The Amazon girl was also a genius of battle.
It sounds harsh to say, but compared to her older sister Tione, Tiona was the one the warrior country's goddess Kali had once favored more.
Originally, her sister was supposed to be her opponent when she advanced to Lv. 5.
It was precisely because she'd foreseen that outcome that Tiona had thrown caution aside and dragged her sister out of the warrior country, out into the wider world.
And now, the girl had found her purpose again, clear as ever. The advantage of being a simpleton was that she never overthought things—she wanted to protect her sister, protect her friends, and keep living happily together with everyone. So she would strike down the [Black Dragon] that wanted to destroy the world!
If that was the goal, then growing stronger was only natural, and mastering new power was only natural too!!
Tiona was actually someone who had always worked hard.
It was just that, thanks to her talent, her lifelong "hard work" tended to look a little baffling to everyone else.
Lefiya and Ryuu, for instance, always remembered Tiona as someone who spent most of her time either eating, sleeping, or wandering off into the streets to play who-knew-where.
But!
The girl really had been training properly, all along!
Just like the finishing move she'd worked out on her own long ago—"blood aura."
That included all the variations she'd developed since: the "Blood Sword," used against fast humanoid Monsters, which condensed all her strength into a single point to skewer the enemy and then detonate; and the "Blood Aura Slaughter," a volcanic, raging technique meant for large Monsters or swarms of them.
There was also "Blood Mist," for escaping and evading, which turned her body into blood aura and let her reassemble it elsewhere, and "Blood Aura Annihilation," a kind of control technique that turned into a giant hound and clamped its jaws shut on the target.
Every one of these techniques, Tiona had figured out entirely inside her own head.
And now, she'd worked out something new again—what Isagi and Ais and the others called a "power of wishes."
It was called—
[Plunder].
The girl's hands turned that same crimson color they always did in battle.
It looked as though blood were seeping out from beneath her skin, ready to cover her whole body.
But this time, the crimson didn't spread across her body, nor did it pool onto the ground. Instead, it scattered outward as countless fine droplets of blood, drifting like snow falling from the sky.
In no time at all, it blanketed an area hundreds of meters around her.
Then, under the stunned, wide-eyed stares of Lefiya, Riveria, and the goddesses like Artemis, some of those blood droplets began drifting out toward the sea.
Swiftly, they turned great swaths of seawater into crimson droplets, large and small.
Was it assimilation?
Or something else entirely?
No one could tell.
But when Tiona's small hand suddenly clenched into a fist, the great expanse of seawater—now turned to blood aura—rose up out of nowhere and surged forward, leaving behind a massive hollow in the calm surface of the sea, as though someone had simply scooped it out with a giant hand.
And the water didn't rush back in to fill that hollow.
Lefiya and Riveria both recognized this—it was the lingering effect of residual Magic.
It happened the same way whenever the two of them fired Explosion Magic out over the sea: a massive hollow would form in the water, and it would only return to normal once the residual Magic in the area finally dissipated.
But something about this felt different.
What Alfia noticed was that the girl had genuinely turned real seawater into blood aura, and the whole process clearly used Magic somehow—but exactly how it worked, no one could explain at all.
It couldn't just be "I figured it should work" or "I felt like it could," could it?!
Apparently it really could!!
This was the "power of wishes."
A power with no logic to it, purely a matter of will, one that had broken entirely free of whatever this world called "magical science."
It existed solely by manifesting whatever the heart desired, through will alone.
The Amazon race.
Since ancient times, they had been a race of hunters.
Even with their so-called nations and tribes, their way of life had always remained simple and stripped down to its barest essentials.
Plundering natural resources, plundering males of other races, even plundering the lives of their own kin.
The warrior country, the greatest nation of the Amazon race, had an ancient tradition of mutual slaughter, viewed by its people as the most noble form of Duel—the victor would earn boundless glory.
This wasn't just an empty title.
In reality, whenever resources ran scarce—food, clothing, even men—everything, absolutely everything, belonged only to the strong. That had always been the true nature of the Amazon race.
Tiona had once rejected all of it.
Among the Amazons, the girl belonged to that rarer breed who resisted tradition.
