The Black Sorceress in Earnest
The moment the Black Sorceress began to draw on her mana in earnest, the air seemed to seize in the throat. Yujun was not the only one who felt it. Even Balrog could not keep still, and only Paranet, undead as he was, remained perfectly unbothered.
She really does have an absurd amount of mana...
Taken like this, the Black Sorceress might as well have had almost no close-combat ability at all. Raw stats aside, the odds were high that her item options had been poured entirely into mana.
If this drags into a long fight, I might actually be the one at a disadvantage.
Of course, that only held if he never drew his sword and fought with Ancient Magic alone.
The Black Sorceress's eyes flooded with blue light, and in the next instant Balrog's and Paranet's bodies flipped upside down.
Is that Ancient Magic?
Yujun knew the spell in theory, though he had never cast it. Reverse Bounding. It worked like an ordinary binding spell, only far sturdier, the sort no common strength could break. Because it hung its target upside down, a strange effect he had never seen much use for, he had never thought to cast it. Space Domination alone had always been enough to pin an opponent down.
Yet Reverse Bounding proved far more formidable than he had imagined. Their arms were forced downward and locked there, so neither of them could so much as take a guard.
Non-elemental magic then slammed into Balrog. Against an enemy with high magic resistance, a spell without an element was sometimes more effective than an elemental one, and this was one of those moments, with the target already neutralized. Balrog thrashed, but he could not tear free of a Reverse Bounding into which the Black Sorceress had poured a vast quantity of mana.
Paranet, by contrast, slipped out with Space Movement. Appearing at Yujun's side, he let out a sigh of relief.
"Whew. Master! I very nearly perished."
"The one who's actually going to die is Balrog, if you ask me. Even if you die, you come back. He doesn't. So go help him."
"As you command."
Should I try it too?
Yujun cast Reverse Bounding on the Black Sorceress. She had, of course, raised several layers of shield to protect herself, but he had not used Reverse Bounding alone. He hammered those shields with dozens of sharp spears, the kind that punched through barriers with ease. It was no high-difficulty spell, yet unleashed from his hand it became a mass of energy with power beyond even Meteor.
A deafening roar split the air, and the shield shrieked as it cracked. Through the enormous hole torn open in it, Reverse Bounding slipped inside.
"Agh!"
It landed cleanly. Reverse Bounding devoured an enormous amount of mana, but in exchange it was a binding spell that was, for all practical purposes, impossible to dodge. A mage whose physical ability was nothing exceptional had no way to evade it if she failed to stop it with a shield, and the whole thing had happened in the blink of an eye. She had not even managed to Blink.
The Black Sorceress found herself in the exact same plight as Balrog. But she had not earned the name of ancient mage for nothing. She unraveled the Reverse Bounding laid upon her, something possible only because she truly understood the spell's essence and its principles.
Oh...
Yujun's mouth fell open. He had almost never been caught in a binding spell himself, and so he had never once reverse-calculated a formula to break one.
Right. There was that way of using it, too.
With Ancient Magic at EX++ and a magic trait of his own, he could have done the same as the Black Sorceress. Whether he would ever have cause to was another matter.
She's quietly making a lot of use of the little tricks I never bother with.
Atradeon had said the Black Sorceress held an immense standing in her own time, which meant her skill with magic was that exceptional. She had mana to spare and a fine command of technique, and yet he still felt no sense of crisis. So far there was simply nothing he could call truly overwhelming. That, of course, was only by Yujun's measure. Balrog, a being out of myth, had been summoned into the same predicament and subdued by her far too easily.
The Black Sorceress glared at him, sharp and fierce. She clearly disliked him answering with the same spell again and again, and disliked even more that his version was stronger.
"Of what order are you a mage?"
At her question, Yujun shook his head.
"You refuse to say? One of us will lose our life here regardless. Surely you might tell me that much."
"It's not that I don't want to tell you. I really don't belong to anyone."
"What? Then you are not a mage of the Kpel Empire?"
"The Kpel Empire? So there used to be a country like that."
"Used to be, you say?"
"I'll fill you in little by little later. But can only mages of the Kpel Empire learn Ancient Magic? Or was there some magic tower they all belonged to?"
At that, the Black Sorceress's expression grew complicated.
"Ancient Magic? I am merely using magic. How is it that you handle magic so deftly, and yet know none of these fundamentals?"
"Want a quiz showdown? Who knows more basic common sense? Unless you've got future information too, you're the one at a disadvantage."
"I haven't the faintest idea what you are saying."
Fair enough. She likely did not even realize she herself had crossed over from the past.
"So? What's your affiliation?"
"I have no wish to tell you. Your attitude displeases me."
"Funny. Same here."
Yujun turned the Absolute Sealing Orb over in his fingers. A slot in it now stood empty. The Black Sorceress was far too intelligent to make into a summon.
Does intelligence even matter? I don't have to use her as a summon. A mercenary would do.
She would hardly volunteer for the role, but that was a problem time, the Whip of Love, and the Absolute Sealing Orb could solve between them.
The fight was gradually becoming a duel between Yujun and the sorceress alone. It was not the sort of true mage's battle in which each read the other's moves and dazzling spells flew in every direction. If anything, it was static. Powerful non-elemental magic streaked toward each of them, and breaking that magic down repeated itself again and again.
