Thunderstorm (4)
The hammer that fell from the sky landed squarely in his grip. Its shape was so bizarre it defied easy description. To put it bluntly, it was lightning itself. A bolt of lightning shaped like a hammer rested in Enlir’s hand. To my eyes, it looked exactly like a thunderbolt summoned from the heavens had slammed straight into that bastard’s palm.
Chiiiiiiiik…….
The garden grass burned fiercely, sending up thick, acrid smoke. Enlir rested the short-handled lightning hammer on his shoulder. The runes on his belt and the lightning armor covering his body remained unchanged. The aura coating his hands had fused with the lightning, transforming into something like glowing gauntlets of light. The hammer itself looked heavy, as if it possessed real mass.
⚡ Eptirleiða: ᚦᚢᚱ ⚡
Replica Mythic Form: Thor
……I’m so fucked.
An inescapable sense of impending doom washed over me. I didn’t even have the brain cells to spare wondering what the hell that hammer was. Even if I was ignorant about Earth’s myths, I wasn’t so clueless that I couldn’t connect lightning and a hammer to a certain thunder god.
「……Mjolnir?」
「Oh? You recognize it after all.」
Enlir twisted the corner of his mouth in a smirk, as if pleased that I’d identified his ride. Don’t you fucking grin at me, you ball-sack bastard. The guy was wrapped head to toe in lightning like some kind of human Blue Lantern, so he was perfectly visible even in the dead of night.
「Don’t worry. Sadly, it doesn’t have the full performance of the real thing.」
Tap. Tap. Enlir rapped the lightning hammer against his palm. Just as he said, the weapon felt about two percent short. Or, to describe it purely by feel without the idiom… it was like only two percent of the tank had been filled. Like pouring a single plastic bottle into an Olympic-sized swimming pool. It probably wasn’t literally just two percent, but it was clearly nowhere near the genuine article.
「Still, it’s more than enough to kill one human.」
「Whether its power is sufficient or not, you can find out with your own body!!」
Static electricity shot through me. My face hardened. This sensation was all too familiar. It was the feeling right before a real lightning bolt struck your brain! Under normal circumstances, the moment I felt this I would have dodged out of the area like avoiding an RPG boss’s ground AoE. But this time, I couldn’t.
Why? Because the attack’s radius was a full twenty meters from where I stood.
"FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK──!!!!!!"
Zero-point-three seconds before the ultimate wide-area instant-death skill landed, I moved. I slammed my spear into the ground like a lightning rod and retreated. I even raised my arms to protect my skull. It was a full-defense stance that scraped together every last scrap of protection I had: the Thurs rune, the mana coating from Beast Regression, and even the defensive power of Gertyr.
⚡ HEAVENLY TRIBULATION ⚡
The roar of thunder that seemed to demand the entire world listen exploded.
By then the lightning had already pierced straight through where I had been standing. My vision went pure white from the electric current that tore through even my maximum defensive buffs. The lightning ripped across the garden and smashed into the commerce building. A section of the wall glowed red-hot before exploding outward, leaving a massive hole as if it had been hammered. I didn’t even need to describe what happened to me after getting caught in that.
"GYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYAAAAAAAAAAHHHH──!!!"
Goddamn it! It hurts so fucking bad!!!
The spear I’d planted like a lightning rod had blocked part of the strike. But even the leftover current hurt like hell. The fact that I could still feel pain meant my nerves hadn’t been completely fried, though I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing. Waves of lightning poured out in every direction like water from a fire hose. I was tossed around like a raft made by cavemen.
Now I understood why primitive people worshipped lightning as a god. If you’re curious, just stick a pair of chopsticks into a 220-volt outlet and see for yourself.
“Kgh, uuuugh……!!”
I clenched my teeth, forcing down a scream. The Thurs rune’s magic resistance was active. The problem was that even with its 1,000 magic damage reduction, 2,000 to 3,000 points of damage were still punching through. Both the defensive power of Beast Regression and Gertyr’s body reinforcement were useless in the face of lightning. Not that they hadn hadn’t helped at all. Without them I would have been crisply cooked long ago.
⚡ HEAVENLY TRIBULATION ⚡
The lightning that had been roasting my neurons like fried chicken finally began to subside.
