The Tide of Battle Shifts
The ferocious battle raged on.
Every time the Black Archmage cast a spell, the entire street shuddered, and the guards and adventurers who had tried to join the fray were hurled back without so much as getting close.
The air grew so thick with potent energy that even ordinary folk who knew nothing of magic fled on instinct alone, and soon the Demon King's soldiers and adventurers fighting around them began to stop, one by one, and stare.
The Black Archmage's skill was, without question, overwhelming.
The tide of battle that had been turning in the enemy's favor reversed in an instant — a performance worthy of the title of one of the Four Heavenly Kings.
And yet—
The Hero's party still stood.
"Blaze."
A single word.
That alone was enough to birth a colossal sphere of fire in the sky.
It began as a flame no larger than a fist, but it drank in the surrounding mana without end, swelling until it could easily swallow several people whole.
Then the Black Archmage lowered his finger.
BOOOOOM—!
The fireball plunged into the ground, and with the impact the flames spread in every direction.
The stone-paved street cracked and heaved upward, the outer wall of a nearby shop collapsed, and the few windows that still remained burst all at once.
But that was merely the opening flourish.
"Dead already? How disappointing."
The moment the Black Archmage murmured those words, a black shadow burst out of the flames.
The Hero.
He cut straight through the fires surging up before him, closing the distance between them.
At the sight, a sneer curled the Black Archmage's lips, as if he were watching a moth fly into a flame.
"Diving into fire of your own accord?"
The Black Archmage was not alarmed.
No — if anything, he was intrigued.
If his research subject moved about this vigorously, then that was precisely what he'd hoped for.
"For the sake of my theory, do try not to die too quickly."
An old, thick grimoire held in the man's hand rose into the air of its own accord. The black metal sheathing its edges and the unreadable glyphs etched across it writhed like living insects, and with every turn of a page, the surrounding mana was sucked inward until the very fabric of space seemed to warp.
"■■■■■■ ■■■■■■ ■■■■."
As the Black Archmage began his incantation, dozens of formulae bloomed across the open pages all at once.
And at the end of the following verse, the final command was given.
"Earth, obey."
GRUUUUMBLE—!
The spell unfurled beneath the ground where the Hero had planted his feet, and in the blink of an eye, a succession of jagged stone pillars erupted upward, surging at him from every direction with the lithe, serpentine grace of striking snakes.
"....!"
But it was the Black Archmage who was surprised.
The first pillar, the Hero evaded with a shift of his body.
The second he cleaved apart with his sword.
The third he used as a stepping stone, leaping off it entirely.
Not a trace of hesitation in any of it.
One misstep would have meant being impaled on the spot — and yet the Hero's movements flowed as naturally as if he already knew where every pillar would rise before it did.
"......Tch."
At last the Hero closed the distance and brought his sword down.
CLANG—!
Once again, the Hero's blade collided with a transparent barrier.
The shield did not break.
But staring at the point of impact, the Black Archmage could not keep the frown from his face.
It had cracked.
Not against some grand-scale spell — a single sword strike had carved a clean, visible fracture into his barrier.
Absurd, monstrous strength.
Widening the distance with a teleportation, the Black Archmage considered: what would happen if that blade touched his body directly? No matter how much he reinforced himself with mana, the result needed no experiment.
[Instant Death]
That was why a mage had to keep enemies at arm's length.
Powerful magic came at the cost of physical prowess, and the Black Archmage in particular had devoted every hour of his life since childhood to the study and research of magic.
He had never seen the need to learn how to swing a sword, how to fell a man with his fists — any of it.
With magic, all of that was meaningless.
Yet in the Black Archmage's mind, the theory he had built mattered far more than any of those realities.
The third pillar was launched precisely from his blind spot. And yet he moved as though he could see it coming — relaxed, unhurried... no, he didn't merely evade it. He used it as a foothold to reach me.
It felt as though the outline of the Goddess's oracle — of the greatest anomaly residing in the Hero — was slowly coming into focus.
I want to know more. Deeper, deeper still!
"Deflect this one if you can!"
The Black Archmage's voice had begun to rise with excitement as dozens of black spears took shape around him.
Their tips aligned on the Hero in unison, and with a sweep of his hand they came pouring down like rain.
Each one carried enough force to punch through armor and skewer a body.
