Ancient Magic of Mass and Speed
Ancient Magic of Mass and Speed
The moment I rode the wave and brought my quarterstaff crashing down against the whirlpool encircling the villa at full force, I realized something astonishing. The speed at which Rapid Freeze encased the target in ice was on an entirely different level from anything I'd experienced before.
The time it took me to freeze a single person with Rapid Freeze was roughly one second.
In contrast, the whirlpool surrounding the villa was, naturally, incomparably larger in volume than a human body. I'd anticipated it would take roughly a minute to freeze the whirlpool completely.
"Huh?"
But the moment it connected with my staff, the massive whirlpool froze solid in about ten seconds. It was so far ahead of my prediction that at first I genuinely couldn't figure out what had just happened.
The staff's function hadn't been enhanced. It seemed to be structured so that Rapid Freeze's power increased under specific conditions. I mulled it over for a second and quickly identified the variable.
'Ah, the impact force!'
It was the kinetic impact channeled into the staff.
When I'd frozen the fishmen on flat ground, it was nothing more than an ordinary staff swing. But when I collided with the whirlpool, I was riding a wave that had accelerated to maximum speed. The mass of the quarterstaff was multiplied by the wave's velocity, resulting in an astronomical increase in impact force.
'So the harder I strike with the staff, the faster the freezing speed becomes.'
Having figured out the variable, I was itching to run experiments, but rescuing the people inside the villa took priority. I smashed the frozen surface of the whirlpool with my staff.
CRACK!
A few strikes were enough to punch a large hole into the frozen whirlpool's surface.
I shoved my body through the opening to inspect the frozen interior.
'Ms. Bella is here... and Rebecca and Ms. Hannah were here too.'
With Kate sprawled out on the wave right beside me, everyone I'd been looking for was accounted for. The only thing left was to eliminate the source of the whirlpool itself.
"Who goes there?!"
A shark-like monster with fins sprouting from its back bellowed at me. Its form was grotesque in the extreme, like a villain straight out of a movie. A bipedal, walking shark — even on a continent teeming with diverse races, I'd never seen anything like it.
But an unmistakable stench radiated from the creature.
That same fishy reek of the fishmen. Perhaps this shark-headed bastard was some kind of evolved form of the fishman race. They'd said it was the Great Chief's bodyguard, so it wasn't an enemy I could afford to underestimate.
Judged purely on water manipulation ability alone, it had me beat by a notch.
However, having awakened as a Rune Mage, I was no longer the same small-fry who just flailed a Water Whip around. I now had an ice staff capable of smashing everyone's skulls with pure, egalitarian force.
"I'm the guy who's going to smash yours."
I answered the shark-head's question lightly and dropped down into the interior of the whirlpool. The ground was about two meters below, but I rolled with the landing and got down safely. I dusted off my clothes, rose to my feet, and locked eyes with the shark monster.
'Can this shark bastard even see what's right in front of it?'
Its face was genuinely shark-like, with eyeballs stuck on either side. Its pointed snout would obstruct its field of view as well — I honestly wondered if it could even see me properly.
"Can you see my face?"
"I see you just fine! Grrrr!"
Okay, so it could see me fine. Confirmed his vision wasn't the problem.
The shark monster glanced around at the frozen colossal whirlpool with an intrigued expression.
"Freezing my whirlpool in an instant... you're no ordinary talent. That freezing speed would rank among the upper echelons of ice mages! You must be at least a mage who has awakened a class."
The creature was a fishman who wielded psychic abilities, but it had clearly studied up on mages as well. However, it was making one critical miscalculation about the speed at which I froze things.
'The Rapid Freeze I cast just now was fast because the impact force was massive. In a cramped space like this, I can't draw out its maximum power.'
To boost the freezing speed, I needed something to amplify the impact force, like the wave I'd ridden at top speed. If I swung the staff with nothing but raw muscle strength, the freezing speed would drop.
Still, it wasn't a bad thing that my opponent was overestimating my power. He might just outsmart himself into self-destruction. I decided to bluff even harder in front of the still-unnamed shark monster.
"I'm Luke. What's your name?"
"Gallod."
"Right then, Gallod. If you understand my power, give up any thought of resistance. I'll freeze you fast and send you off painlessly to the afterlife."
The bluff landed.
Gallod's attention was now fixed entirely on me. He didn't even try to stop Kate, who had jumped down through the hole right after me, from approaching the injured Rebecca and Hannah.
"Rebecca! Are you okay?!"
"K-Kate..."
There must have been a pretty fierce fight before I arrived. Of the two injured women, Rebecca in particular bore marks on her body that looked like cuts from something sharp.
She was probably hit by those whirlpools the shark monster controls.
"Lord Baldur, please heal these wounded lambs."
