Chapter 201: Floating Sky Islands (11)

"Kh—! What is this?!"

Light flared. The instant the impact struck the Spatial Barrier, the rippling membrane of space heaved, and its duration dropped by a full forty percent. The flesh took no harm. The mind took plenty.

I ground my teeth, refilled the Spatial Barrier, and broke into a zigzagging sprint. A glance upward caught the winged human high overhead, the head of her staff leveled at me, white light knotting at its tip.

"Ah, that—!"

Tzzzzzt!!

"Gah!"

The zigzag saved me. Four bolts of light only grazed the Spatial Barrier, and because they merely grazed it, taking all four still only shaved the duration by twenty percent. More to the point, that bitch was retreating exactly as fast as I closed in.

She kept opening the distance and dropping bolts of light, and I clicked my tongue and threw a Mana Bullet to pin her. She must have felt the danger in that blue sphere, because the winged human simply climbed.

"Damn it! ...Huh?!"

As if that weren't enough, a sharp tzt! cracked the air and a bolt of light struck the Mana Bullet dead-on and blew it apart.

KRRRRRUMBLE...

The blast shredded the air right beside me. I trusted the Spatial Barrier and ran straight through the gaps between explosions. The duration was falling, but far less than it would have from a direct hit. Heat, thunder, and shock all died against the barrier and never touched my stride, so I used the blasts blinding both of us to hurl more Mana Bullets at the winged woman and ran harder still.

Light and fire poured down, boom after boom. The explosions hid her too well for me to be sure I was hitting anything. But the bolts that had been falling in a steady stream were hammering the ground around me now, not ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠me—so she, at least, was no longer in any ordinary state.

The real problem was how to drag a flying winged woman into the range of my Spatial Perception. I was turning it over when Spatial Perception caught more than a hundred Light Bolts punching through the blasts and raining on the ground.

"Oh, come on!"

I answered for broke, dumping 100 TP Mana Bullets into the sky without restraint, and the roar that filled the basin sounded like a war had broken out between nations. The noise put a knot in my chest. What if another winged human came out of the temple at six o'clock to reinforce her?

I dodged some of the Light Bolts tearing through the explosions and let the Spatial Barrier eat the rest, feeling out their speed to guess the distance between me and the winged aberrant.

...About three kilometers, maybe?

The TP a Mana Bullet burned was nothing next to my Phase Power and the rate I recovered it. I could fire all day. Keeping this up was still a terrible idea. I had no notion how much punishment Basin Island could take, but if I insisted on fighting like this and the island came apart, my sister and I would be the ones who lost everything.

Should I unseal the Mana Cannon?

But I didn't even know how strong it would be. A 100 TP Mana Bullet was uneven, yet its blast ran roughly fifty meters, and a 10,000 TP Mana Cannon detonation had left a crevasse a kilometer across. If a 100 TP Mana Bullet was a kilometer, then by a crude projection a 10,000 TP Mana Cannon would be... twenty kilometers?! No. An explosion on that scale would erase Basin Island whole.

The light bolts that had poured down like rain at the start had fallen to half their number and were coming only now and then. That did not mean they had weakened. I ground my teeth and kept pouring Mana Bullets into where I thought the winged aberrant was, and not knowing how the fight was actually going began to choke me.

If the bolts have dropped to half, I must have landed something. Or is her visibility just that bad? What if she's simply climbed higher?

Visibility was awful, but I couldn't fight the urge to glance toward my sister. The explosions thinned, and I caught her locked against the Pegasus. Nothing was left of it but a torso and its forelegs, and it was bleeding in sheets as it tried to dodge the Fusion Dark-Water she had fired. She was never going to let that pass. She stitched it with a rapid burst of Light Bolts, and the moment the Fusion Dark-Water crashed down over its head, flame and blast swallowed the view completely again.

Good. I can stop worrying about her side.

Tzt!

