Ryuu kept pace at Isagi's side, continuously adjusting her position — always appearing at precisely the right place: directly behind Alfia.
The elf girl held fast to the understanding that her role was to feint.
At the same time, she had to prevent Alfia from unleashing that sonic magic known as [Demon King Valion] — and so she had been chanting her own magic, [Luminous Wind], without pause.
"———O forest canopy now long since passed. O boundless stars inlaid across the infinite vault of night, answer the voice of one as foolish as I, and grant me once more the blessing of starfire..."
Countless orbs of light circled the elf girl's body.
Converging. Compressing.
Ryuu had once asked Lefiya for guidance on the finer techniques of magical control.
And so.
What she was doing now was not merely cycling through her chant to multiply the orbs — she was also pouring her full mental concentration into each and every one of them, her focus absolute and unwavering.
Converging, compressing, driving magical energy inward without cease.
Even the flame magic of her dear friend had been woven into the orbiting spheres around her — fire, wind, and radiance intertwined, blazing in a mingled deep-crimson and deep-green light.
They were extraordinarily volatile, like bombs on the verge of detonating at any moment, held together only by the sheer force of the elf girl's concentrated willpower.
The effort was immense. But it had to be done — and there could be no lapse, not even for an instant — because the magical orbs that might detonate right at her side were genuinely dangerous to herself as well.
The purpose behind all of this was equally simple: to maximize their destructive potential, and in doing so, to ensure that Alfia — standing mere inches away — felt the threat of "magic" bearing down on her at every moment.
Only then.
Would the woman be compelled to maintain that "magical domain" capable of silencing everything around her at all times. And only then — simultaneously — would it be possible for Isagi and herself to remain at the woman's side, rather than being casually flung away by that invisible sonic magic of hers.
Ryuu was not the only one working toward this end.
At the same time, from a distance, Heith had her [Book of Poisoned Milk] open in her hands and was chanting her own magic without pause.
[Asa Gullveig].
Heith's sustained healing magic — channeled through the [Book of Poisoned Milk] that Isagi had given her — was converted into a continuous source of "corrosive damage" dealt to its target.
Against Alfia in her current state, this was of course useless in any direct sense.
But it was precisely these threats.
That forced the woman to keep [Garden of Stillness] active without interruption — and in doing so, reduced the power of any magic she herself released to something barely worth accounting for.
Having set all of that in motion, what came next depended entirely on the golden-haired girl positioned at a distance.
Ais, at this moment, held a bow.
A great bow built to hunt dragons — and the arrows it loosed were, frankly, absurd.
The heavy shafts, far thicker than the arm of a grown man at his strongest, each had a fist-sized bomb bound to them, giving every shot an "explosive" property.
With those slender palms of hers, Ais nocked five arrows simultaneously, drew back the string, and in the blink of an eye had taken aim at Alfia in the distance.
"Hah!"
With a small, sharp cry from the girl.
Those impossibly heavy arrows carved curved arcs through the air, and in a fashion that defied all reason, every single one of them bore down on the woman's head.
And still she did not stop. Ais continued to draw and nock, loosing every arrow in her grasp in an unbroken stream.
In that moment, the girl could release her magic freely.
Riding the golden gale swirling around her body, she called down what truly looked like a sky full of falling arrows.
Though the barrage completely enveloped Isagi and Ryuu as well, those descending shafts seemed almost to have eyes — none of them touched the boy or the girl in any way. Every single arrow flew straight for Alfia.
This was the fruit of everyone's combined effort.
Ais was using her mental focus to manipulate the invisible hands of "wind," influencing the trajectories of the arrows in flight.
Simultaneously.
Isagi and Ryuu were constantly, deliberately weaving through the countless arrows raining down around them, intentionally clearing space so the shafts could strike Alfia.
Cold flickers of steel flashed past at nearly point-blank range, accompanied by rolling detonations.
In this moment, Ais was the team's primary attacker.
Together with Isagi, she inflicted wound after wound upon their enemy without pause.
Under an offensive this utterly saturating, even a woman whose [Agility] and [Dexterity] had long since reached 999 could not possibly emerge without taking any damage at all.
And beyond that.
Her perception, at this moment, had been "warped" by Isagi.
Alfia could not read Isagi and Ryuu's attacks through her eyes — and even the incoming arrows were impossible for her to track in terms of trajectory or landing point. Everything before her had become blurred, muddled, as though the whole of reality had been churned into a single indistinguishable vortex.
The one piece of good news was that Ryuu's attacks were not lethal to her in isolation — and that she could still use "sound" to gauge the general position of the arrows and dodge them accordingly.
But the boy was a genuine threat of a different order.
His blade made no sound — not even a sensation, not even the faintest trace of… "killing intent."
That instinctive sharpness adventurers develop for danger — that prickling of the body and skin that should arise when a weapon is about to fall — none of it was there. None of it at all.
Alfia had even begun to suspect that Isagi simply did not "exist."
If his blade did not actually open cuts in her skin — letting crimson blood bead to the surface — she would have had no means of confirming whether the boy was there at all.
And there was more.
The shotgun in Isagi's hands was underhanded beyond all measure.
Pulling the trigger, igniting the powder, firing the round from the barrel — all of it naturally produced sound. No matter how masterful one's weapon proficiency, that could not be erased; it was a matter of the firearm's own mechanical structure.
And yet.
Isagi would, without anyone noticing, move the shotgun into position — utterly soundlessly — until the muzzle was right against the woman's body.