After what felt like ten minutes packed into a single second, I was down on one knee, breathing hard. I wiped my mouth, feeling as if sparks were still popping inside my skull. I’d thought it was drool overflowing, but what was smeared across my cheek was blood baked dry by lightning. Crispy flakes of burned skin came off on the back of my hand. Fucking lovely.
Hwarururuk.
A burning piece of wood lay beside the hand I’d planted on the ground. My dazed mind took a moment to register what it was before I realized my mask had been incinerated. The scorched smell coming off my body was real. My skin was burned, my hair was deliciously cooked. The stench of burning protein was so strong it made me want to vomit. I tore off my flaming robe. My charred arms had lost all fine control, so I ended up ripping my top completely apart as well. I was now unintentionally shirtless. A lightning-shaped burn mark ran across my torso.
Not bad. Pretty wild-looking. I like it.
I could already picture the tearful faces of my wives. I clenched my trembling fist. The vibration running through it was intense.
"You son of a bitch…… If my wives start crying, are you going to take responsibility?"
I spat out a mouthful of boiling-hot saliva and yanked the spear free. My left leg reacted a full second slower than I expected and I nearly fell. Chiiiiik……. Even the spear that had blocked the lightning wasn’t unscathed. The mithril had turned glowing red, all the runes carved into the blade had vanished, and every last one of the auxiliary devices Larilura had enchanted with Puppetry was burned to a crisp.
「Kha, khahahaha……!! You’re still alive after taking that hit?」
The previous attack must have been a serious finisher even for Enlir; I could see sweat running down the bastard’s cheek. Still, it was too early to feel relieved. My senses, sharpened by the proximity of death, roughly estimated the mana he still had left.
……Three or four more times, maybe.
He looked like he could fire off attacks of similar power that many more times. The technique probably had a cooldown, but his confidence in his total mana reserves clearly hadn’t been a bluff. In contrast, I would die if I took even one more solid hit. Even if I avoided instant death, a knockout was one hundred percent guaranteed. And getting knocked out in front of an enemy was synonymous with dying.
Even if the story somehow progressed to me not dying here but getting kidnapped and dragged off to some mysterious organization, that would still be extremely shitty for me. My mask had burned away completely, so running was pointless. Even if I fled, the odds of him chasing me down felt like about 140 percent.
⚡ CRACKLE ⚡
Lightning sparked from Enlir’s eyes. Literally crackling with electricity, the bastard glared at me.
「I can see it!! I can see it, Druid!! The beast coiled inside your belly!!」
Had turning into a fake Thor let him see something new? The lightning-covered Enlir was practically glowing with manic delight.
「Come on, bring it out too!! Surrender your body to rage and mana!!」
Enlir did a backflip and landed on top of the clock tower in the garden. Then he raised the hammer again. The static electricity piercing my body and the premonition of death! Fortunately, this time the attack was a straight line, so I had a chance to dodge.
"Fuck off!!"
I threw myself sideways with everything I had. My muscles were shot and my feet kept freezing up, so I used steam propulsion to assist my movement. The crackling Mjolnir flew toward me like a beam of light. Given that it was lightning, calling it a beam of light wasn’t an exaggeration.
⚡ KWAaaaaang!!! ⚡
The lightning smashed into the wall of the commerce building. When Enlir pulled his hand back, the fake Mjolnir flew back to him in reverse. The already collapsing commerce building sent up a cloud of dust.
That son of a bitch. It’s not even his house, yet he’s wrecking it like this.
「What’s wrong?! Are you hesitating?! If you’re not going to use the beast in battle, what’s the point of raising it?!」
Enlir hurled Mjolnir again, clearly enjoying the act of wielding such power. I had to dodge left and right in time with the bastard’s excited rhythm, but unlike the initial psychic storm, the hammer throws were actually dodgeable.
「Show me!! Show me what your old god’s mana looks like!!」
But there was a limit to how long I could keep dodging. I was already half-reflex at this point; how much longer could I last? The first lightning strike had been that overwhelmingly powerful. Even if I survived, my body couldn’t stay intact. It seemed the bastard had calculated that and opened with his ultimate right from the start.
Goddamn it!! It’s already depressing enough that I couldn’t shave off any HP before we entered phase two!!
