Chapter 86
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Translator: 8uhl
Chapter: 86
Chapter Title: When Space Unravels
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Pristine white horns, bluish skin, fluid wings that looked like a draped cloak, and hands disproportionately large for his frame.
Overlord Mikael appeared at the very rear of the battlefield, on the hill where Bel and Grisha stood.
‘…Since when?’
The method Mikael had used to get behind Grisha and Bel was remarkably simple.
While Overlord Maltiel was creating a diversion by targeting the boy named Bin, Mikael had dug a tunnel in the ground.
It was an absurdly simple method, yet no one, including Bel and Grisha, had noticed.
The moment the white-haired boy came under attack, everyone's attention had been focused on protecting him.
It was only natural. The boy was hailed as a prodigy who would grow into a monster on par with the Sword Saint himself—the very man who had slain an Overlord less than ninety seconds after stepping onto the battlefield.
He was a boy worth everyone laying down their lives to protect.
“Who wraps us in light and drives out the darkness…”
Belatedly, Grisha began to recite her prayer. A faint light enveloped the two of them, but the sphere of light already coalescing in Mikael’s hands had expanded to its limit.
“Now, what lies ahead is completely unknown.”
The perfectly laid plan had been overturned; the fish trap had sprung a leak.
‘…No incantation, no spell name. He focused on casting speed over power.’
Time slowed for Bel.
‘…Even if he skipped the spell name and incantation, this is still a spell from an Overlord, and one who specializes in magic at that. If I take it head-on, it’s instant death, no question.’
In a fraction of a second, his thoughts moved even faster.
‘Damn it, he’s too close. No matter how fast I move, escaping the blast radius is impossible.’
He calculated the odds of escape.
‘Can Grisha finish her prayer in time? It looks like she’s not even halfway through.’
He calculated Grisha’s chances.
The mind of Bel, a 9th Circle Mage and the de facto strategist of the allied forces, burned through sugar at a frantic pace.
Even with death looming before him, Bel’s mind did not freeze; it ceaselessly searched for the best possible move.
‘The best-case scenario is Grisha finishing her prayer and successfully deploying the barrier before the explosion reaches us.’
But the probability of that happening was, in Bel’s judgment, far too low.
The ‘miracles’ used by priests were fundamentally different in structure from the magic used by mages.
Unlike magic, where one could choose to omit incantations and even spell names in exchange for power, priests had to recite their prayers to the very end, no matter what, to invoke a miracle.
‘…The worst-case scenario is me dying here, caught in that explosion.’
Bel the mage was not the type of person who cherished his own life. Having sacrificed countless people for the greater good, he viewed his own life as just another piece on the board, ready to be discarded for the cause at any moment.
Therefore, his assessment of ‘his own death’ as the worst possible outcome at this moment was not an emotional one. He held no particular attachment to life.
‘If I die, an unprecedented catastrophe, one never before recorded in history, will occur.’
The magic Bel currently had surrounding Vellaland was a spell that twisted the very concept of ‘space’ to the mage’s will.
It temporarily excised the space that connected the inside and outside at the barrier's edge. The result was a state where no object could pass between the exterior and interior.
It was conceptually different from ordinary barriers that erected a ‘solid wall.’ Without the ability to access the concept of space itself, no being could leave the location known as Vellaland.
At first glance, it was an all but invincible spell, but it had three major, hidden drawbacks.
One was that the mage had to personally plant scrolls, infused with mana over a long period, at the vertices of the barrier.
This drawback, this condition, had forced Bel to undertake the perilous mission of infiltrating deep into enemy territory to hide the scrolls himself.
Another was that the difficulty of casting and maintaining the barrier was astronomically high.
Bel’s brain cells were melting in real time just to maintain the barrier. If Grisha hadn’t been standing next to him, constantly healing him, the barrier would have undoubtedly collapsed in less than thirty seconds.
And the last one… was that every step of the process was exceedingly complex and cumbersome.
Most barriers, while requiring considerable effort to cast, posed little risk to maintain or dispel.
But the barrier surrounding Vellaland was a high-level spell that operated on a completely different plane from such simple constructs.
Even when taking it down, a precise procedure and proper calculations were required.
This was because the ‘space’ that had been excised needed to be stitched back into its original place.
“…Fuck.”
The discipline of magic, which might seem endlessly convenient and simple to the uninitiated, was in reality a truly rational and logical field of study.
Where there was a great advantage, there was bound to be a correspondingly great disadvantage.
The barrier Bel had deployed over Vellaland boasted near-invincible strength, but in return, it demanded a difficult and cumbersome procedure.
What if the mage holding the excised space in place were to die before he could stitch it back?
‘A catastrophe will occur.’
The front and back, top and bottom within the barrier would become distorted, and in the worst-case scenario, everyone inside might be trapped, unable to ever escape to the outside world.
Naturally, Maltiel and Mikael couldn't have known the specifics.
They had simply made a rational inference that ‘such a powerful barrier must come with a commensurate risk’ and coupled it with the prediction that ‘Bel Artois would not let the Sword Saint and the boy get caught in that risk,’ choosing the most probable course of action.
‘The Sword Saint is in here, as is Bin. I can’t let them get caught up in this, no matter what.’
And their prediction had hit the mark perfectly.
‘It doesn’t matter if I die. There are plenty of people who can take my place. But not those two.’
Bel gave up on countering Mikael’s attack and focused all his consciousness on stitching the excised space back together.
He didn’t even consider deploying a defensive barrier.
He had no mental capacity left to allocate to such a thing. The amount of calculation a brain could handle at once was finite, and his was already melting just from maintaining the spatial magic.
He had to safely take down the barrier, no matter what.
