Chapter 45: This Man Is Too Magnificent
Seeing the look of hesitation and suspicion plastering Freya's face, Yumesaki couldn't help but let a faint smile play on his lips.
He paid Freya no mind, turning instead to Esdeath and the others to tell them to dig into the food.
Esdeath, Mez, and Suzuka had spent the entire previous day fighting inside the Dungeon, leaving them thoroughly famished and parched from the very start. Faced with this lavish spread of dishes, they fell upon the meal without a shred of hesitation, devouring everything in sight.
Even the bones were crushed piece by piece under their teeth and swallowed down into their stomachs.
Before long, the food across the entire table had been completely swept clean by the group.
This left Freya watching the scene utterly dumbfounded.
If there was ever a definition of eating like ravenous beasts, this was exactly it.
It wasn't that she had never seen people eat quickly before, but this was the first time she had witnessed anyone eat at such a breakneck pace.
This kind of appetite was definitely not that of an ordinary person.
Once she had eaten and drunk her fill, Esdeath questioned Yumesaki, "Where does that guy named Ottar live?"
She was already burning with impatience to test her mettle against this man, eager to measure just what kind of standard a peak-tier expert in this world possessed.
While eating, Yumesaki had already used his Clairvoyance magic to scan all of Orario, tracking down Ottar's whereabouts.
Seeing how restless Esdeath was, Yumesaki rose to his feet and said with a cheerful smile: "Come with me."
After the group paid the bill, they left The Hostess of Fertility.
Watching them go, Freya couldn't help but raise an eyebrow. Was that woman actually planning to challenge Ottar from her own Familia?
Now this was getting interesting.
She, too, deeply desired to see what kind of background this woman with the shockingly radiant crimson soul truly possessed to dare challenge the strongest monster in her Familia.
With that thought in mind, Freya left through the back door of The Hostess of Fertility.
On the other side, Yumesaki brought Esdeath to the vicinity of the Tower of Babel.
The Tower of Babel soared high, piercing through the clouds, standing as the absolute center of the Labyrinth City Orario.
Beneath the towering structure, people surged back and forth. The shouting of adventurers, the clashing of weapons and protective armor, and the whispering of information brokers intertwined to form the eternal background noise of this city.
Yumesaki pointed toward a tall, massive silhouette and said: "Do you see that Boaz over there? That is Ottar."
Esdeath followed the direction of Yumesaki's finger and shifted her gaze.
Sure enough, she spotted a man with a towering, massive build.
Although Orario was a gathering place for adventurers where all sorts of physiques could be found, this man's stature could still be considered an anomaly.
Standing well over two meters tall, his shoulders were as broad as a city wall, and the contours of his muscles were clearly visible beneath his coarse cloth clothing, each part looking as though it were cast from solid steel.
His face was rugged and composed, devoid of even the slightest hint of excess expression, resembling a statue chiseled from mountain stone with knives and axes.
An absurdly large greatsword hung slanting across his back, which was none other than Ottar's signature weapon... the Supreme Black Sword.
The moment she laid eyes on this man, Esdeath knew Yumesaki hadn't lied to her.
The man hailed as the strong was indeed exceptionally strong.
Esdeath came to a halt twenty paces in front of Ottar, looking up slightly at this man who stood as silent as a mountain peak.
The man's presence felt like a block of iron that had been forged thousands of times.
Calm, resolute, and unyielding.
Exuding a pure, almost primitive sense of pressure.
Esdeath could feel the temperature of her own blood rising. That long-lost thrill felt like a surging undercurrent beneath a sheet of ice, gradually breaking through her habitual composure bit by bit.
"Are you Ottar?" Her voice wasn't loud, yet it clearly cut through the frozen air of the plaza. "I heard you are the strongest adventurer in this city."
Ottar finally raised his eyes, looking without a single ripple of emotion toward the woman who had posed the question to him.
He had never seen this woman before in his life.
Yet intuition told him that this woman was incredibly powerful.
Her ice-blue hair reached all the way to her waist, casting a cold gleam beneath the sunlight.
Her facial features were beautiful to the point of sharpness, the corner of her mouth carried a trace of an excited smile, and the gaze she directed at him looked as though she were viewing an intriguing prey.
This was a gaze unique to the strong.
Clearly, this unfamiliar woman before his eyes considered her own strength to be above his, which was why she would display such a condescending look.
This left Ottar a bit puzzled. Where did she get such confidence?
"Who are you?"
Ottar's voice was heavy, like rolling thunder in the distance. Just those three words, with no extra syllables.
"My name is Esdeath, the person who is about to crush you."
Esdeath slowly raised her right hand, and an ice crystal the size of a fist froze out of thin air, hovering and spinning above her palm.
The moment the words left her mouth, she moved without any warning.
In a mere tenth of a second, the ice crystal elongated, took shape, and hardened into an ice stake half the height of a human. Ripping through the air at a speed difficult for the naked eye to register, it shot straight toward Ottar's chest.
A piercing, deafening screech exploded in the air—the boom of the ice stake breaking the sound barrier. The stone tiles of the plaza were gouged into a shallow trench by the passing air pressure, sending rock fragments and dust hurtling to both sides.
This strike held absolutely nothing back.
Yet Ottar's reaction was even faster.
The instant before the ice stake struck, his body shifted half a step aside. The distance was so miniscule it was almost imperceptible, yet it accurately evaded an attack fully capable of piercing a city wall.
The ice stake grazed his shoulder and flew past, embedding itself into the surface of the stone tiles behind him with a heavy shattering sound, sending shards of ice flying in all directions.
"Crush me?"