This was completely different from the monsters I’d fought until now. The moment that son of a bitch decided I was dangerous, he immediately pulled out his trump card.
⚡ KWAaaaaang!!! ⚡
Lightning poured from the hammer. I spun my spear like a windmill to block it. The red-hot mithril spear spun and shredded the lightning like noodles in a blender. I had no angle to dodge, so I was forced to deflect. Even that tore at my palms and set my electrocuted body on fire.
"……………!!!!"
It felt like I was spinning a propeller inside a thundercloud. I rotated the spear with the resolve to die. I poured every ounce of the old god’s mana rooted inside me into my arms, trying to spin it even faster. Just a little quicker. Keep spinning so the lightning couldn’t travel along the shaft—
……Spin?
The sudden thought made my feet stop. Mjolnir flew at me again as if it had been waiting. I rolled across the ground using steam propulsion to dodge. When the lightning hammer struck the earth, it left a crater behind.
"Aaaagh, fuck!! Let me think for a second, you stupid bastard!!"
I shouted desperately. I couldn’t even tell if I was still breathing. Even though I clenched my teeth, strength was draining from my body. I still had mana left, but it felt like I’d squeezed out every last drop of stamina and internal energy.
If this keeps up, I’m really going to die……!!
I didn’t know how he’d done it, but Enlir had somehow entered a “Thor, come forth from hell” state. The hammer god from another world who had supposedly died during the mythic era—Chris Hemsworth’s counterpart. That bastard must have had his precious hammer stolen by some criminal. Stupid German day-laborer. You should have guarded dangerous items better. Or maybe he’d simply recreated it with magic since he admitted it wasn’t the real thing. Perhaps, just like how I had received Odin’s wisdom during my rampage, this guy had summoned the hammer through similar means.
Whatever the answer was, there was one thing I could say for certain.
For me, who had nothing left but mana, there was only one path to victory remaining.
「──Are you not going to do it? Or can’t you?」
Enlir stopped attacking and asked. Sitting atop the clock tower, he looked down at me like a kid staring at an ant, or like a god gazing down from the clouds. His eyes seemed to hope that the interesting spectacle wouldn’t turn into disappointment! The bastard was clearly expecting me to go into a rampage like I had when I beat up Yerna.
I wasn’t sure if he knew I could enter that state, but it felt like he was just throwing out a guess based on some knowledge only their group possessed—maybe this guy can do it too~
"……This is already my transformed state, you idiot."
Ptui. I spat out dry saliva.
"Can’t you see the green mana all over my body? Why are you rushing me to transform like some kind of maniac?"
「What else? I’m curious. Even if we lump it together as ‘old god’s mana,’ there are many differences once you dig deeper. pack」
Enlir twirled a finger through the air with an empty hand.
「Using rage as sustenance is a trait unique to Odin’s mana among the old gods’ powers. The mana you’ve accumulated is that kind. You’re not going to say you didn’t know, right? The heavenly god’s mana in your soul is greater than that of Odin’s priests or third-rate Einherjar.」
Crackling with lightning, the bastard spoke to me.
「So go ahead and rampage. Who knows? You might be able to do it like me. If you do, you’ll have a chance to survive, and I’ll get a much more entertaining fight.」
……A chance to survive, huh.
At those words I sneered as if I knew nothing.
"If I do what you say, what happens? Will I transform and start sparkling like you? If my brain gets overloaded with rage, I feel like my eyes would just roll back like some idiot who took the wrong medicine."
「……I see. A rampage, huh. That could happen.」
Enlir stroked his chin with his thumb and muttered as if talking to himself.
「It’s not an impossible story. If the activation condition is pure rage, then it’s possible. But in that case, how did that woman…… Whoops.」
Enlir covered his mouth as if he’d made a verbal slip. Then he seemed to remember that the only person who had heard him was me, already baked crispy, and let out a small chuckle.
「Well, never mind. So, are you going to do it or not? I’ll wait, so I strongly recommend you give it a try. Wielding a god’s power is incredibly thrilling, you know? You’ll understand once you try it.」
Even though it would put him at a disadvantage, Enlir was practically urging me on. I let out a deep sigh. The answer had already been decided.
"──I’m not doing it, you moron."