Tag (3)
"Gyaaaaah!"
The Incubus shrieked as its chest was run through. That it could still scream at that volume with a hole through its torso was almost impressive. Different organ structure from a human, maybe? Or could it still produce that much sound with one lung gone?
Not that a loud voice was going to do it any good.
"Does it hurt? I hope it hurts a whole lot more."
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Flash after flash of light shot from her fingertips, shredding the Incubus's regenerating torso over and over. Even after the beams had already torn its body apart, they bent three times midair and smashed straight through its skull.
"Gyaaaaah!! You bitch!"
"You moron. Is that all you know how to say?"
Between the relentless assault and the words scraping raw at its pride, the Incubus must have been furious beyond reason. Crimson light flared in its eyes as it jabbed a finger at her.
"You female! Be a proper female and spread your legs for me!"
A resonant hum of mana rolled outward.
Charm-laced power surged in from every direction, closing around her.
"You really thought I wouldn't prepare for that?"
She had already been thoroughly burned by Han Sung-jun in a dream, after all.
She had already swallowed an alchemical draught and layered herself in counter-wards. Incubus charm was just a species-typical mana that scrambled the mind — worthless against anyone who had taken the proper measures.
Like river water splitting around a boulder midstream, the seductive mana parted around her without ever touching her. It left no mark at all.
"Done thrashing around?"
Dozens — hundreds — of magic circles bloomed into existence around her body.
An Incubus on its own was a pathetic excuse for a demon. It only amounted to anything inside a dream, and even the dominion of that dreamspace had already been overrun by her magic — thrown into deliberate chaos so no one else could interfere.
Once a dream became an uncontrollable chaos, she had no intention of losing to something as lowly as an Incubus.
"Die shredded into pieces."
Flash magic punched through the Incubus. Incineration magic set it ablaze. Ice magic forged spears of frost that shattered its skull. Rock magic summoned a torrent of stone that swallowed it whole.
A baptism of every kind of spell. Fail to answer that, and death was the only outcome left.
"You bitch!"
Was that really all it knew how to say?
Realizing its charm had no purchase, the Incubus switched to magic. Massive black thorns erupted from the ground at its feet, racing toward her as they tore the earth apart.
Kwa-kwa-kwa-kwa!
If it was going to attack like that, wouldn't it be better to travel along the ground as a medium? Did it really need to smash the earth to pieces just to move?
"A magic duel? That's exactly what I wanted."
She answered with the same spell.
The method, though, was different. The Incubus's magic kept thrusting spikes of rock up from the ground, pulverizing the surface as it advanced. Hers flowed through the earth like a current — like a shark gliding through water — and swallowed the Incubus's spell whole before—
"Guhhhhk!"
—punching straight through its abdomen and spitting it on a skewer of stone.
Even the same spell hit harder with far less mana when you focused the power into a single point the way she did, instead of dumping it out like a blunt instrument.
"Without a dream you can control, this is all you amount to?"
"Y-you bitch!"
Always with the bitch, bitch.
This thing had stolen Sung-jun's memories, and it still kept treating her like a woman.
That made her angry.
That a creature like this dared to look at her as female — to call her female, girl, bitch — made her angry.
The only one in this world allowed to treat me like that is…!
Her fury made her pause her casting for a moment, and the Incubus's magic came flying for her.
Flash magic. Incineration magic. Ice spears. A rehash of everything she had just used…
…This is pathetic.
Every single one was several tiers below her own. The only thing it had in abundance was raw mana, so it compensated by dumping power in by the truckload until the force was roughly comparable.
The flash spell was so overcharged it flew not as a sharp beam of light but as a whole pillar. The incineration magic didn't cleanly target and burn the way hers did; it set the ground itself on fire and came racing in as a wall of flame. The ice spears were so poorly formed that whole sections of them collapsed into shapeless icicles.
"So this is you bragging about having a lot of mana."
Kwaaaaang!
To swallow those crude, shoddy spells, she raised a tsunami of water. The colossal wave engulfed the Incubus's magic whole.
"Then take dying to this spell as an honor."
The Incubus had flung magic around like it was showing off its reserves, but she did not have that kind of surplus. Casting hundreds of spells just now had already burned through nearly half her mana.
Of course, she was a mage who could draw ambient mana from her surroundings even with nothing left in her body.
Which was why she still had a spell she had started developing and then abandoned.
