Chapter 79
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Translator: 8uhl
Chapter: 79
Chapter Title: The Sky's Wrath
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Bolt.
Bolt is an exceptionally reliable spell. Its casting time is short, yet its power is formidable for such a quick cast, and it performs above average in any situation. It is, in every sense, a jack-of-all-trades.
If one were to compare Bolt to modern weaponry… yes, it would be like a very well-made pistol.
A weapon with excellent accuracy, infrequent malfunctions, and great portability, ready to be drawn and used at a moment's notice.
In contrast, Rireu’s signature spell, ‘Thunderbolt,’ has many more flaws than Bolt.
Its casting time is longer, and it comes with various restrictions and conditions.
While ‘Bolt’ can unleash its full power simply by raising a staff and chanting the spell’s name, ‘Thunderbolt’ requires several preliminary steps to achieve its proper effect.
If Bolt is a well-made pistol, then Thunderbolt could be compared to a heavy machine gun, its stats skewed to extreme firepower. It’s heavy, cumbersome, and presents numerous difficulties when you need to use it in a situation where every second, every tenth of a second, is critical.
“Eyes of stars, clouds of light, a sea covered in scales and flowers of salt.”
Nevertheless, no lightning mage would ever neglect Thunderbolt. Even those not born with a natural talent for it, like Rireu, typically had a considerable understanding of both ‘Bolt’ and ‘Thunderbolt.’
The reason was quite simple.
It was because of the overwhelming firepower inherent in the spell.
“The humidity is just right, and the dark clouds have gathered quite thickly.”
Alter watched Rireu, who was gripping her staff with both hands and concentrating on her incantation, and spoke with a low laugh.
A massive parchment was spread across the floor of the trench where Rireu stood. On it were scrawled a large magic circle and countless runes, their meanings incomprehensible to the average person.
“Can you even begin to fathom how much power is hidden within those dark clouds?”
Standing beside Rireu, who was now emitting electrical currents from her entire body, Alter looked up at the sky. He wore a pleased smile, like a father watching his fully-grown daughter show off her talents.
With every word Rireu uttered, the sky roared. Soon, the only sound in the area was the rolling thunder, and everyone, without exception, naturally lifted their heads to gaze at the dark clouds preparing to unleash a torrent of lightning.
Raguel, seeing the familiar clouds behaving so erratically, scowled.
“Thunderbolt.”
Raguel hastily folded his wings and lowered his altitude as much as possible.
But it was already too late. The sky, obeying Rireu’s command, began to unleash its fury.
Light enveloped the world. The battlefield, once shrouded in a bloody mist, turned pure white. Eyes were momentarily blinded, and soon, ears lost their function as well.
A ringing filled the ears of everyone on the battlefield, be they human, orc, elf, or Mazoku.
The orcs were the first to regain their sight, thanks to their characteristically robust constitutions. Humans followed. While they didn't have the same recovery ability as orcs, the elves’ uniquely sensitive senses meant it took them longer than the other races to escape the ringing and the intense light.
What met the eyes of those who had recovered their vision… was a scene straight out of hell.
The sky continuously hammered the ground with lightning, and the mud-caked battlefield churned like the shores of a stormy sea.
An unidentifiable metallic scent filled their noses and mouths, and a stinging sensation from the electrical charge lingered on their fingertips.
“You… crazy!”
A small scream escaped from the area where the lightning was concentrated. But it was quickly drowned out by the thunder and vanished.
“...General, look at two o’clock.”
In the epicenter of the bombardment, where hundreds of lightning bolts struck every second, was the Overlord Ariel.
Rex let out a hollow laugh as he watched the shadow, kilometers away, flicker in and out of existence.
Meanwhile, Rex’s superior, the boy, had yet to recover his senses from the light and thunder of the spell.
“Hoo…”
The greatest weakness and strength of Thunderbolt is that it is heavily influenced by the weather.
A ‘Thunderbolt’ cast on a clear day performs little better than a Bolt, but one used on a day with dark, heavy clouds and high humidity brings a destructive power so immense it’s hard to believe it’s the same spell.
