"Raaaaaaaaaahhh!"
The roar of Nikolaos was the opening salvo, his enchanted spiked maul a blur of destructive momentum.
The air crackled with anticipation, the curtains of battle drawn back to reveal the grim tableau. The witch, Alfia, stood poised, her response to the initial onslaught a single, deceptively simple word.
"Gospel."
"Graaaaaaaghhh!!"
Nikolaos grunted, his powerful charge abruptly halted.
A wave of sound, amplified by Alfia's sorcery, slammed into him, flinging his frame backward as if he were a child's toy.
The sheer force of it was enough to make lesser warriors reconsider their life choices.
But the adventurers were not lesser warriors.
They had been schooled in the arts of Alfia's hymn, prepared for her sonic assaults.
"Hup!!"
"Tempest!"
Nikolaos's momentary distraction was all Ryuu and Ais needed.
They surged forward, their twin blades carving arcs through the air.
Like predatory panthers, they moved from opposite flanks, their upward slashes aimed to cleave Alfia in two.
Against any lesser foe, the combined force of their attacks would have been an inescapable, devastating hurricane.
"I see the echoes have still not died down."
Alfia was no ordinary monster.
She was a creature of terrifying power, a nexus of destructive magic talent.
As Ryuu and Ais's blades neared her, she uttered another word, weaving it into her unholy song.
"Rugio."
A cataclysmic explosion of force erupted, shattering the air.
"Wha…?!"
Shocked exclamations were swallowed by the concussive blast.
"Aaaahhh!!"
Ryuu and Ais were sent reeling, as if struck by invisible hammers.
Ryuu, instinctively crossed her blades, digging her heels into the ground to resist the impact.
Ais, smaller and more lighter, was lofted into the air, spinning like a discarded plaything.
They had been flung into the very spot Nikolaos had occupied moments before, immediately enveloped in a maelstrom of explosive magical energy.
"That was a spell key!!"
Ryuu gasped, her voice strained.
She recognized the signature, the deliberate manipulation of lingering magic.
A spell key, she knew, was a means to detonate a previously cast spell, releasing its latent energy at a moment of the caster's choosing.
The horrifying realization dawned on the adventurers.
Alfia hadn't merely cast a spell; she had done something far more insidious.
She had already unleashed her primary attack, and what she had detonated as a spell key was not a new incantation, but the residual energy of the first.
Usually, spell keys were employed with homing projectiles or beams, allowing the caster to detonate the ongoing spell mid-flight.
Ryuu had never witnessed such a devastating two-stage attack, a spell cast once, followed by the explosive reclamation of its aftermath.
"Wait, what?! What just happened?!"
Alise, observing from a slightly safer distance, cried out, her gaze darting between the battered adventurers and the unflinching witch.
"I blinked, and now Nikolaos is on the floor, then Ryuu and the Sword Princess got blown back as well!"
"She uses sound magic!" Dimitra yelled, her eyes locked on Alfia.
"Weren't you listening when we were briefed about this?"
"The casting time is ultrashort, hits as hard as Nine Hell's magic, and you can't even see it coming!" Kaguya added, her voice laced with exasperation.
"And if that isn't enough," Lyra chimed in, her tone shifting to a dramatic, spooky cadence, "the wave will bust your eardrums and make you dizzy as hell! Every hole in your face will be oozing blood….even your eyes!"
"Ewww, gross! I can handle a nosebleed or two, but that sounds nasty! If even old man Gareth lost to her, then I hate to think what it'll do to me! It'd break every bone in my body!" Alise shuddered, her earlier bravado replaced by a genuine unease.
"...And yet, you all remain in one piece,"
Alfia's voice, eerily calm, cut through the girls' worried chatter.
"How curious. A magic item, perhaps?"
Kaguya and Lyra, having witnessed the sheer destructive potential of even a single spell from Alfia, could attest that any one of her sonic assaults should have ended the battle then and there. Yet, Nikolaos, Ryuu, and Ais staggered to their feet, defiance burning in their eyes.
From each of their ears dangled a small, purple piercing shaped like a miniature harp.
"Precisely," Lyra confirmed, a hint of pride in her voice.