This is fun.
Before he came to the Tower of Infinity, Yujun had never thought of himself as particularly clever, and he hadn't been. Now, though, he could look at a magic formula so complex it ought to have overloaded his mind, analyze it, and dismantle it in a single stroke. It was possible because he already carried the theory in his head, and even so, undoing a spell was a matter of an entirely different order.
When that pattern dragged on, the Black Sorceress finally burst.
"Aaaah!"
"......"
"I cannot accept that one with no affiliation can dismantle magic in this fashion."
"Is affiliation that important? These days every dog and ox learns magic. Didn't know that?"
"What...?"
"Why do you think I called it Ancient Magic? Think it over."
"I do not know."
Well. How easily could anyone accept that they had come to the future? For all he knew, the Black Sorceress had been summoned whether she willed it or not.
"The magic you're using is old junk. You're someone from hundreds of years ago. These days the fashion isn't that outdated stuff. It's New-Generation Magic."
"Hundreds of years...?"
The Black Sorceress's magic stopped. Yujun did not bother pressing the opening. He stopped casting as well.
"Now!"
Balrog, who had been playing dead, closed the distance to her in a single rush, but she had not halted her magic without any defense at all. He slammed into an invisible, formless force. His whole body shuddered, and then he passed out.
What was strange was that Balrog's body bore no external wound at all. Yujun's eyes went wide. It was a spell he did not know, and it certainly did not seem to be a shield or a barrier.
"What kind of magic is that?"
"A spell I researched and created on my own."
"Oh, you made a new spell?"
"You seem not to know, but I was one of the Three Great Mages. Creating a new spell is not easy, yet neither is it impossible."
Yujun was impressed. Creating a new spell was no simple thing for him either. More precisely, he had no sense of how one would even begin. In pure theory, she did seem to stand ahead of him, and that was only natural. She had learned magic through every kind of trial and error, while he had merely had already-completed magic poured into his head and made it his own. He had no experience of failure whatsoever. Set beside the Black Sorceress, the gulf in experience was simply too wide.
"I want it."
"Did you not call it outdated?"
"You've been nursing that, petty as it was?"
"Do you... know of this New-Generation Magic?"
"Of course."
Yujun nodded with a shameless smile. The Ancient Magic skill did hold, in his head, the theory of every spell that currently existed. He could hardly call any of it better than Ancient Magic itself, but the Black Sorceress's eyes were so full of curiosity that he could not tell her the truth.
"How does it differ from the magic I use? Has it evolved further? Beyond all comparison?"
"It evolved in a different direction. The power's enormous, too."
When I cast it. He left the rest unsaid.
"Tell me at once. I am curious."
Whether her will to fight had broken, or curiosity had crushed it, he could not say, but the Black Sorceress dropped her combat stance completely. Or perhaps she was simply trusting the formless force Balrog had crashed into a moment ago. Either way, her attitude changed all at once. It was the moment he felt just how tremendous an ancient mage's hunger to know really was.
"You want me to tell you for free? Can't do that."
"You wish to make a bargain? Very well. What do you want?"
"You trust me, though?"
"What do you mean?"
"That New-Generation Magic exists. And that you're in the future right now."
"The future... of that I am uncertain. But I can see clearly that you have learned something other than the magic I know. The fragrance that rises from your magic is a little different. Peculiar."
"How's it different?"
"Should I say it feels refreshing? Hmm. Or perhaps not? Forgive me. It is difficult to put this precisely into words."
"Nothing to apologize for. So? You going to make a deal with me?"
"Very well. Before that. You called it New-Generation Magic, did you not? Are there many mages who have learned it?"
"Plenty. But almost nobody near my level."
"...As I thought, you are a remarkable one. I did think you reproduced my magic far too easily. Merely knowing the theory is not enough to follow it. Are you the foremost mage on the Continent at present?"
"Hard to say. The world's awfully big..."
"Even so, finding one such as you would be no simple matter. Meeting you here may well be a great fortune for me."
Fortune, all of a sudden? Wasn't that a little too optimistic? The thought crossed his mind, but he did not voice it.
"You know I'm not the one who summoned you, right?"
"I know. Someone demanded that I answer their call, and I responded, but the energy I sense from you is wholly different."
"Why'd you answer? It wasn't a good energy."
"I was curious. Who had pierced every one of my security spells and reached into my mindscape."
"You know about the Demon God Worshippers?"
"Those vermin were, to my knowledge, entirely exterminated in the generation before mine."
"So you've never actually seen them?"
"I have not."
"The one who summoned you is a Demon God Worshipper."
"......"
The Black Sorceress's eyes went wide.
"You mean they have been revived?"
"Yeah. Right now their power is even greater than it used to be."
"And what were the other mages doing while matters came to this?"
"The Demon God Worshippers grew even stronger than before. We're gathering our strength, but it's more than we can easily handle."
"......"
"We can talk about that later. Want to make a contract first?"
"What contract?"
"We each stake what we want. And then we make a contract."
"I asked what manner of contract you mean."
"A soul contract."
Yujun barely held back the grin that had climbed all the way to his chin as he said it.