I had let my guard down. A bolt of light fell dead-center, and the Spatial Barrier's duration dropped to twenty percent. Struck by a bolt I never even saw. I sighed, refilled the barrier, swept both hands up to fire Mana Bullets into the sky, and shifted. Then, instead of launching the ones I had already formed, I hid myself in the chaotic wash of the blasts.

The Light Bolts had stopped coming for a while. She seemed to have realized I was tracing them back to aim. Which meant I couldn't throw Mana Bullets around freely either.

Damn it. Should I just lose my mind and jump for it? You never know. Maybe she'll happen to fall inside my Spatial Perception.

But even a jump with everything I had topped out at fifty meters. Get to the nearest tree and launch off that, and I would still only make eighty. I ran my thoughts at full acceleration, a mind drawn wire-tight, searching for a way to deal with the winged woman, and nothing came that would break this open. Spatial Manipulation needed her inside the range of my Spatial Perception, and that bitch had no intention of coming down out of the sky...!

Then smash the temple. Would an enraged winged aberrant come down for that?

Tch. Damn it, what am I supposed to— huh?

SKREEEEE!!

CRACK!

In that instant a sound like a Formula One car at full throttle tore across the air, and I watched a black bolt of lightning spear down into a single point.

A black bolt?

SKREEEEE!!

The sound came again, a shriek that raised the hair along my spine, and a second black bolt struck another point.

Wait. No way!

The winged aberrant was wherever those black bolts were falling. My sister was the one firing them! The moment I had a read on where the winged woman was, I started putting Mana Bullets on that spot with real precision, and the light bolts that had been falling in fits and starts stopped dead.

"There you are!!"

Miss this and there would be nothing after. I stopped counting what it cost in Phase Power, drove Mana Mode's physical enhancement to its absolute limit, and surged toward her. And I got her. The winged woman I had been waiting on fell inside the range of my Spatial Perception.

The instant I realized she was trailing pitch-black smoke and falling, I stopped firing and drove Spatial Manipulation into the space between her wing-joints. A brrrr, like a water balloon shaking, cut through the roar of the wind, and through Spatial Perception the image of her shoulder bones shattering poured into my head.

You think one hit ends this!!

Eat another!

"Ah—aaaaah!!"

Swept through the distortions of space blooming one after another, the falling winged woman screamed in agony. By then I had reached close range. I gathered my fingers, drew a Mana Ray out long, and brought it down at her neck.

Crack!

"Kgh—!"

"You're blocking that?!"

Instinct, maybe. Wing-bones shattered, still falling, she covered herself with her wings and stopped the Mana Ray. I clicked my tongue and moved to use Spatial Manipulation again—and with a heavy thud she hit the earth, spraying dust and blood.

Blood burst from her mouth in a flood. She curled in on herself, then spread the wings—burning black, the black bolts, maybe—and wrapped them around her body. In that instant light began to sheathe those snow-white wings, and the blackened, burning marks started to fade.

Sh-she's regenerating?!

"Kkh—aaaaaaaaagh!!!"

No matter how I looked at it, this was no normal recovery. Black smoke and pale white smoke began to billow from her critically wounded body and wings. At the same time a horrific scream tore out of her, as if her organs were being ripped apart, and a savage sense of danger crashed over me at what she was doing.

I couldn't leave her like this. I concentrated the Mana Sieve into my skin as hard as it would go and hammered Spatial Manipulation into the winged woman without pause. My sister must have felt something in that scream. She broke away with Shadow Jump and ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠fled.

A good call. I kept raising ripples through the winged woman's lower abdomen and chest, and even when space churned as violently as a pool under a falling waterfall, the aberrant only shuddered the wings wrapped around her. She would not die.

This much should have killed her. Why isn't she dead?! Just die already!

Looking inside the wings, I found the staff gone and the tunic gone with it. Naked, she was being tossed through the Spatial Manipulation and still enduring it with a durability that made no sense. What was she even trying to accomplish, forcing herself to take an attack like this? Did she have some hidden card?