Even with the Overlord’s explosion right before his eyes, Bel’s mind was completely consumed by that single thought.
Soon, the black sphere before him engulfed his body.
* * *
Light.
If there was one thing I’d learned since coming to this world, it was that explosions always began with a massive amount of light.
The color of the light didn’t much matter. It could be red, purple, or blue.
The light, in its various colors, always brought with it a tremendous blast of heat. The temperature of the blast varied. Some were hot enough to melt not just skin but even steel on contact, while others were like the dry desert wind—suffocating, but not life-threatening.
The blast of heat currently washing over my skin was closer to the latter. My skin was weak, so I suffered some light burns on my face and the back of my hands, but it wasn’t enough to make me lose consciousness.
For an explosion created by an Overlord, the one from the Mazoku was incredibly small in range and weak in power.
Even from dozens of meters away, I could tell it was a hastily cast spell. The magical calculations were handled so sloppily that a mountain of mana was leaking out, and the ball of energy concentrated in his hand didn't look very pure.
It was a spell that not even the Sword Saint, but even the orc Rex standing next to me, could withstand without much trouble.
That was about the level of its power.
‘Crude.’
That was the thought that filled my mind the moment the spell went off.
But that crude spell was more than enough.
The mana possessed by the Mazoku named Mikael was comparable to that of a 9th Circle Mage. No matter how sloppy the calculations, the inherent purity and quantity of mana stored in his body guaranteed a minimum level of power.
A spell powerful enough to kill one or two ordinary people without difficulty.
That was likely the exact level of magic Mikael had been aiming for.
Controlling the level and casting speed of a spell at will, depending on the place, time, and situation.
It was an application of magic that only those who had reached the pinnacle could perform, and…
“General!”
It was also a brilliant move that could instantly overturn the tide of this battle.
*Crack!*
A sound like something shattering came from the hard-baked clay ground. I thought the ground might have been damaged by the explosion's aftershock and turned my gaze to where the sound came from, but I saw no signs of anything broken on the ground.
*Rrrrip—*
This time, there was a tearing sound.
It came from behind my head. Again, I turned toward the sound, but all I saw were a few infantrymen rushing toward the site of the explosion. Nothing seemed to be torn.
“Ha! How absurd…”
Maltiel, who had been watching the situation from a distance, looked around with interest.
*Crrunch…!*
This time, it sounded as if someone was wringing out a balled-up piece of cloth. The sound came from the empty air where Maltiel’s massive wings were spread.
Immediately after, a series of strange phenomena that I couldn’t comprehend began to unfold across the battlefield.
…As if being sucked into a vortex, the very air began to twist.
The soldiers who had been running toward the explosion slowed down until they froze in place like statues. It was as if a video had been slowed down and then paused.
The hot blast of wind suddenly turned into a frigid, cutting gale, and I could see frost forming on my robe.
Looking elsewhere, I saw some soldiers’ eyes and hands instantly wrinkle, their flesh and muscle wasting away. Transformed into visages resembling old men who hadn't eaten in decades, the soldiers looked at each other, their faces contorted in terror.
‘…Spatial magic.’
I had no trouble identifying the cause of these bizarre phenomena.
‘That crazy bastard, Bel.’
Spatial magic was a field of magic whose research was forbidden in almost every school of thought.
The risks involved if a mage made a mistake in their calculations were far too great, and the difficulty of the calculations themselves was on a level incomparable to other types of magic.
Successfully casting spatial magic was akin to the feat… no, the miracle of riding an elephant across a sheet of ice one millimeter thick.
“General, what is this…!”
And the mage who had achieved such an impossibility had just been caught in a tiny, crude explosion created by an Overlord.
It was as if a tsunami had suddenly struck a semiconductor factory in the middle of an extremely delicate operation.
Space twisted, broke, and tore apart, over and over. The torn void shot up to the sky and slammed back down to earth at random, and the air entering my lungs was expelled from my nostrils before it could even supply my body with oxygen.
“…We’re fucked.”
No matter how I thought about it, there was nothing I could do. I had absolutely no knowledge of spatial magic.
I barely had enough time to read books on lightning magic; when would I have had a chance to learn about a forbidden art?
‘It would be better to just die. At least then I could rest in peace.’
Such a pointless thought drifted through my mind.
*Whoosh!*
At the same time, an oblivious, refreshingly cool breeze brushed past my cheek. All by itself, naturally.
…Wait.
A natural breeze just passed by? Where did that even come from…
“Generaaal!”
A loud voice rang out. It belonged to one of the soldiers who had been frozen like a statue just moments ago. He seemed completely unaware that time and space around him had been momentarily twisted at will.
He ran straight toward the direction the blast of heat had come from.
Heat.
The cutting wind that had threatened to freeze everything had, at some point, returned to a blast of heat.
The laws of physics, which had been twisting arbitrarily, found their proper places again. Time began to flow, and vitality returned to a mind that had thought all was lost.
The bodies of the soldiers who had aged in an instant returned to normal, and the torn, broken pieces of space that had been flying about were now silently holding their positions.
“…Haa, sseup.”
The breeze that had passed me by swept away the black curtain of smoke that had covered the hill.
And then, I saw Bel and Grisha.
“A close call, wasn't it?”
“…Bel?”
Bel was cradled in Grisha’s arms.
He had lost his left leg and right arm, and his entire body was covered in severe burns.
…It seemed Grisha’s hastily deployed barrier had been a step too late.
The two of them were enveloped in a bright yellow barrier, but the explosion had already engulfed Bel’s body before it was up.
“Ah, ah. Aaaargh…!”
Grisha’s scream echoed from within the barrier.
The sky, oblivious, shone with brilliant sunlight.