To compensate for this weakness, some mages would cast a spell to create dark clouds beforehand, but… there was no need for that now. The skies of Vellaland had been covered by thick, massive storm clouds that had blocked out the sun for two straight weeks.
“I’m reaching… my limit…!”
Rireu, who had brought a hell of thunder and light to the battlefield, spoke, her hands trembling as she clutched her staff.
Originally, Rireu was not a mage strong enough to make such an impressive mark on a battlefield like Vellaland.
She had become a 5th-circle mage at the youngest age in the history of the lightning school, but that was all.
She had boundless potential, but her current skill was still far from developed. That was Rireu.
And yet, Rireu’s Thunderbolt had, in a single moment, completely dominated the battlefield.
A sky full of dark clouds, a meticulously crafted plan, an innate talent for Thunderbolt, and a blessing bestowed by a spirit.
It was the convergence of these four elements that made her the variable the Overlords had never imagined.
“Phaaaah…!”
With a sound like air escaping a balloon, Rireu dropped her staff.
“Have Rireu moved to the rear, Second Lieutenant. She’s exhausted all her mana.”
The white-haired boy spoke, his hands still pressed against his ears, which were ringing.
“Yes…? Ah, yes! Understood. Sergeant Hendel and Corporal Sys! Escort the mage to the rear!”
The second lieutenant, whose uniform was relatively clean compared to the soldiers’, shouted immediately upon hearing Bin’s order.
To be honest, the lieutenant didn't quite understand what had just happened on the battlefield either, but he quickly regained his composure.
He had experienced countless incomprehensible situations on this battlefield. In times like these, trying to understand by clumsily racking one’s brain was poison. The lieutenant knew from long experience that the best course of action was to simply carry out the superior’s command as given.
“...Damn, it’s gotten bright.”
Like the boy, Rireu was a mage who had received the ‘Spirit’s Protection’ from Dajin. Because of this, her capacity for storing mana was limitless, and she was even a full circle higher than Bin.
The result of her pouring out every last drop of mana she had diligently saved for the past two weeks without wasting it elsewhere, all in the span of a single minute, was the scene now laid out before them.
The sky, having unleashed tens of thousands of lightning bolts, was now as clear as the morning in some nameless country village. The pervasive humidity and fog had completely vanished, and the dark clouds that had obscured the sun were gone, leaving only a clear blue sky and sunlight above them.
Some soldiers felt a sense of strangeness at the sudden change on the battlefield.
The nearby hill was gone, as were the piles of corpses. Now, before the white-haired boy, there was only a massive crater created by tens of thousands of lightning strikes, and at the bottom of that crater, a pitch-black shadow writhing and screaming in agony.
“...Just as the report said, its form is truly indistinct. It would have been impossible to find that Overlord in the previous weather.”
“Is it some kind of camouflage magic? How bizarre.”
The two orcs who had stepped forward to guard Bin spoke in low tones as they watched the shadow, which was slowly moving and emitting smoke from the bottom of the distant crater. Being ignorant of magic, they had a tendency to assume any incomprehensible phenomenon was magic.
“It’s less magic… and more a concept closer to biology. Think of it as similar to how a chameleon changes its body color to match its surroundings.”
Alter answered, joining their conversation as he slowly climbed up from the trench.
In Alter’s hand was a staff as large as his torso. The staff, intricately carved with magically significant decorations and runes, was covered in scratches earned over years of fighting on the battlefield.
“What’s a chameleon?”
“...Never mind. Let’s just call it magic.”
At Rex’s question, Alter, sensing the conversation would get long, simply brushed it aside.
While the old man with white hair and a beard carefully walked onto the battlefield, two soldiers who had brought a stretcher from the trench below lifted Rireu and gently laid her on it.
“You did well. Go get some rest.”
The white-haired boy watched Rireu leave the battlefield with an affectionate gaze. Others who saw it thought the boy had special feelings for the elven mage, but in truth, he was simply envious of Rireu for getting to leave the front lines first.
“Hee hee… I think I’ll go eat some of the chocolate my master brought. My blood sugar is crashing.”
“Aren’t you worried about me?”