Ottar's voice remained perfectly calm, but his right hand had already gripped the hilt of the greatsword on his back.
The greatsword was unsheathed by him with a single hand, the blade reflecting the sunlight, dense and placid like a mirror.
"Then just try it!"
His feet dug in, the stone tiles cracked, and his entire being pressed forward like a moving mountain.
There were no flashy techniques, no wasted movements, just the simplest vertical slash.
Yet the trajectory the greatsword traveled carried a pressure that made people gasp for breath. The air in front of the blade was compressed into a white shockwave visible to the naked eye, unleashing an explosive roar.
This was the fighting style of the strong.
Pure might, overwhelming brutality.
Esdeath burst into a hearty laugh. "Splendid! It truly should be this way!"
As the empire's strongest general, she naturally wouldn't retreat. Shoving both hands forward, a half-meter-thick ice wall rose from the ground. With the Demon's Extract blending with Ice-Make Magic, the hardness of the ice wall far surpassed solid steel.
The greatsword slammed into the ice wall, a thunderous boom erupted, and the entire plaza trembled for a brief moment.
At the point of contact, the ice wall fractured into countless cracks, and shards of ice sprayed out like shrapnel in all directions, pelting the walls of the surrounding buildings and leaving dense pockmarks.
Yet the ice wall did not shatter completely.
Meanwhile, Esdeath had already leaped into the air under the cover of the splintering ice wall.
Her figure stretched out in mid-air, her long ice-blue hair fluttering like a banner.
With both arms extended out to her sides, her five fingers curled slightly. The moment her palms faced each other, an intense cold gathered frantically within a three-meter radius around her body. The water molecules in the air froze into ice within a fraction of a second, and then, as if glued together by an invisible hand, they took form.
One blade, two blades, five blades, ten blades... dense ice swords lined up behind her body, their tips pointing downward, hovering in the air like an army poised for action.
"Ice-Make Magic: Ice Sword."
She uttered these few words in a low voice, her tone carrying an exhilaration that was almost full of reverence.
The next second, the ice swords shot forth simultaneously.
It was an onslaught as dense as a torrential downpour. Each ice sword carried enough kinetic energy to pierce a city wall, sealing off all of Ottar's paths of retreat from every direction.
The sound of the falling sword rain wasn't a crisp clanging, but a heavy, continuous rumble, like divine punishment.
Under the impact of the ice swords, the surface of the plaza's stone tiles shattered across a wide area. Smoke, dust, and ice shards blended together, forming a rapidly expanding white blizzard.
An ordinary person caught in this sword rain wouldn't survive for even a single second.
But Ottar was no ordinary person.
The moment the ice swords began to fall, he made a split-second assessment.
Since he couldn't evade, he wouldn't evade.
With a sudden jerk, he brought the greatsword horizontally in front of his body, using the wide blade as a shield to block the densest cluster of ice swords at the front. At the same time, he crouched slightly, reducing his exposed surface area to the absolute minimum.
The ice swords slammed against the greatsword and the stone tiles. The shattered ice fragments gouged countless small wounds across his body, and fresh blood seeped out along his brawny muscle lines, but he didn't even knit his brows.
He was waiting.
Waiting for the moment the sword rain ended.
Then, he moved.
Amidst the smoke, dust, and ice mist, a massive silhouette hurtled out like a cannonball, his speed entirely mismatching his body size.
Ottar's footsteps crushed the ground, each stride leaving deep fractures atop the stone tiles.
His greatsword was dragged behind his body, the tip frictioning against the ground and drawing a blinding trail of sparks.
Then, utilizing the momentum of his dashing charge, the greatsword was swung from bottom to top. The path of the blade was like an inverted waterfall, intending to cleave Esdeath in the air clean in two.
The power of this single slash was simply too immense, so immense that the air in front of the blade's tip formed a visible bow-shaped shockwave.
Esdeath's pupils contracted slightly, her excitement reaching its absolute peak.
Yet she still managed to twist her body in mid-air, her right leg hoisting high before slashing downward like a battleaxe.
Along the trajectory of her downward slash, the intense cold froze frantically. Layer after layer of ice crystals wrapped around her leg, forming an exaggeratedly massive ice blade in an incredibly short span of time.
Measuring over three meters in length, the edge of the blade was as thin as a cicada's wing, reflecting a seven-colored light under the sun.
Leg turned sword collided violently with the greatsword in mid-air.
Above the point of impact, a ring of shockwave visible to the naked eye exploded, rippling out in all directions, sending the nearby stall wares and rock fragments flying.
Every adventurer below Level 1 around the Tower of Babel instinctively lowered their bodies. The sense of pressure brought by that kind of shockwave was simply too terrifying, as if an invisible giant hand were dropping from the sky, wanting to crush everything into the dirt.
The ice blade shattered, and the greatsword bounced back. The head-on collision of two immense forces sent both individuals jolting backward.
Ottar's two feet gouged two deep trenches into the surface of the stone tiles, retreating a full five steps before stabilizing his massive frame.
Meanwhile, Esdeath spun once in the air before landing lightly upon the ground ten paces away. The stone tiles beneath her feet were coated with a layer of white frost the moment she touched down.
Her breathing was slightly ragged, but that kind of pure, satisfied thrill was like magma that had been suppressed beneath a sheet of ice for far too long, finally finding a vent to spew forth.
She looked at the wounds gouged by the ice shards on Ottar's body, saw the fresh blood dripping onto the ground along his arms, and noted Ottar's standing posture, which still remained as steady as a mountain. The smile at the corner of her mouth grew deeper and deeper.
This man is too magnificent.
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