An unfamiliar shore; air that was damp and tinged with salt.
"This should be... the right way, shouldn't it?" Leaning on her staff, Yuna walked across the sand, a somewhat crudely drawn new map in her hand.
After leaving that little village, she had heeded the villagers' words and pressed northward all along the way, searching for the supply town the village chief had spoken of.
The farther she went, the more wrong it felt.
Could the information have been mistaken?
Wait—and where on earth were these two immense, eerie surges of Mana coming from?
Her gaze shifted to a small wooden hut by the sea. Yuna swallowed reflexively. Could there be a Mage living here? Or else...
"Why are you covering your face?"
"Didn't you say that if I lost, I'd be too ashamed to face you? So I covered my face."
"But what's the meaning of pulling a trash can over your head?!"
"Ah, Glück told me—it suits me quite well."
Both hands cradling a teacup, he reached it up into the trash can over his head. The black can shifted slightly as Macht took a sip of tea, perfectly at ease.
"After everything, why have you still come to me? Traitor."
Solitär, who ought to have kept her smile, now wore a face full of fury. The comrade who'd promised they would study humans together had now utterly defected to the humans' side.
"Weren't you the one swearing up and down it would be no problem, only to be beaten by some little girl in the end, and to throw me aside and flee?"
"That was a tactical retreat!"
Solitär made it clear she would not accept the other's rebuttal.
"For now I intend to stay in Weise for a while. Do you want to come along? As long as you don't kill humans, then probably, that existence won't come bothering you." That existence referred specifically to Nanoda.
"No, absolutely not. I never imagined she was still alive."
"So, did you find that sense of guilt or malice you were after?" Even with that sour face, Solitär was still a little curious about the results of Macht's experiment.
The trash can across from her swayed back and forth twice. "Not in the slightest. No matter how those humans reviled me once they knew the truth, or how some still stood up for me, I never felt a thing. But now I can be certain—she is different from us. She possesses something we do not, and so I want to follow her for the time being."
"Enough, don't bring it up again. I don't like her." Solitär had not forgotten her first encounter with Nanoda. "So then—before I ask you to leave this place, shall we first go catch that little rat outside?"
"Fine."
Seeing he couldn't talk Solitär around, Macht simply chose to throw in the towel and go along.
Out beyond the sands, Yuna was skimming low through the air with Flight Magic.
After confirming that there were two members of the Demon Race inside the seaside hut, her very first choice was to flee.
Both were existences with Mana stronger than her own—most likely the reclusive demons Lady Nanoda had once mentioned to her. She did not simply count on these demons harboring the same goodwill toward humans that Nanoda did.
With no chance of victory whatsoever, fleeing was the best and the only choice.
A sudden whistle of cleaving air and a swiftly approaching surge of Mana—"So I was spotted after all." Yuna twisted her body and dodged, evading a Mana blade that grazed past her from behind.
Unexpectedly, the Mana blade banked again up ahead and came stabbing back toward her.
With it moving too fast, Yuna had no choice but to halt her Flight Magic and switch to hovering. Her staff in hand pointed straight at the Mana blade—Killing Magic!
A white pillar of light annihilated the returning Mana blade.
Just as Yuna meant to continue onward, dozens more Mana blades surged up from behind.
Yuna was not skilled at combat in the open sky; her past First-Class Mage examinations had all used broad ground and enclosed ruins as their main battlefields.
Facing those troublesome Mana blades, Yuna could only choose to meet them head-on.
No—it seemed she could give this a try?
A sudden flash of inspiration.
Rather than turning to counter them, she put on more speed and flew forward, while the Mana blades behind her, bolstered by Solitär's Mana, came on even faster.
At the very instant they were about to strike, Yuna, with a hair's-breadth adjustment plus the effect of Severance Magic, sent all the Mana blades closing in around her flying off and away!
To carry out precise control during high-speed flight, to calculate distances, and still to unleash additional magic—all with hardly any margin of error: this was the difference between reaching First-Class and being an ordinary Mage, the layering of talent and experience.
But before Yuna had time to rejoice, her head suffered a heavy blow. She had crashed into an invisible wall, and nearly plummeted straight out of the sky.
"A barrier?!"
Severance Magic, (an improved version of) Killing Magic, and Ordinary Offensive Magic all went off together, yet aside from a violent roar, the barrier before her did not so much as budge.
It seemed she would have to use the power-accumulating Killing Magic.
But there was no longer any time.
"What rotten luck!"
All of a sudden Yuna felt that this time, she might truly have no way of returning to Gaderia.
"To think it actually came in handy. Good thing I left a little something prepared on my own turf."
"A lost human, hmm."
A demon with cyan-green hair, gentle and sweet of feature.
And the other was a tall, large-statured figure in full formal dress... a trash can?
Yet whichever demon it was, both radiated overwhelmingly powerful Mana.
If it were only one, Yuna felt she might still have some chance of winning, but now there were two, and she didn't even know their methods... Since she couldn't escape, then she could only strike first!
In the brief moment the two sides sized each other up, more than a dozen hidden magic circles manifested all around Yuna, and the Ordinary Offensive Magic readied within them roared out in an instant, making the whole sky flicker for a moment.
"Humans really do seem to love this magic."
Solitär merely drifted in place, neither dodging nor evading, letting the white cannon of light strike her. Yet the very instant it made contact, a continuous sizzling rang out, and across the surface of her body an eerie layer of blue Mana defense automatically unfolded, like Defensive Magic, directly blocking off the impact of the magic.
On the other side, Macht—his head encased in the trash can—used Ordinary Defensive Magic to precisely defend against the cannon of light fired at him.
"That's—our Defensive Magic?!"
In an instant Yuna recognized Macht's technique. Though she'd long considered the possibility, demons who had learned human magic really did exist.
"Don't be in such a hurry to leave. Why don't we sit down and have a good, heart-to-heart chat? Human."
Solitär once again revealed that business-like smile. Although she very much wanted to gripe about how Macht could even see the road with a trash can over his head, her desire to study humans was burning fiercely.
Beside her, Macht slipped a hand into the trash can, stroking his chin as he pondered for a moment. He kept feeling that this human before him looked somewhat familiar, yet he couldn't recall where he had seen her.
"My apologies, I bear no malice. You were the ones who attacked me first—this counts as legitimate self-defense on my part."
Seeing her preemptive strike had also failed, Yuna shifted instead to trying to communicate with the demons across from her, while in one palm she brewed up Severance Magic in a charged state. Such charged Severance Magic had higher lethality at close range than equally charged Ordinary Offensive Magic.
Because the brief pride of becoming a First-Class Mage had utterly vanished—truly, there was always a higher heaven beyond the heavens.
In such a dire strait, she decided to first stall through conversation, biding her time for the right opportunity.
____
👻🔥Seek: Walnut-chan🔥👻
🔥 New history: A Martial Arts Master Will Never Be Humiliated
Let's hit these goals:
🎯 100 Powerstones = 1 extra chapter for the public!