The boy asked, looking slightly hurt that Rireu was planning to leisurely munch on chocolate while he was about to face a life-or-death struggle.
“Nope, not at all.”
Rireu replied with a calm smile.
It wasn't that she was indifferent to the boy or disliked him.
It was quite the opposite.
Rireu simply had immense faith in him. She firmly believed that the boy named Bin was not someone who would fall on a battlefield like this, that his true potential and talent were not something that would crumble in a place like this.
“…”
However, the two soldiers who lifted Rireu onto the stretcher glanced at Bin with a hint of pity.
To an outsider, it looked like a human boy gazing affectionately at an elf, and an elf responding curtly to him.
‘…Sir Bin isn’t very skilled when it comes to romance.’
‘An elf… he’s chosen a difficult partner.’
Such inappropriately peaceful thoughts briefly crossed the minds of the surrounding soldiers.
It was probably because of the weather.
The pressure of survival and death that had been weighing down their shoulders just moments before had likely been lifted by the bright sunlight and the pleasantly dry breeze.
Some might have scolded them for their lack of discipline in the face of the enemy, but for these men who had lifted their swords and shields every day for so long, overcoming the fear of death, this absurd moment of leisure was necessary.
Perhaps the relaxed atmosphere was contagious. The soldiers, as if bewitched, slowly peeked their heads out of the trenches. Some even placed their hands on the ground, baked hard as pottery by the lightning, and pulled their bodies out of the no-man’s-land. The officers watching did not stop them.
“...A full-frontal assault?”
The second lieutenant, who had been hiding in the trench, asked the white-haired boy instead of stopping the soldiers who were leaving on their own.
The Overlords, who had only ever revealed themselves one at a time against Bel, had now appeared two at once against Bin.
On top of that, one of the two Overlords was writhing in agony at the bottom of a large crater with no cover or concealment, while the other seemed quite fearful that another powerful spell like the last might come flying again.
The fog that had obstructed their vision was gone. The bright sunlight illuminating the battlefield meant they could react quickly to enemy ambushes or surprise attacks, and since the ground had been baked solid by the lightning, there was no risk of soldiers’ boots getting stuck in the mud and slowing them down.
And above all, the eyes of the soldiers, who had always been staring at the ground and trembling, were now filled with life and fighting spirit.
Their morale wasn't exactly soaring, but… even this was more than they could ask for.
If the soldiers before were like cattle in a slaughterhouse awaiting death, the soldiers now were warriors who had resolved to die to protect their country and their loved ones.
“It’s a full-frontal assault.”
Hearing the young general’s answer, the soldiers began to speak one by one, letting out small, dry laughs.
“Finally, this damn war of attrition is over. Dammit… it dragged on for way too long.”
“That’s it. Whether I die or they die, it ends today.”
“Hoo, shit! Let’s do this.”
More and more soldiers began to pull themselves out of the trenches. The clanking of armor stirred a sense of elation in their hearts.
“...Prepare for a full-frontal assauuult!”
The officer’s belated cry echoed in the soldiers’ ears.
Mud-stained swords and shields slowly formed ranks, surrounding the white-haired boy.
“This is the real reason we mages are treated like nobility.”
Alter said with a smile as he looked at the white-haired boy.
“...You, you foolish bastards! You’ve finally lost your minds!”
Raguel, who was regenerating his blackened, scorched wings from the lightning strikes, sneered at the soldiers raising their swords and shields with fighting spirit.
Objectively speaking, the Continental Army was still at a disadvantage. Two of the four Overlords had yet to show themselves, and when factoring in the other high-ranking Mazoku and the Mutants they had created, they were inferior in both the quantity and quality of their forces.
But strangely, an unexplainable confidence was welling up in the heart of every single soldier.
It was probably because they had just witnessed a baptism of colossal lightning that covered the heavens and the earth.
‘A mage far greater than the one who cast that spell is fighting with us.’
‘As long as we protect Sir Bin, we can somehow resolve this situation.’
The simple, almost foolish and irrational thoughts gave the soldiers the strength to stand on their own two feet.
The mage's lightning didn't just bloom on the bodies of their enemies.