the boy couldn't quite put it into words — clearly this power wasn't so simple. Since he himself was, in some sense, "the Law" incarnate, he naturally also possessed the power to alter certain "laws."
But Isagi clearly had no intention of touching that.
Mess with something like that carelessly, and it could stir up serious trouble.
The girls and goddesses, too, sensed that this was a truly "complicated" matter, and so they didn't press him for more.
And now.
Ais stood here now, ready to answer the question that Riveria and Alfia both shared, using her own "Strength" — her power of wishes.
What exactly was this power?
Without experiencing it firsthand, there was no way to truly understand it.
Though it might sound a little "arrogant" to say so, right now, neither "Mama" nor Miss Alfia was any match for her at all.
If they really fought seriously, one careless moment and someone could get hurt.
So what to do?
Ais had thought of a good solution — one that made use of a power unique to her, her Lv.8 Strength.
"Let's do it right here,"
the golden-haired girl said softly, as though she might melt into the golden leaves drifting silently down around her.
Then.
Ais simply sat down, leaned back against the great tree behind her, and — of all things — fell asleep.
"...?"
Riveria and Alfia, of course, had no idea what was going on.
But it wasn't long before—
an immense force began dragging them forward. The Elf princess knew this sensation well — it was the same one she'd felt before, whenever she'd entered Isagi's "dreams."
Baffled as they were, neither woman resisted.
And so—
as Riveria and Alfia crumpled to the ground one after the other, the two of them slipped into Ais's "dream."
It was that same small courtyard again.
Only, unlike the Nightmare from before — with its endless, pitch-black depths and terrible, empty stillness—
this time the girl's dream was bright and beautiful.
Blue sky, white clouds, sheets of leaves scattering off into the distance — and faintly, indistinctly, they could even hear a woman softly humming a tune—
It was Aria's voice.
Taking in the sight before her, Riveria could only feel it was unbelievable.
Because… wasn't pulling someone else into a dream of one's own creation supposed to be a power unique to Isagi?
Compared to the boy's [Dark Hall], the dream Ais had conjured here was admittedly rather crude — but it was, without question, the same kind of power as Isagi's.
So what exactly was going on?
Compared to Riveria's shock, Alfia took it far more calmly.
She'd never been inside [Dark Hall], and had no idea just how many wondrous powers Isagi had — which, if anything, made it easier for her to simply accept the situation as it was.
As for all this.
Ais wasn't quite sure how to explain it either.
She had a rough sense of why she possessed such an ability — this was her own power of wishes: [Yearning].
Wanting to follow in his footsteps, wanting to walk beside him — and so, step by careful step, through [Yearning], Ais had been clumsily imitating everything about Isagi.
All of it.
This didn't mean, of course, that Ais had actually gained every single one of Isagi's abilities in full.
That would be impossible.
The true nature of this power was "imitation" — and only the imitation she could understand and actually manage to do.
The result was what stood before them now.
The girl's dream could only carry her and others to this beautiful place deep within her own heart.
Nothing more than that.
But that was enough — because it was a dream, it didn't matter how fiercely they fought.
No one could die within a dream.
"That's about the gist of it,"
Ais explained, a little clumsily.
Riveria and Alfia, naturally, couldn't take it all in at once.
But that was fine.
Just as the girl had said — all that mattered was being able to fight. Here, they could experience firsthand exactly what this power was.
"Then let's begin."
Alfia was clearly not one for wasting words.
Watching the Black Wind slowly coil around the girl, she could feel the terror woven into it — and the unreasoning, absolute "suppression" it exerted on a mage like herself.
[Completely nullifies any Magic.]
Right now, Ais was, without exaggeration, the absolute "mage killer."
So.
Facing an opponent like this, what was she supposed to do?
It was a counter to the extreme.
But the problem was, for an adventurer, "I can't win, so I won't fight" was never really an option — in the Dungeon, you could run into any kind of Monster at any time.
So even when there seemed to be no way, you had to make one!
And this, it seemed, was—
the very nature of the power of wishes: turning the impossible into the possible.
Easy enough to say, and not hard to understand — but genuinely difficult to actually "grasp."
To hold it in one's hand.
To trace out its shape.
And then, to shape it into whatever one wished.
Alfia and Riveria, in this moment, seemed to catch just the faintest glimpse of that secret.
Good.
Then, onward.
As seasoned adventurers, the two women had almost never fought side by side before — yet sheer instinct guided them into a seamless, simultaneous strike against the girl in the distance!
The staff struck the ground with a heavy thud.
Magic gathered around the Elf woman.
Over this stretch of time researching it, Riveria and Lefiya had made considerable progress with "Explosion Magic" — or rather, with Magic formed purely by concentrating raw Magic itself.
Explosion Magic — gathering Magic and then detonating it in a devastatingly violent blast — came with all manner of "secondary functions" besides.
First.
There was the one both Elves had already made use of before.