"Finn devised them, and Perseus crafted them for us!" Ryuu explained, touching her earlobe.
"One for each of us," Ais added, her voice regaining some of its usual spark.
"So don't expect us to go down easily!"
These small, exquisite ornaments were originally a type of accessory known as a Silence Lyre, developed by Asfi to protect against the alluring songs of mermaids and sirens.
However, at Finn's specific request, Asfi had modified them to counter the devastating effects of all sound-based attacks.
The lyres incorporated a sophisticated blend of active and passive noise cancellation, creating a localized field around the wearer that dampened incoming sound waves.
They were, in essence, tailor-made to neutralize Alfia's unique brand of magic.
If one were to assign a name to such an item, it would undoubtedly be something along the lines of… Witch Bane.
Ais, having regained her footing, gripped her sword, 'Desperate,' and readied herself once more.
"Evidently, the noise will not die out so easily," Alfia murmured, a flicker of something akin to annoyance crossing her features.
"How irritating… but at the same time, it reminds me of something."
She spoke of the past, her voice devoid of overt emotion, yet carrying a weight of unspoken history.
"You children of Loki always did manage to pull something out of your bag of tricks when it counted. A wall to our sword, a veil to our magic. And now, these cheap tricks."
She paused, a hint of disdain in her tone.
"Your own past has saved you. All that noise was not in vain after all."
She was referring to the long-standing feuds between the Loki and Freya familia's against Zeus and Hera.
The only reason Riveria could now mount such a coordinated defense was because of the brutal lessons learned from repeated defeats at their hands fifteen years prior.
Yet, Alfia dismissed those painful memories as mere "noise."
Riveria shot the witch a venomous glare.
"Then let us see, shall we? Let us see how long that legacy will hold."
A brief silence descended, Alfia's dismissive words hanging heavy in the air.
Then, the onslaught resumed.
"Urgh?!" Clair cried out, her charge blunted.
"Dammit! This isn't fair!" Asta grumbled, recoiling from another sonic blast.
"How are we supposed to get close when she keeps blasting us back?!" Nikolaos complained. With Vasileios and Gareth absent, the heavy hitters like Asta and Nikolaos had been forced to act as vanguard tanks, absorbing the brunt of Alfia's attacks.
Alfia's magic was a relentless tide, seemingly unstoppable.
Even the adventurers' specialized defensive enchantments struggled to fully attenuate the sheer power of her sonic assaults.
Ryuu and her allies were tossed about like ragdolls, hurled against crystalline formations that shattered upon impact.
Fighting Alfia at a distance was an exercise in futility.
She surpassed even Riveria in raw magical output, her spells cast faster and hitting harder than any mage they had encountered.
A direct contest of magical power was a foregone conclusion....failure.
"Ignore it! Keep pushing!"
Riveria's voice, strong and clear, cut through the chaos.
"Overwhelm her with numbers and don't give her breathing room! Keep casting!"
The high elf herself sprinted to a new position, employing concurrent casting to maintain her own offensive pressure while meticulously managing her magic reserves.
Even amidst the desperate push, she and the others remained acutely aware of the two behemoths – threats from above and below – that would soon add to their already overwhelming predicament.
It was a torturous dilemma, restraining their own already meager power while attempting to overcome a foe who was already an insurmountable obstacle.
The melee fighters, with no other recourse than to keep pushing, leaped into action.
"Leon, Kaguya, Clair! Let's go!" Alise shouted, her sword tightly held.
"I'm coming, too!" Ais voice rang out as she joined the fray.
The five launched themselves at Alfia in a coordinated assault: Alise in the lead, Ryuu and Ais flanking her, with Kaguya and Clair providing rear support.
Their whirlwind of blades and spears sliced through the air, aimed with precision and fueled by desperation.
Yet, they struck nothing but empty space.
"Don't even raise your weapons if you lack the skill to use them properly."
Alfia moved with an almost supernatural prescience.
With a mere lean of her torso, a subtle tilt of her head, or the brush of a fingertip against a blade's edge, she deflected or avoided every single blow, her eyes closed serenely.
The five girls reeled, their surprise palpable.
Time seemed to stretch and warp.
