She sat on the ground with nothing to do, surrounded by a forest of fallen mana-swords, her smile replaced by cold indifference.
Solitär let out a slow breath and began to rise, the vast column of mana around her starting to contract.
It was rare to find an opponent who could draw out her full strength. To have it end so anticlimactically — that was, somehow, a little galling.
"Mm… I suppose I should go find something more interesting to do."
She was just about to turn away when the atmosphere around her shifted in an instant.
Through the open air, Solitär felt it first on her exposed skin — a thick, viscous sensation — and then the overwhelming stench of blood materialized from nowhere, flooding her senses.
The mana-swords embedded in the ground behind her began to shudder violently. Tiny beads of blood peeled away from their surfaces and drifted upward, converging in the air above.
The presence that had grown so faint it was nearly undetectable now bore down on Solitär with immense, crushing pressure.
"You can't be serious…"
She had barely spun around before her head snapped back again, jade-green eyes flashing — and that smile returned to her face.
The droplets of blood gathered into threads, threads wove into a cocoon, and the mana-swords were eaten away and dissolved as new mana surged back to life around them.
"What kind of magic is this?"
Without a moment's hesitation, Solitär raised her hand and aimed at the cocoon forming in the sky above.
She unleashed the most lethal magic at her disposal — a mana scatter: the raw dispersion of her own enormous mana, fired like a shotgun blast.
It was simpler and more primitive than even Killing Magic in its method of attack — less a spell in the traditional sense, more a technique of brute mana manipulation.
At close range, its destructive power rivaled Killing Magic. Where Killing Magic pierced, mana scatter at close range crushed — given sufficient volume of mana, it could punch through an opponent and flatten them simultaneously.
Solitär was barely three meters from the blood cocoon. At that distance, the mana scatter maintained both its maximum spread and its maximum force.
The mana erupted like a carbonated drink shaken hard and uncapped all at once — it slammed into the blood cocoon in midair, and the moment the ash-white mana made contact with the cocoon's surface, it shaved away a thin layer of bloody mist. A constant, sizzling hiss filled the air.
"Now I've seen everything."
Under the first wave of Solitär's mana scatter, the cocoon only cracked a shallow outer layer — which was swiftly sealed and filled again by the proliferating blood threads. Inside, a vague and blurry shape was just barely visible.
In all her long years, this was the first time Solitär had ever encountered something so bizarre — a Demon and a magic this strange.
"If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I never would have believed something like this existed in the world."
At first, after her initial probing, Solitär had assumed Jane was simply using her vast mana reserves to continuously convert and manipulate blood.
But this — endless proliferation? Rising from the dead?
While continuing to pour out mana scatter, Solitär also reactivated her earlier magic — forging and controlling mana-swords. Blade after blade surged alongside the barrage, each one attempting to breach the cocoon's surface.
As though sensing the ferocity of the assault, the cocoon accelerated its absorption of the scattered blood on the ground and its own regeneration, barely holding together a last, thin final layer even as outer layers were shredded away.
"I see. She's concentrated all her mana into a single drop of blood."
Solitär suddenly perceived it — deep within the cocoon's core, a single drop of blood was transforming into a human shape.
At last, Solitär abandoned the pointless war of attrition against the cocoon. Instead, she began pooling her mana into a sphere directly in front of her, preparing to detonate it all in one scatter the instant her opponent broke free.
Without the external assault to fight off, the cocoon's incubation accelerated. A rhythmic pulsing began to emanate from within.
...
Just a short while later, the massive sphere of mana condensing before Solitär had grown taller than the trees of the surrounding forest — from a distance, it looked like an egg rising above the canopy.
On the other side, cracks were spreading across the cocoon, and vivid red shards were falling away one by one.
"Just die already."
Before whatever was inside the cocoon could even emerge, the ground convulsed with a violent tremor. The enormous mana sphere detonated. A curtain of pure white light swept across the sky, and for a hundred miles in every direction ahead of Solitär, it was as if dawn had broken.
Countless streams of light converged; the raging mana swallowed the cocoon whole and ground everything within nearly a thousand meters into nothing.
That single strike had carried just under half of Solitär's mana at full power.
The topsoil was overturned completely. Every living thing was annihilated. The small stretch of forest nestled at the foot of the mountain range was largely reduced to nothing by the impact, and even the rolling hills beyond were crushed and erased in an instant.
"..." Solitär stared in silence at the mana still dispersing ahead of her, and said nothing.
Until a voice rang out — and the corner of her mouth curved into a wider arc than it ever had before.
"I'm not… 'dead'… yet."
Jane's voice was languid, like someone who had just woken from sleep, carrying a faint, drowsy haze.
"A book I read once said that living things on the verge of death will unleash potential they never had before. So I tried it."
The blood cocoon had vanished entirely. The demon girl stood suspended in the air, balanced atop a string of blood droplets.
A scythe — nearly one and a half times her own height in length — lay across Jane's hands. Its grip and blade were formed from solidified blood: not translucent, but a sharp, solid mass of deep crimson.
Jane was no longer wearing any clothing. Her newly regrown skin, pale and smooth, was covered only by a layer of blood-formed scale armor, and crystallized blood jutted out from her body's surface in jagged spines.
Crystalline blood-wings had replaced her former liquid ones, glinting in the sunlight. Her once jet-black curved horns had turned blood-red. Her short white hair drifted in the wind, and her equally blood-red eyes blazed with a savage light.
Like the Grim Reaper from the depths of hell. Like a war god risen from a lake of blood.
Solitär suddenly realized she could not quite control her own expression.
"Even I have to admit — this is insane."
What she was witnessing had already exceeded the boundaries of what Solitär could comprehend.
"Cough…" Even as the two of them faced each other, Jane coughed up a mouthful of blood.
Clearly, Solitär's last strike had not been without effect. It wasn't that Solitär's mana had simply diminished after pouring everything into that blow — Jane's mana had also dropped sharply.
"How about this — let's both rest for a bit before we keep going? I think——"
She hadn't even finished speaking before that enormous blood scythe was already in front of her.
After the transformation of her blood-wings, Jane's speed with the crystalline wings was more than double what it had been before.
Defensive Magic activated in an instant. The blue polygonal barrier scraped sparks against the tip of the scythe.
A faint, cool scent of blood reached Solitär's nose. For the first time, a crack appeared in her specially crafted defensive barrier.
"Then let's go all out!"
Seeing that her opponent had absolutely no intention of backing down, Solitär's smile widened — deeper than it had ever been. She seemed to make up her mind. In one motion, she released her Defensive Magic, twisted sideways to dodge, and at point-blank range, fired another mana scatter directly at Jane.
BOOM!
____
Danmachi: Summoning Ruri Gokou, And oth
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