Using the explosion of Explosion Magic to generate, on the spot, a space of total Magic disorder.
Within this small space.
the massive residue of leftover Magic caused any spell entering it to become unstable, dissolving on its own or detonating outright — effectively producing a kind of "anti-magic domain."
And now.
One of Riveria and Lefiya's newest discoveries was Explosion Magic's "kinetic force."
A Magic explosion produced tremendous energy — that much was beyond doubt.
The impact force was terrifying, and if a solid sphere — one immune to being shattered by Magic — were launched by that immense kinetic force, it too could unleash devastating destruction.
This was a tactic devised specifically to counter enemies with a "Magic nullification" trait.
If Isagi had been here, he would surely have shouted.
[Whoa, a Railgun!]
In principle, it was almost exactly the same thing.
Except what Riveria and the others used wasn't a coin, of course, but "bullets" created by Asfi and Cecil together through their [Mystery] Development Ability — projectiles entirely unaffected by Magic.
In shape, they were nothing more than plain, ordinary spheres.
Apparently.
Asfi had originally meant to shape them like arrowheads, but the more she refined the design, the more she found that a "pure sphere," backed by that enormous kinetic force, delivered greater killing and destructive power.
And so this secret weapon, originally named the [Magic-Breaking Arrow], had since been renamed the [Magic-Breaking Round].
Fine, whatever — that wasn't the important part!
A black sphere hovered before the woman, buoyed up by Magic.
In the next instant.
Riveria threw up a Magic barrier around herself, then unleashed a technique she'd only mastered through countless hours of drilling: detonating the smallest possible amount of Magic just behind the round to create massive kinetic force and send it firing dead ahead.
From an outside observer's point of view.
it looked like nothing more than a sudden, soundless flash of lightning — followed by a deafening shriek as it tore through the air.
But faster even than the sound, the pitch-black round had already closed on Ais.
Even the layered, invisible winds around her couldn't fully push it away.
The wind only slowed the round down.
just enough for Ais to react in time and throw herself out of the way.
Even so.
A few strands of golden hair drifted down, proof that Riveria's attack had genuinely connected.
Meanwhile, on the other side.
Alfia had adopted a strategy "roughly similar" to the Elf princess's.
Only her method of attack was much easier to make sense of — right now, she was simply using a bow and arrow.
Alfia was a "genius."
She fought with Magic only when the opponent in front of her could be dealt with by Magic alone — nothing more.
Among her four Stats, only [Endurance] was low, a consequence of her frail, sickness-prone body — but her [Strength] sat at an upper-middle level, while her [Agility] and [Dexterity] went without saying: a perfect "999."
Under these circumstances.
even without using Magic, relying purely on melee skill, the vast majority of adventurers were no match for Alfia at all.
And now.
she was making full use of her speed.
Archers among adventurers filled a ranged support role, their primary job being to back up mages by striking a Monster's vital points with sharp arrows — whether the eyes, mouth, heart, any other weak spot, or the Magic Stone that was every Monster's fatal weakness.
But in battles between adventurer and adventurer.
archers were, frankly, a rather "unfair" breed.
Because while Monsters usually had thick hides and tough flesh, an ordinary adventurer could never hope to match that kind of defense.
Attacks lethal from extreme range.
And blistering speed that could shut down a mage's chant before it finished — back in the city's once-chaotic early days, "Archer" had been, without question, the strongest class of all.
It was during that era that Alfia had learned the bow.
For a genius like her, that had been more than enough. Now, in bow-handling skill, there wasn't a soul left in the entire city who could match her.
"Fwip fwip fwip fwip—"
a crisp, birdlike whistle of wind-splitting cut through the air like driving rain, chasing after Ais's fleeing form.
One shaft, two shafts, three shafts, four shafts, five shafts — chained together, tracking, and silent—
In Alfia's hands, the great bow became an instrument of exquisite grace, as natural as breathing.
Every technique of archery came "naturally" to a genius like her.
She hardly needed to learn anything — she simply understood, in the moment of using it, that something could be done, and did it with ease.
And that wasn't all.
Like Riveria, Alfia was, at her core, a mage.
So even with the vast "anti-magic domain" now surrounding Ais, Alfia was still finding her own way to put Magic to use in the fight, all while keeping her distance from the girl.
The woman's "Satanas Verion."
It, too, could generate tremendous thrust and resistance — in a sense, sharing the same basic nature as Ais's "golden wind."
Equally formless.
Equally capable of exerting massive pressure and force upon everything around it.
And by harnessing this force.
Alfia could not only accelerate her own arrows in flight, but forcibly bend their trajectories — even freeze them dead in midair, then "push" them onward again.
And so—
arrows that should have followed a predictable path became utterly unpredictable.
From the very start of the fight, the two mages — who should by rights have had no way to fight back at all — had each brought out their own "preparations."
And to this, Ais's response was…
____
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