'I can't touch her,' Alise thought, her eyes wide with disbelief.
'Even five of us can't land a single scratch while receiving magic and ranged support from behind!' Clair observed, her brow furrowed in frustration.
'I've never seen a mage move like her,' Ryuu mused, beads of sweat forming on her brow.
'It's like…' Ais's heart thrummed with an unknown rhythm.
'She's a frontline fighter, just like us!'
The witch, seemingly bored with the one-sided dance of evasion, finally decided to engage directly.
"Give me that."
Her arm shot out, a blur of motion.
In an instant, Ais sword, 'Desperate,' was gone, wrenched from her grasp.
"Wah! That's mine! Give it back!"
Ais cried, hopping up and down towards Alfia's raised hand in frustration, like a child whose toy had been snatched.
The other girls, recognizing Alfia's intent, moved to pull Ais back, but it was too late.
"Let me show you how to use a sword like this."
A roar, like the tearing of the sky, echoed through the battlefield.
A streak of steel, impossibly fast, seared a burning horizon into the girls' retinas.
Mere moments before the five would have been bisected, Nikolaos threw himself into the path of the devastating blow, his maul flaring with the explosive enchantment he had cast on it.
The world dissolved into a blinding white light.
"Raaaaaaaaaaahhhh?!"
BOOOOMMM!
The roar, a primal beast's cry, was swallowed by a deafening explosion.
Like a warped echo of the preceding moments, Nikolaos was once again flung backward.
Yet, in his desperate stand, he had managed to shield Ais, Ryuu, Alise, Clair, and Kaguya from the devastating slash by consuming all the explosive charges on his enchanted maul.
All six, along with the splintered remains of Nikolaos's maul, lay scattered across the torn ground.
"Ryuu! Alise! Kaguya!" Neze's voice, laced with concern, cut through the cacophony as she and the other strike team member parried the relentless onslaught of lesser monsters.
"That attack just sent all of them flying!" Lyra exclaimed, her eyes wide with a dawning horror. The sheer ease with which Alfia had dealt with them now, compared to their previous encounter, sent a tremor of fear through her.
"The hell was that, anyway?!"
It was Riveria who finally broke the stunned silence, her voice a low, guttural growl.
"That was one of Zald's techniques!"
Disbelief rippled through the onlookers.
"You're joking," spat Kaguya, still flat on her back.
Her trembling arms reached up, peeling the dazed Ais off her stomach and tossing her aside. "Glutton's swordplay? She's supposed to be a mage!"
Alfia herself, the source of their terror, provided the chilling answer.
"I can reproduce any technique if I've seen it even once before," she explained, her voice calm, almost detached.
"While I cannot pretend to possess Zald's physicality, I can imitate his swordplay, at the very least."
The statement hung in the air, a blasphemy to the very concept of effort and hard work.
The frontline fighters themselves, understood the impossible nature of her claim.
A witch, a mage, wielding the legendary swordplay of a warrior, flawlessly.
It was an insult to their dedication, their sweat, their very existence.
"The Monstrously Gifted…" Ryuu breathed.
"Are you some kind of goddess in disguise?!" screeched Kaguya, her voice raw with a desperate, almost delusional, fear.
It was then that Nikolaos, crawled to his feet.
Despite the shattered remnants of his weapon, his spirit remained unbroken.
"No point in comparing yourselves to her. She's exceptional even by ridiculous standards! A mage who fights on the front lines, but not as a magic swordsman! Not much different from Draco-nii."
"I know not if that is insult or praise, beast-boy, but it is noise either way."
Alfia, clearly weary of the adventurers' attempts to rationalize the impossible, raised Ais sword to shoulder height, testing its weight.
"This weapon does not suit me, after all," she mused aloud.
"How ridiculous it looks in these twigs I call my arms. You may have it back."
With a casual flick of her wrist, she tossed the sword, dumping it carelessly onto the ground at Ais feet.
The golden-haired swordswoman, her brow slick with sweat, stooped to reclaim her weapon with both hands.
"My heart's pounding… I've not felt this scared of another person! Not since…" Ais trailed off, the unspoken memory hanging heavy in the air.