That was also why, after her sister was defeated by Commander Finn and fell head over heels for that most Amazon of traditions, Tiona had always regarded it as the worst kind of dross.
But while one's beliefs could change, the blood running in one's veins was far harder to change.
So-called "bloodline" was just such an intangible, elusive thing.
Plunder. Plunder. Plunder.
Wasn't protecting everything from that world-ending Despair, in its own way, also a kind of "plunder"?!
Seizing what she wanted for herself was the same as protecting the life she wanted to live!!
The girl clenched her fist.
And so, the blood aura she'd seized from the sea began to solidify into something real, twisting and shifting into a monstrous, terrifying beast.
"!!!"
Riveria and the others, as mages themselves, felt the Magic surging within it once more.
That thing.
It really did feel a lot like Explosion Magic.
But it was even purer, even more violent—after all, an Amazon's "blood aura" had always been exactly that kind of thing to begin with.
If it exploded...
"Up! Aim it up, Tiona!!"
Lefiya shouted the warning at once.
If that little simpleton let her fist come crashing down, this whole vast, deserted island would probably be finished.
Mm—
Tiona wasn't quite that much of a simpleton, in fairness.
So, with a small roar of effort, the fist that should have smashed downward instead shot skyward, completing a beautiful uppercut!
"BOOM!!!"
A deafening explosion rang out, so loud that for a moment everyone present lost the ability to hear anything at all.
Dead silence fell all around.
Not until the sound of waves lapping against the sand slowly returned did the world come back into focus.
Only then did everyone finally see it.
Directly above Tiona's head, where a great expanse of pure white clouds had once drifted, the sky itself had been blasted clean through, a massive hole punched into it.
A ring of crimson afterglow lingered there in the heavens for a long, long time, hanging like a halo.
It was a little frightening.
Though the true extent of the power hadn't been fully shown, it was more than terrifying enough as it was.
And clearly, what Tiona had just shown was nothing more than the most basic application of this [Plunder]—simply turning natural things like seawater, earth, rock, and trees into her own blood aura power.
In truth, there were far more outrageous ways to use it that the girl hadn't even tried yet.
Anything and everything could be [Plundered].
That naturally included other people, and even Monsters, whether living or dead. The girl's true power was far more absurd than what she'd just demonstrated.
Still... it was more or less within everyone's expectations.
Back when they were still Lv. 7, Lefiya, Riveria, and even Alfia had all marveled at power like this—so incomprehensible that once upon a time, they wouldn't even have dared imagine it.
Alfia especially.
As a former member of Hera Familia, she had genuinely witnessed, with her own eyes, the two adventurers who had once been the city's Lv. 8 and Lv. 9, back when they were the City's Strongest.
But back then, still only Lv. 7 herself, she hadn't even been worth their full effort.
And even though she'd once fought alongside them, watching them use that kind of power against Monsters was one thing—experiencing it firsthand, going toe-to-toe with it, was something else entirely.
Alfia had genuinely been stunned.
But once she herself reached Lv. 8, and slowly began to understand this so-called "power of wishes" for herself, she no longer felt any surprise at all.
[Ah, so that's how it works.]
That was probably the gist of it.
By now, Tiona—having tried out her new power—was still bursting with energy. She pulled her little fist back and announced she was going to go fishing in the sea.
Then she remembered: this was where Leviathan's remains lay, and for hundreds, even a thousand kilometers around, no fish or Monster would dare come close.
Swimming that far out wouldn't really be a problem for her, just a lot of trouble.
So instead she volunteered to go hunt for fruit in the dense forest on the other side of the island, and dashed off in an instant, vanishing from sight.
The girl's energy was simply absurd.
Goddess Aphrodite had thought about tagging along too.
But remembering she still wanted to see Lefiya and the others show off their new magic, she decided against it, and instead waited to watch the mages, staffs in hand, standing along the beach, begin their "performance."
And next up, the first to make her move was, of course, Lefiya—
—
By the time Isagi got back from the Dungeon, it was already night.
After returning to the Familia's base and washing up, he came out to find only Ryuu-senpai sitting in the living room, looking like she had nothing to do with herself.
That was when he learned that Lefiya and the others had all gone out to test their new abilities that day.
"Senpai isn't feeling lonely, is she?"
"No."
She shook her head.