Blood kept pouring from her nose and mouth, and still she stayed curled, hands clasped, offering a prayer to something... a prayer? Every fine hair on my body stood on end. I poured Spatial Manipulation out like I was emptying a bucket, all or nothing—and suddenly Spatial Perception started screaming warnings into my head.

The world was darkening. I felt hives climb all the way to my jaw as I looked up, and black clouds were gathering in the sky over Basin Island. White lightning crawled back and forth through the thunderheads with a low rumble. And then the winged aberrant's prayer drifted into my ear.

What?!

Only then did I get a read on the winged woman's Phase Power. A staggering 3,300,000. The Phase Stone alone held 3,010,000.

A Peak-Rank / High-Tier Variant, close to Highest Tier.

A prayer.

A sudden upheaval in the sky.

The three of them tangled together, and a dizzying sense of crisis stabbed into my brain. As if to prove it, the Phase Power inside the winged aberrant began to surge and resonate. Her TP plummeted, and in inverse the lightning multiplied, gathering at the heart of the storm cloud. Then it clenched together like a bead, and that bead swelled exponentially, shoving the thunderheads aside.

RRRRRUMBLE...

The pure-white sphere, wrapped in some unknowable white mist, let out intermittent peals of thunder as it descended slowly toward the basin. A colossal sphere, five kilometers across by the look of it. I didn't need to think about what would happen if that thing detonated.

In a basin like this, there was no dodging it. If that hit us, my sister... she would die.

...Die?

Who?

My sister?

My sister would die?

The instant I pictured her dissolving, snuffed out inside the light of that white mass, I let go of the tether of reason.

Mmm...

...

Huh?

When I came to, a world was spread out before my eyes, similar to ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the one I had seen when I rose to C-Class. The difference was the viewpoint. It wasn't a view I moved by my own will. It felt like looking through someone else's eyes. Like sitting in an old movie theater, watching a film—and the screen was the sensation of running, mindless, through a pitch-black castle.

The image shook violently. The camera whipped around the dark interior in panic, and that alone told me how terrified and desperate the owner of this viewpoint was. Every time the gaze bobbed, slender white arms flickered in and out at the edges of the frame.

A woman?

Whoever owned the view sprinted across something like a great hall and glanced back now and then, and each time the black interior of the castle burned itself onto the screen. A castle of oppressive gloom, as if carved and stacked from black stone. I knew, instinctively, that this was the black castle.

She ran hard, trying to escape, but she couldn't get out of the maze of corridors, and in the end her legs tangled and she went down. The screen flickered, again and again, as if she were blinking. Then the viewpoint dropped, and a naked woman's body was stamped onto the screen.

The large breasts, rising full, were a wreck of scratches and bruises, and below them the abdomen was carved with every kind of mark a beating leaves. Beneath the dark thatch of pubic hair, blood ran down the thighs together with white foam. Those white thighs, blood-soaked and scored with scratches and cuts, told me just how severe the torture she had suffered was.

The traces of violation carved into her body made me feel as if I myself had been raped, and just as the filth of that feeling set in, the woman curled up and began to shake. In that moment the gaze jerked and turned upward. From the top of the screen, out of the dark, came a human arm—skin a livid blue, knotted all over with muscle.

The viewpoint locked forward, and the field of view began to rise. The blue arm must have seized her by the head and lifted her. The viewpoint turned slowly. And out of the darkness, a shape that was human, and was not.

The thing stood something like two heads taller than the woman. Ram's horns jutted from both temples, and from the center of the forehead rose something like a rhinoceros horn. Livid blue skin. A hideously warped face, and unpleasant white lips split all the way to the cheekbones. Between those split lips, black teeth like a shark's. Eyes of blazing red, set against that skin, flashed like struck matches, and from an upturned nose sickly yellow smoke poured without end. Something like a snake's tongue flicked in and out between the teeth, and that ugly mouth kept working.

If demons existed, the blue thing in front of me was one.