"Rest assured, I despise your kind as well, girl. All I ever evoke in the eyes of children…is fear." A new wave of sound, a prelude to renewed hostilities, washed over them.
Ais and the other adventurers scrambled to evade the next onslaught.
Swordplay, magical ability, inborn talent – none of it seemed to matter against the Monstrously Gifted.
She was the storm, and they were merely sailors clinging to a battered ship, their lives hanging by a thread.
This was the terrifying might of Hera's Level 7.
"Girls! Get back!" Riveria's voice, a desperate command, cut through the din.
"The chant's complete! Get ready!" Ryana and Celty yelled, their voices sharp against the relentless barrage of Alfia's magic.
Positioned in the back ranks, they had been mercifully spared the direct brunt of the attacks thus far.
Together with Riveria, they raised their staffs, unleashing a potent vortex of magical energy.
"Wynn Fimbulvetr!"
A fearsome combination of fire, lightning, and three blasts of arctic wind, far exceeding anything the adventurers had witnessed before.
This magical bombardment was powerful enough to fell a floor boss.
Yet, Alfia merely extended her arm and uttered a single word.
"Ataraxia."
The magic dispersed, as if hitting an invisible, insurmountable wall.
"Wh… what the…?!"
"All our projectiles are being nullified just before impact!" Celty and Ryana's faces paled.
"Grh!" Riveria scowled, her composure cracking.
"She can use that barrier even after she's just cast a different spell!"
The mages had meticulously timed their combined assault for the precise moment Alfia would be unable to defend….right after she had unleashed her devastating attack on the frontline fighters. But Alfia had seamlessly pivoted to defense in mere moments.
"You never learn, do you?" Alfia's voice dripped with a weary condescension.
"How many times do I have to silence your paltry spells? I was under the impression the elves were a wise race, young one. Is that not the case?"
"Young one?! I'm older than you!!"
Riveria's retort was sharp, laced with an indignation that momentarily startled even Ais.
Of course, Alfia was Riveria's senior when it came to adventuring, a fact the high elf understood. But the witch's remark, so dismissive of her experience, struck a raw nerve.
"That makes it worse," Alfia shot back, her tone colder.
"It means your years have taught you nothing, you ill-tempered spinster."
The high elf snarled, her anger so palpable it made young Ais flinch.
"Rrrrrrrrrrrrghhh!!"
"Don't lose your head!" Dimitra cautioned, her voice filled with concern.
The last thing their team needed was to lose one of their most powerful fighters to a bout of rage.
More than anyone, Riveria's outburst worried her fellow elves.
"Lady Riveria's lost it!" cried Celty.
"Wh-what do we do?!" asked Ryuu, her voice trembling.
"Drop the comedy act, numbskulls! We're in the middle of a fight, here!" Lyra chided the two elves, before turning her attention back to Alfia.
A cold sweat trickled down her neck, soaking into her armor.
'Still, that high elf is right; her abilities are crazy! She can put up a wall so quickly after battering us with spells!'
It was unreasonable.
It was unfair.
It defied all logical magical principles.
Even Alfia's level wasn't enough to explain it.
Draco, while capable of similar feats, was different.
According to their goddess, he hailed from an ancient, near-extinct race with inherent, extraordinary abilities.
But Alfia was human.
Ultrafast casting should have its limits.
She was practically casting two Falna-type spells almost simultaneously.
Such a feat was supposed to be an impossibility.
One of the fundamental rules of Falna-based spell-craft dictated that spells could not be cast without performing the corresponding chant.
And it was impossible to recite two chants at once, regardless of any rare skills a mage might possess.
Attempting to do so would only result in muddled words and the failure of both spells.
"There's got to be some trick to what she's doing! How's she able to mix offense and defense so easily?!" Lyra glared at the witch, her mind racing, unable to unravel the enigma before her.
Alfia looked down, a flicker of disappointment crossing her features, and spoke a single, potent word.
"Gospel."
This spell contained more magical energy than all the previous ones combined.
Sound transformed into pure, unadulterated destruction, shattering the ground beneath them.
"It's a wide-area attack!!"
"We can't evade it!!"
"Grrrrrrhhh!!"
The adventurers were engulfed in the blast.