At this point, even though she was still Lv. 7 herself, Ryuu genuinely felt nothing about it. Leveling up would happen eventually anyway; a little slower didn't matter.
What was actually troubling the Elf girl was something else entirely.
Because her level was too high now.
Goddess Astrea had already forbidden her from going out on street patrol.
"Hmm... now that I think about it, wasn't it last time you broke someone's ribs..."
No.
Isagi had actually put it mildly—that person had nearly died.
If Airmid hadn't gotten there in time to treat him...
There was no helping it—Ryuu-senpai had never known how to hold back when it came to actually fighting. Back when she used to train with people, they'd always had to warn her ahead of time and make all sorts of preparations first.
And now that she was Lv. 7,
when she caught a Lv. 1 adventurer causing trouble in the city, one kick from her—and the man dropping dead on the spot—was already the result of her being about as "gentle" as she could manage.
That was how things stood already; never mind what would happen once she leveled up to Lv. 8.
There was no way anyone would let her go on patrol after that.
Adventurers were one thing, but if it were an ordinary city resident, to put it bluntly, standing in front of Ryuu-senpai, they'd be about as fragile as a bug.
But still.
Street patrol mattered a great deal to her.
Because these days, the patrols of Astrea Familia relied mainly on Senior Alise and the others.
To put it plainly, Ryuu-senpai now felt as though her old companions had "left her behind"—that feeling of having grown too strong to fit in with her old friends anymore.
It was a bit childish, honestly.
But that was just how Ryuu-senpai was, and honestly, from an Elf's perspective, the girl really wasn't all that different from a child right now.
"I understand!"
Faced with Isagi's sudden, dead-serious tone, Ryuu felt only a little bewildered.
The boy looked like this was some trivial problem he could solve at any moment—reassuring, certainly, but what exactly did he have in mind?
"Why not just equip Ryuu-senpai with a [Damage-Limiting] weapon?"
"?"
"Something like the sword Miss Adi carries—a weapon that can't kill."
Adi was the younger sister of Ganesha Familia's captain, and also an old friend Ryuu had once saved from certain death, back in the city's dark days.
As far as Isagi knew, her Magic and Skills were both quite unusual.
As for her weapon—called [Sacred Oath]—though it was only a second-tier armament, its maker had gone so far in pursuing "non-lethality" that they'd used a huge amount of special materials to forge it, driving the price up to tens of millions of Valis, nearly rivaling a first-tier armament.
It was a weapon that barely counted as a weapon.
In truth, Ryuu-senpai's use of a "wooden sword" carried the same idea.
Not only could a wooden sword double as a staff, it could also greatly reduce her own sharpness, so as not to accidentally take a life.
Justice called for judgment and reckoning, not slaughter and death.
In Isagi's mind, this was hardly worth troubling over—he wouldn't even need to bother Cecil with it, since she was already swamped forging everyone's zero-tier armaments.
After all, Adi's [Sacred Oath] had originally been forged by Hephaestus Familia, so they should be able to make something similar without much trouble.
And then he could just use his Divine Power to add a few special effects onto the weapon afterward—like forcing a health lock, making sure it could never actually kill anyone.
That would take care of it, wouldn't it?
Just like the hunter-type armaments he'd made for Ais before.
No sooner thought than done.
Isagi immediately called Ryuu-senpai over, ready to head to Hephaestus Familia's base.
But then—
just as the two of them stepped out of the Court of Stars—
suddenly, a sound like the earth itself shaking rang out.
An earthquake?
No—was it the Dungeon...?
Not that either!
The tremor wasn't coming from beneath their feet at all—it came from far away, out in the depths of the night, at the very edge of sight, somewhere beneath that endless dark sky in the distance.
Then, all at once,
a rush of air spread outward at an unbelievable speed, sweeping straight through the city and racing off toward somewhere even farther beyond.
And at that same moment, from beneath that distant night sky, an unbearably bright flash of white light burst forth.
That was pure Magic.
II
Isagi already knew—it had to be Lefiya and the others.
Because in this world, aside from Lefiya, Riveria, and Alfia, no other mage should be capable of something on that scale.
Those idiots...
They hadn't actually gone and hand-crafted a "nuke," had they?!
____
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