"Just one, and I have little reason to fear it."
Hans watched the Imperial Prison Dragon turn its gaze toward her. A barrier spread outward from her body, encasing the interior of the church.
At that very moment, a chorus of roars erupted from the Imperial Prison Dragons outside.
The dragon inside, cut off from all Mana Perception and sound by the barrier, heard nothing. Hans, however — the one who had cast the barrier — remained unaffected.
The realization made her pause, braced as she was for a fight. "What lunatic went and stirred up the dragon pack outside?"
Before the ancient church, black scaled wings blotted out the sky. Ten Imperial Prison Dragons rose in formation, their eyes blazing crimson as they locked onto the intruder who had dared to violate their territory.
With these lords of dragonkind present, the ambient Mana in the surrounding air grew thick and heavy, a suffocating pressure settling over everything.
"Quite the spectacle."
The words had barely left her lips when ten massive columns of searing breath plummeted from the sky in an instant.
The breath-streams were fast — but Nanoda's eyes were faster.
By reflex, she reached toward her leg holster for the broken horn — then remembered: that pair of horns was back on her head where it belonged.
The pillars of flame reached her in a heartbeat, punching through the afterimage she had left behind and boring halfway through a distant hillside.
Moving with nimble, fluid grace, Nanoda wove and leapt between the fire pillars, slipping past attacks launched from every angle.
The earth was melted through like cheese. Vast swaths of trees were swept away, leaving scorched root-stumps in the blackened ground. One breath-stream carved clean through the jungle in a continuous line; a pond along its path evaporated in an eyeblink.
Those ten jets of flame, launched from ten different directions, could have annihilated a small village in the blink of an eye.
Nanoda raised a hand and unleashed Severance Magic, cleaving the last pillar of fire apart.
She looked down at her empty hands and felt, somehow, that something was missing.
The ten Imperial Prison Dragons opened their fang-lined maws, white smoke curling from between their teeth, and let out a world-shaking roar.
As the Mana coiling around Nanoda grew ever denser, the Imperial Prison Dragons began to grow agitated.
"Your aptitude for magic isn't much to speak of — but your physical technique is something else entirely."
Half-veiled by a lock of white hair, that golden slit-pupil contracted slightly. Nanoda watched the Imperial Prison Dragons wheeling high above and bared her fangs in a grin.
"What a shame. In the old days, I'd have had to try the taste."
The already-restless Imperial Prison Dragons, caught in that gaze, beat their wings and came diving down from above.
An even denser barrage of breath-streams followed in rapid succession, transforming into a vast curtain of fire rain that fell like a first-layer assault.
With that much area covered, Nanoda had no room left to evade. The sky in every direction turned the apocalyptic orange of a collapsing, burning world.
Scorching shockwaves tore through the air with a howling shriek, the dying cry of the melting vegetation all around her.
Nanoda's expression didn't change. She accelerated the rate at which her body absorbed Mana, threw herself under a flying-magic boost, and flew straight up into the descending fire rain — face-first.
"Hot."
Even Qual's Killing Magic couldn't pierce through Nanoda when her absorption was running at full capacity. The fire rain washed over her like boiling water over bare skin — and Nanoda punched straight through the wall of flame and smoke above.
Against the sheer size of the Imperial Prison Dragons, Nanoda piercing through that canopy of fire looked like nothing more than a tiny black-and-white speck. In the next instant, the mid-air Imperial Prison Dragons converging in a dive brought everything to bear at once — claws, fangs, scaled tails, even the horns atop their heads — all trained on the ascending Nanoda.
Armed with bodies that could shrug off high-level magic and were physically indestructible, compounded with the momentum of their dives, they pressed their assault in the most primal and direct way possible — a second layer of attack.
"Hey — you're getting more out of my body than I ever did. Pity you still can't master all of my magic."
"That's because this is my area of expertise."
From her earlier battle with Macht, Nanoda had gradually grown accustomed to aerial combat while in flight. She twisted sideways in the air and slipped past a raking claw at nearly point-blank range.
With no broken horn to serve as a short blade, Nanoda simply channeled Severance Magic directly into her five fingers. She planted a foot against empty air, launched herself forward, and drove her hand straight at the exposed throat of the Imperial Prison Dragon.
From the dragon's perspective, Nanoda had barely dodged its attack. It was already planning to reverse direction and sandwich the enemy with the ally behind her — when a sharp, searing pain erupted from its throat and its entire body seized up. No matter how furiously it beat its wings, it could not move.
The five fingers laced with Severance Magic had punched clean through the Imperial Prison Dragon's seemingly impenetrable black scales and sunk directly into the muscle beneath.
Gripping the dragon's neck, Nanoda glanced up at that wall-like column of throat and realized she was shorter in height than the neck's own diameter.
"GRAAARRGH!!!" The seized dragon screamed in pain, letting out roar after roar.
Nanoda cast a glance at the next wave of Imperial Prison Dragons queuing up to attack. She swung her arm with a burst of force and simply hurled the mountain-sized dragon upward. Her fingers pulled free stained with red.
The struggling dragon tried to right itself — then Nanoda was already coming up from below, body and fist together, slamming into the exposed belly the throw had left wide open. The flesh caved inward; blood seeped from the joins between the scales.
The Imperial Prison Dragon's eyes went wide. It was an expression utterly unlike the arrogance with which it had looked down on Nanoda from on high moments before.
The remaining dragons, who had been riding their dive momentum in for another attack, all pulled up short at once. Faced with Nanoda sheltering beneath their packmate and pummeling it relentlessly, they found themselves with no opening and were forced to peel away in every direction.
Sensing the other nine Imperial Prison Dragons sweeping around to gather below her, Nanoda stepped on the belly of the dragon she had seized as though gravity meant nothing, trailing streaks of afterimages, and hauled herself onto its back.
By the time the dragons below looked up, Nanoda had already repositioned onto the back of the half-glazed-eyed Imperial Prison Dragon.
Targeting the roaring, open-mouthed head, Nanoda surged her Mana and stamped down with brutal force. The impact left a visible dent in the dragon's skull; its open maw was slammed shut by force, and several fangs cracked against each other and flew free.
The whole dragon tilted head-first and dropped like a missile, crashing into the scorched, near-charred earth left by the earlier breath-streams.
BOOM.
Clods of reddish-brown earth flew in every direction. The Imperial Prison Dragon had hammered a massive crater into the ground.
The dragon that had been roaring moments ago went completely still — its entire head buried in the muddy pit like an ostrich, motionless as a dead dog.
The remaining nine Imperial Prison Dragons looked down at their ruined companion, then turned as one toward the figure hovering in midair.
The positions of hunter and hunted had reversed.
Nanoda floated in the air, looking down at the low-flying Imperial Prison Dragons below her. She raised one blood-smeared palm and pointed at them.
"That's the first one down.
____
👻🔥Walnut-chan ;)🔥👻
🔥 New history: Danmachi: Summoning Ruri Gokou, And other Chuunibyou Brats
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