The entire floor shook violently, the air filled with the chilling symphony of shattering crystals. Soon, only the distinct, resonant tone of a tuning fork lingered.
As the dust settled, revealing the aftermath, the sight was one of remarkable resilience.
A female dwarf and a beast-kin stood stoically before the remaining party members, their shields raised against the devastating impact.
"Asta, Nikolaos, you saved us again…" Neze stammered, her voice weak as she took in their battered forms.
"Is everyone okay?" Nikolaos asked, his gaze finding Asta, who remained at his side, her own shield still at the ready.
He had managed to activate one of his stat augmentation skills, allowing him to share the brunt of the impact with her. His maul lay in ruins, so he had been fighting with a spare enchanted shield borrowed from Asta mid-battle.
It appeared that this shield, too, had reached the end of its lifespan.
"W-well, I'm a dwarf, after all…!" Asta replied, her voice strained but firm.
"Do you have another spare shield? I'm afraid this one won't do anymore."
"O-of course! Here you go!"
"Appreciated. However, I fear for our prospects. We shall have no weapons or armor at this rate…" Nikolaos tossed aside his previous shield, of which little now remained, as Noin passed him a new one.
Alfia was burning through their equipment faster than a dungeon boss.
The party's sound-cancelling accessories could only do so much.
A single glance at Asta's full plate armour, cracked from head to toe, made the grim reality starkly clear.
"There's no gap in her attacks to exploit!" Riveria cried, her voice strained.
"And there's not much time! Soon…!"
But right on cue, a new sound emerged, one so chilling, so earth-shatteringly loud, that it outclassed even Alfia's devastating spells.
The cavern floor buckled, a groan far deeper than any beast's preceding the truly cataclysmic. "Another attack from below! It's a big one!" Clair shrieked, her voice a fragile reed against the rising cacophony, barely bracing herself before an enormous explosion obliterated all sound.
A column of liquid fire, a reverse waterfall of pure destruction, erupted from the ground, spanning the entire height of the colossal floor.
The blistering heat washed over them, forcing Ais to shield her face with raised arms.
"It's coming through the ground!" she cried, her words raw.
"What is this monster supposed to be, a volcano?!" Lyra yelled, mesmerized by the inferno. Below, the ancient tree, once the floor's majestic centerpiece, was instantly consumed, its mighty form crumbling to ash as the flames surged through it.
"There's a big hole in the center of the floor!" Ryuu's voice cut through the blistering air.
Where the tree had stood, a gaping maw of blackness now pulsed, a void about thirty meters in diameter.
A deep rumble, like the horns of heaven announcing judgment, vibrated through their bones.
The first behemoth had only left a barely fifteen-meter scar; this new one was twice the size, promising unimaginable power.
The adventurers spun, their faces etched with shock, staring into the abyss.
"Oh no… It's here!"
From the collective horror, Alfia's voice, eerily calm, cut through the din.
"…A demon wreathed in flames. The Dungeon's cry made manifest. Second evil's first birthday."
Then, with a sickening CRACK followed by a BOOM that dwarfed even the inferno below, the cavern ceiling collapsed.
Perhaps drawn by the chaos or the titanic efforts of Vasileios and Gareth, tons of rock and glittering crystals rained down.
From the gaping new wound in the ceiling, the first child of evil descended, a shadow against the collapsing stone.
Amidst the swirling dust and the roar of destruction, a divine voice, a chilling melody of malevolence, wormed its way through the labyrinth of suffering, straight to Ryuu's core.
She spun, her eyes wide, to face its source.
"Hahahaha, the birth of the first and second evil. A nightmare made real. In the name of primordial darkness, I have upheld my oath."
Framed against a pillar of endless fire, a single figure approached, a contingent of shadowy troops at his back.
Ryuu froze, her lips trembling, recognition dawning like a cold dread.
"It's you… Erebus…!"
The dark god stepped out of the veil of scarlet and into stark relief, his eyes gleaming with madness.
"Here I am," he stated, his voice a silken threat.
"And I brought the apocalypse with me."
Behind him, three new pillars of fire violently erupted, and from the depths of the abyss, the second harbinger of destruction, a beast of nightmare and flame, began its ascent.