The viewpoint dropped briefly to the demon's torso, and a naked male body filled the view—blue, packed with more muscle than even a professional bodybuilder could carry. I saw what hung at his groin. A grotesque, enormous thing, like a dildo sculpted out of malice. Beneath the trembling view, the naked demon wore a smile that raised the skin, gripping the woman's head and holding her up. His mouth had been working for a while. He seemed to be saying something. Even reading his lips, I couldn't make out a word.

And the view began to blur.

Is she crying?

The viewpoint, hanging in the air, suddenly spun and showed me the dark interior of the castle. Then it began to jolt up and down, settling into a steady rhythm, rocking. That rhythmic motion brought to mind the movement of lovers being taken from behind.

...

Why am I seeing a vision like this? What is that blue-skinned demon in the black castle? I was fighting the winged woman.

The viewpoint kept rocking up and down in that steady rhythm, moving somewhere. Even so, it periodically widened, then narrowed, and trembled. After a long while of travel through the dark, black interior of the castle, we arrived at an enormous stone door, as if the stone had been painted in blood.

When the door sat directly in front of the woman's gaze, a thick blue arm reached out from the right and began to push. Through the gap of the slowly opening door, a hellish scene entered the view.

A torture chamber.

A room that encompassed every form of torture, from the physical to the mental to the sexual. The ones inflicting it were naked, blue-skinned demons. The ones receiving it were female bodies—human, and of races that only looked human.

A demon pared the skin from a woman whose body was short and thick enough to call a dwarf to mind, flaying her as if the flaying itself were the point. Another pulled out, as if it were amusing, the fingernails and toenails of a woman with a body long and thin as a spit and ears that came to points. A tall woman with ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a pair of feathered wings had been stripped of the skin from her entire body except the face, and lay pickled in blood while a demon laughed like a madman, slicing her flesh and filleting the muscle away.

The devices were worse. There was a frame that fixed a breast inside a round iron ring and tore it off. There was an iron mass shaped like a phallus: work the lower section and the shape split open, and long needles rose from inside it. Something like a waterwheel had clasps to fix both arms and both legs, and beneath the wheel a fire was burning. A cage barely large enough for one person had needles running along its bars, and a thick chain hung from the top—shake it, and the scene that would unfold didn't bear imagining.

On every one of those devices, women who were not human, only human-like, were bound and suffering. Blood ran from the bottom of a closed coffin shaped like a person. A woman with her limbs bound to a carriage wheel was laughing like a madwoman. It was a place where the orgy unfolding in one corner looked normal by comparison.

The owner of the viewpoint couldn't tear her gaze from the room, and the thing that looked like an eyelid was trembling, so I knew something was forcing her eyes open. From the top of the view, a face that looked ready to spit curses descended, wearing a grotesque smile. It kept coming until the demon's face filled her entire vision, and then the lips worked, and a snake-like tongue stretched out and licked across the viewpoint.

I wanted to stop watching. The viewpoint kept showing me anyway. In the space of the orgy, a great number of demihumans had been made into the demons' playthings, suffering humiliation on objects that didn't even fit their bodies.

And then the place changed. There was a demon beneath the viewpoint's owner, and another behind her—I could tell from the way the viewpoint thrashed, and from the blue arms swinging through the frame. After the two demons had had their way with her for a long while, she turned her gaze aside. There, a blonde Western woman was being eaten alive by two demons, screaming.

Why is it Alastor's Terrible Dark Castle that comes to mind?

Why show me this now, of all times? And why show it to me?

Who is the owner of this viewpoint?

In an instant the view flared wide, and she looked down at her own left arm. There, a demon wearing an I-can't-hold-it look on his nasty, fucked-up face was eating her arm away, bit by bit. The viewpoint shook hard, thrashing this way and that, but that didn't last. Her head was fixed. The view locked, and what it held was her own arm, slowly disappearing—

And then even that was gone. Everything before her eyes went black as pitch, and sank into silence.