Cosmic magic, drawing on the mana of the sky and the universe itself. "Sky magic" just didn't sound as cool as "cosmic magic," so she had deliberately named it that.
She could already pull in nearby mana to fuel her casting, but this had been an attempt to go further — to complete a spell by simply drawing the magic circle while borrowing the vast mana hanging in the heavens. Efficiency had been excellent, just as she had hoped. The casting time, however, was far too long, and once the spell was read it was easy to disrupt, so she had shelved the project.
"Starlight."
The mana of the sky and the cosmos gathered like starlight and rained destruction on her enemy — a cosmic bombardment spell.
She had named it Starlight.
Kwa-kwa-kwa-kwa-kwang!
Starlight became spears of radiance and hammered the ground without mercy. Like a vast thunderhead, like a bomber that never stopped, the completed sky-magic kept dropping starlight in endless lightning-strikes.
The hard part of Starlight was finishing the cast. Once it was up, nothing stood in its way.
Mana efficiency was excellent — she only needed to form the circle. The power was more than enough to reduce the ground to ash. The area of effect scaled with the size of the circle she built. It did require a minimum size, but that was a minor issue.
Well. I can improve it later.
It was nothing more than a half-finished project she had dusted off and brought back. Starting the refinements again would be easy enough.
Once she had completely purged the Incubus from Sung-jun, she would have time to spare.
"Khh… khhrr… hhhh…"
The Incubus, reduced to an upper body, rolled across the ground. Apparently the only part of it that had survived the starlight barrage intact was its torso. It no longer even had enough mana left to regenerate its lower half; it scraped toward her on both arms in a thoroughly undignified crawl.
"Y-you damned bitch…!"
"I've heard that one a lot. Try something original."
The line about her talent being not a genius's gift but a natural disaster was one she was thoroughly tired of. This was the same tired repertoire.
"So this is all you really are."
Intelligent demon, whatever.
Without the special conditions of a dream, this thing would never have been worth this much trouble.
Even preparing for its charm had been overkill. At this level she could have skipped the alchemical draught for mental disruption resistance entirely. Its mana pulse couldn't even punch through her barrier — a pathetic little wave.
"Be cursed! You bitch!"
Crash! Crash! Crash!
Space shattered like glass.
With the last of its power, the Incubus poured everything it had into the dream she had deliberately thrown into chaos. The dream's dominion, already destabilized by her magic, responded to the Incubus's mana and began warping the space at random.
"Kyahahahaha!! Die! Drift forever in the cracks of this space…!"
"Shut up."
Bang!
Even as its body crumbled into ash and scattered on the wind, it kept making noise, so she burned its head off with a flash spell.
With not a scrap of mana left for regeneration, the Incubus's head disintegrated into drifting ash.
"Well. I did set up an emergency exit."
Did it take her for an idiot?
Did it really think she would barge into a dream it had already tampered with like she was walking into her own house? Of course she had prepared an emergency escape route.
"Ah."
…A problem.
With spectacular bad luck, the warping of the space had smashed her escape route from the very start.
Only about ten percent of this space had broken so far. And of course that ten percent included her exit.
"…Haa."
At this point, there was only one option left.
"Hurry up and wake up and help me. Han Sung-jun."
Her last resort had always been Han Sung-jun.
This dream had been spun by the Incubus parasitizing him. Which meant the true master of this dream was Han Sung-jun.
Crash! Crash! Crash!
Before any answer came from him, the sky cracked like glass again. The sight was starting to feel genuinely dangerous.
Beyond the shattered sky lay nothing but absolute black.
Creeeeak.
Then, from somewhere, came the sound of a door opening. She turned her head — and there, right in the middle of the scorched ground, a wooden door stood wide open.
Beyond it, she could see her own room.
"I knew it. You're awake."
Feeling a flicker of satisfaction that teaching him magic had paid off, she shot through the doorway on a flight spell.
"I'm here. I'm here."
Clack.
…Strangely, the sound of the door closing was not followed by her consciousness waking.
…Is this some kind of aftershock from its final thrashing?
She glanced around. The place was a perfect copy of her room.
Even the magic circle off to one side, and Han Sung-jun sleeping quietly at its center — everything was there.
Beep.
And one electronic board that her real room did not have.
On a stretch of wall that should have been bare, a display that did not belong in her room at all was mounted and lit.
A Room You Can't Leave Without Having Sex
"…Fuck."
What a load of bullshit.