Point-blank shots.
This meant that even Alfia had almost no time to react.
In the span of an instant, arrows, blade, and shotgun — the primary weapons of offense — were being directed by Isagi and Ais to carve wound after wound into their enemy.
The scales of victory began to tilt of their own accord. Defeating Alfia was beginning to seem like a simple matter of time.
At this rate, the fifteen-minute window Isagi had originally planned to take her down in was well within reach — nothing impossibly difficult about it.
Whatever else she was.
Alfia was still an adventurer. A Lv. 7, certainly — but she would never possess the absurdly high [Endurance] of a Monster Rex.
So it would be enough. And indeed, as her wounds continued to accumulate.
The woman's movements were noticeably slowing — only a little, but the moment even that faint trend appeared, their side could begin leveraging their advantage into a snowball, until in one final instant they would shatter through the woman's "gates" entirely and bring her down for good.
——
Azure radiance swept across the entire temple in an instant.
Isagi and the girls all gave a small start — in that tiny fraction of a moment, time itself seemed to stop. Everything came to a halt: themselves, and the arrows that had been falling around them.
"?"
In Alfia's hand was a fragment of irregular crystal, and it was glowing.
A magic stone?
Or… a shard from some magic staff?
Isagi didn't know.
Did Alfia have a weapon?
In principle, she should. After all, as the former strongest members of Hera Familia in the city's history, they would surely not have lacked the funds to forge a staff for her.
And yet, in truth — whether it was Riveria and Ryuu-senpai, who had lived through the era of the Great Conflict, or the various adventurers' "journals" he had read — there had never been any record of Alfia possessing a staff.
By rights.
As a powerful adventurer, her weapon should be just as famous as she herself was.
But it wasn't.
And furthermore, from a theoretical standpoint, even the magic-suppressing robe Alfia habitually wore served the purpose of restraining her own magical output and reducing the collateral destruction her spells would cause.
Naturally, then, it was hardly unusual that she would not use a staff at all.
Perhaps the woman simply had no need for a weapon to amplify her magic — and no need for a staff to help stabilize and control it.
But clearly, the "Alfia" before them now was different from the real Alfia.
The one here was a creation of the Dungeon.
And so that "weapon fragment" in the woman's hand was, in truth —
——
A bone-piercing cold spread through the temple hall. Almost instantaneously, everything before them froze in place — and a blizzard erupted alongside it.
It was the first time Isagi had ever felt, within the Dungeon, what it meant to be cold enough to cut to the bone.
Even his body could no longer move. He had lost all sense of it — as though his very existence had been erased.
Everything, all of it, had ceased to belong to him.
Whether time had stopped or everything had simply been frozen — it made no difference either way.
Ryuu even felt the response within herself to magical energy lock into place. The only one still capable of movement was Alfia.
She was chanting.
"———O root of all blessed calamity, O hatred born into being, devouring half of my flesh as the original sin that is mine...."
The woman parted her lips.
Word by word, she gave voice to that extraordinarily long incantation — and every syllable struck against the hearts of Isagi and the girls.
"That which cannot be cleansed, cannot be purified, cannot be redeemed — the sound that resounds to the heavens is the very mark of my transgression..."
The longer the chanting continued, the greater the power that would be born.
What Alfia had used before were her two ultra-short-verse magics. But as the city's once-greatest mage, she naturally held every magic slot available — three in total. And now, the one she was releasing was the last of them: the strongest, an "ultra-long-verse wide-area annihilation spell" —
[Extinction · Annunciation Prayer].
"O trumpets of the gods, O harps of the spirits, O melody of light — the very seal of sin, the fate of one beloved by a man-made heaven and earth——"
She had to be stopped.
His body had begun to sense fear almost on instinct — Isagi even became acutely aware that what the Alfia before him was using was a magic incomparably more terrifying than the [Explosion Magic] Lefiya and the others wielded.
It had once slain the Sea Overlord in a single blow.
If Lefiya's Explosion Magic was crude and primal — hurling every scrap of one's magical power outward at once and detonating it — then what Alfia was using now was something that had been refined across countless iterations: the fully matured, reliable, perfected final form that Explosion Magic could become.
This is what it was —
"Shatter into ash, for I despise thee utterly — the price is here, the proof of my sin destroys all things, weep, thou holy..."
The chant was nearly complete.
And just as Alfia was on the verge of giving voice to those last few words —
The "divine power" at Isagi's fingertips began to gather — and as the Dungeon shuddered around them, it swelled, growing larger and larger.
The magic the woman was using now was nothing short of rule-breaking. The most critical factor was the "weapon fragment" she was holding in her hand.
Right now.
Everything had been "frozen" and "suspended." Neither himself nor any of the girls could make a single move to prevent her from releasing that extended magic.
This was absolutely absurd. Completely out of the question.
If that was how it was going to be — then don't blame him for what came next!!!
Isagi's mind was filled with nothing but that single thought — and so, with the eruption of magical energy, his divine power erupted alongside it.
After the blinding flash of white light came absolute void — a total darkness in which nothing at all remained.
Magic that had once been capable of destroying Leviathan — unleashed now, the tower before them, no, the entire floor itself would probably be obliterated.
That was all of their thoughts in that moment — Isagi's and the girls' alike.
But it seemed that was not what happened.
When everything had vanished without a trace, everyone — Isagi included — realized only after the fact: in the moment just past, they had died, and come back to life.
____
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