Dozens of them.
The Hero swung his sword and beat away the spears in front of him, but falling as he was in real time, stopping every attack was impossible.
Shoulder. Flank. Thigh.
The spears he failed to shed punched through the Hero's body, and blood sprayed in every direction. By the time he hit the ground, he was closer to a bundle of rags than a man.
"Hero!!!"
The Saintess let out a raw, cracking scream.
"I am fine."
Leaving only those words, the Hero moved again.
He didn't bother wrenching the spears from his body — he simply lunged at the Black Archmage, wounds tearing wider and blood streaming with every step, and swung his sword once more.
CLANG—!
The second fracture.
CLANG—!
The third.
Now the barrier trembled so precariously it seemed it would shatter at any moment.
"This lunatic......!"
Hero or not, the man could not have been immune to pain.
Spells had been driven into his body. He was bleeding. His wounds verged on fatal.
And still he did not stop.
A hero of stories would worry for his wounded companions, spare his enemies, spout words of justice as he fought — but the being before him was nothing like that.
He hadn't even factored the destruction of his own body into the equation. He chose only the most efficient method available for one purpose: killing the man in front of him.
A puppet of war that had abandoned its own selfhood and moved like a chess piece, driven by a single objective.
Less a hero than a mercenary.
Less a mercenary than a pit fighter.
And even that wasn't quite it — closer to a veteran of countless battlefields, a survivor who had learned to treat his own body as a consumable resource.
"Hahaha!! What in the world are you, boy! You, a Hero!"
Fascinated to find himself cowed by the spirit of a mere human, the Black Archmage shouted with laughter full of rapture.
Nothing about this had gone as predicted. The Black Archmage found himself wanting to probe, to dissect, this being called the Hero more and more.
"Hero, just wait a moment......!"
Bela—the Saintess hurried to his side at last, and as her holy power wrapped around the Hero's body, his wounds knit closed and the streaming blood stanched.
He was not fully restored, but his punctured form had been mended enough that the injuries hindering his movements were gone.
And with that, the sword strikes resumed.
The Black Archmage clicked his tongue and retreated.
Insufferable.
No matter how gravely he wounded the Hero, the Saintess would simply heal him. At this rate, the same cycle would repeat forever.
Unless he pressed the Hero harder, he had no way to uncover the truth — no way to learn what the Goddess's oracle actually was.
Then the Saintess dies first.
He moved his hand to designate the Saintess as the target of his next spell.
At that very moment.
POP—!
"Ngh?!"
A small explosion rang out, and the Black Archmage's vision jolted.
The power was nothing.
A magic bolt that hadn't left so much as a scratch on his barrier — weak enough that calling it a distraction would have been generous.
But it had detonated precisely beside the Black Archmage's face.
"......What?"
He turned his head, and behind the Hero and the Saintess he saw her — the Mage, gripping her enormous crystal-mounted staff with both hands.
A pitifully insignificant existence. A girl barely worth calling a creature, so beneath his notice in his focus on the Hero and the Saintess that he hadn't spared her a single thought.
He had assumed that a being who couldn't even cast a proper spell could do nothing against overwhelming firepower — assumed she would simply flee in terror — and had struck her from his calculations entirely. Never in his wildest imaginings had he pictured the Mage striking him from behind.
Even now, the girl's hands were trembling.
The instant her eyes met his, her shoulders hunched as though paralyzed with fear, and tears were already welling in them.
And still, she did not lower the staff.
"I-I'm sorry......."
"......?"
Her next words were an apology. The Black Archmage nearly gaped.
"B-but I'll... I'll do it again."
Truly, an absurd thing to say.
That last spell had inflicted no damage whatsoever on him.
However many times she repeated it, it lacked the force to touch even the hem of his robe, let alone his barrier. And yet the Mage raised her staff once more.
It was only then that the Black Archmage realized — the incantation on his lips had been severed midway.
"Don't tell me."
The Mage hadn't attacked in hopes of defeating him.
She had deliberately detonated a blast right next to his face to shatter his concentration — to make sure he could never finish casting.
"Ha......!"
It was only natural that it felt unbearably, outrageously insulting.
He had been interrupted.
By a Mage barely more accomplished than a novice who'd just learned her first spell — him, a master who stood at the very pinnacle of the magical arts.
It was the feeling of a child pressing a paint-smeared handprint across a canvas he had labored over with all his heart and soul.
The Black Archmage reached his hand out toward the Mage. One strike was all it would take.
First, clear away the variable corrupting my research—
But the instant he moved to act on that thought—
CLANG—!
The Hero's sword came down on the barrier once more.
"Where are you looking? I am right here."
The Hero was not a fool who would let an opening born of carelessness slip past him.
Crrrick—
At last the fractures spread across the entire barrier, and the Black Archmage was hurled backward, unable to fully absorb the shock.
Even thrown into disarray, he did not stop weaving his spell, unleashing powerful magic at the one who had interrupted him—
"The Goddess has spoken: in Her sacred name, nothing shall pass!"
The holy barrier the Saintess cast wrapped around the Mage, and the spell broke against it with a thunderous roar, dealing no harm at all.
"Tch! I let the heat run too high — my vision's narrowing."
The Black Archmage hastily raised a fresh wall and fell back, and only then did he begin to grasp that this fight was nowhere near as simple as he had assumed.
The Mage disrupted his incantations. The Saintess blocked his attacks and healed the wounds.
And the Hero — the Hero refused to grant him even a moment to deal with either of them, planting himself squarely in his path again and again.
It had begun as a crushing victory.
Every time the mage cast a spell, the street crumbled, and the guards and adventurers who tried to intervene were thrown back without ever getting close.
But then those three began to move — each covering for what the others lacked.
Little by little. Very, very slowly.
The Black Archmage, who should have been the one dominating, found himself being pushed back.
"Hoo......."
Having recovered his composure, the Black Archmage began sorting through his thoughts.
So my method of fighting has been read.
At its foundation, spellcraft was the act of issuing commands directly to the mana in the air while pouring one's own bodily power into the working, amplifying its force and precision. Lighting a single flame required no particular process at all — but the more a spell demanded fine control of direction, range, and magnitude, the more complex the calculation and the greater the concentration it demanded.
Incantations served as a kind of auxiliary apparatus that carried all of those steps through stably — following a fixed sequence of phrases, commanding the mana, channeling one's bodily power in an unvarying order, and manifesting the desired phenomenon in reality with exacting accuracy.
There were ways to skip the incantation entirely, but doing so made the mana that much harder to control. The slightest break in concentration could abort the spell or trigger it along an unintended path — and in the worst cases, the backlash would strike the caster himself.
Such an incomplete, crude method was something the arrogant pride of the Black Archmage, who stood at the summit of all magical knowledge, would never permit.
The Mage was sporadically catching the rhythm of his castings and firing distraction bolts to raise noise and sap his focus.
The Saintess was layering near-absolute protection with her holy power while simultaneously performing healing that verged on restoration.
And the Hero — the Hero had placed himself at the very front, blocking the Black Archmage's spells head-on while grinding down his barrier's durability and pressing the assault.
He could have simply eliminated the Mage first, the one interfering with his spellwork — but the moment he committed to concentrated fire, the Hero would obviously not stand idly by, and even if a strike landed, the Saintess's protection would reduce it to nothing. It was a losing gambit, near as made no difference.
And even were he to use poison or curse, the Saintess would dispel and purge them almost before they took hold; even were he to raise corpses and employ the necromancy he had learned from the Necromancer through the bodies littering the field, her holy power would break it with pitiful ease.
....There's no answer, is there? Now I understand why the other Demon King's generals fell...... and yet.
The Black Archmage exhaled through his teeth, dragging a hand along his jaw. Having tasted firsthand the cause of defeat he had only ever known from reports, he found himself feeling, for once, a touch humble.
It feels like I'm the one being solved.
The Four Heavenly Kings commanded forces so lopsided that an even contest should have been unthinkable. Yet these three had not merely withstood him — they were adapting, steadily, as the battle went on.
"However."
The Black Archmage was hardly a foe to be taken lightly either.
In the end, as things stood, the advantage remained his. That much had not changed.
The sheer volume of mana he commanded, the destructive force he could unleash in a single stroke, his knowledge and experience of magic itself.
He yielded to them in none of it.
If the method he was using now did not work—
"Then one simply changes tactics."
The grimoire flapped violently as its pages began to turn, and the light in the Black Archmage's eyes sharpened further still.