Kate used a healing spell to restore both Rebecca and Hannah simultaneously. Even with a healer performing treatment right next to him, Gallod couldn't have cared less. His attitude practically broadcast that whether they recovered or not meant nothing to him.
'So he thinks no one else here is a threat.'
Praying that Gallod's arrogance would hold steady, I walked forward. The distance between me and Gallod was roughly fifteen meters. If I could close that gap and land a solid hit on his body with my staff, the victory would be mine.
"Grrrrrr! How laughable. Do you think learning some measly freezing magic lets you look down on my water manipulation?"
Gallod let out a guttural, rumbling laugh as he spoke.
"We fishmen control water from the moment we are born. We're fundamentally different from you wretches who merely mimic natural phenomena with magic. We, who spend half our lives submerged in water, are the true masters of it!"
As his words continued, an absurd phenomenon erupted from the moisture-slicked ground. Numerous things resembling blue octopus tentacles burst through the earth, blocking the space between me and Gallod.
"Tentacles?!"
They were massive tentacles made purely of water. Each one stretched four meters long, and they kept sprouting one after another from the floor. I realized they were a summoned-creature variant of the fishmen's Water Whip technique.
"I'll crush you flat—"
CRUNCH!
The blue tentacles all struck at the spot where I was standing in perfect unison. I scrambled backward in a hurry, swinging my staff to freeze one of the tentacles solid. But even as I shattered one, more blue tentacles sprouted endlessly from the ground.
"Stone Wall!"
I raised a stone wall in front of the area where the tentacles were bursting out. In the same split-second motion, I touched the stone wall with my staff and froze it with Rapid Freeze. But even a stone wall with its durability reinforced by ice couldn't hold out forever against the tentacles' onslaught.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The tentacles' power was so immense that the frozen stone wall ultimately shattered. While the wall had been holding, I used my staff to launch the mana spheres I'd summoned, sending them hurtling outward. A dozen mana spheres, now coated in ice, flew toward Gallod.
"Hyaaaaaap—!"
Gallod summoned a whirlpool to block the ice spheres as they rained down in a parabolic arc. Yet my ice spheres were just a fraction of a second faster than the whirlpool's formation rate. The one sphere that had been flying at the very vanguard smashed into Gallod's chest.
Direct hit!
It was a Magic Missile coated with sharpened ice, packing the same punch as a pistol round! But the moment I assessed Gallod's condition, any feeling of triumph vanished, replaced by a bone-chilling dread.
'He took a direct hit from a mana sphere reinforced with Rapid Freeze... and he's completely fine...?'
The ice sphere couldn't penetrate Gallod's iron-plate-like scales. The scales lay densely packed over his skin and absorbed the entire impact. The instant Gallod flexed his pectoral muscles, the ice sphere was spat right back out.
"You're a genuinely talented mage, I'll grant you that, horned dream demon. If I let you live, you'll become a threat to our fishmen. I'll dispose of you now, before you can grow further."
Gallod unclasped his hands and straightened his index finger as if pointing toward me. Ominously, the tip of that finger was aimed exactly at me.
'What's that? Is he going to fire a death beam or something?'
Maybe someone else wouldn't understand, but I, having once been an Earthling, knew just how terrifying that particular hand gesture was. There was no rational reasoning or deduction involved.
My gut screamed that a beam was about to fire from the tip of that finger!
I didn't make the foolish mistake of trying to block it head-on.
The moment water began gathering at Gallod's fingertip, I threw myself sideways and rolled across the ground. That proved to be the correct judgment.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzt-!!!
A slicing jet of highly compressed water shot out, carving the ground apart. I narrowly managed to evade it, my body scrambling just outside the slash zone of the super-high-pressure water. But I hadn't dodged perfectly, and my condition wasn't unscathed.
"Ghnnnngh...!"
The jet was too fast for the naked eye to track.
A deep wound was etched across my back where the super-high-pressure water had swept past. Only now did I register the searing heat and the sensation of blood trickling down.
Gallod had replicated, through sheer psychic power, what amounted to an industrial-grade water cutter.
It was the kind of feat impossible for Universal Magic, which was bound by so many constraints — a technique only attainable by fishmen who had honed water manipulation alone for decades.
"You dodged."
Zzzzzzzzzzzzt-!!
Without a moment's pause, Gallod fired another jet of super-pressurized water at me. The attack was compressed into a single point, meaning any half-baked attempt to block it would just punch holes straight through my body.
"Stone Wall!"
I threw up stone walls purely to obscure his line of sight, then ran for my life through the gaps between them.
"Liquid Ring!"
I summoned a magical wave to sweep over Gallod, but all it accomplished was slightly throwing off his aim. Gallod summoned his own wave to collide with mine head-on.
"Hahh, hahh...."
My stamina was steadily draining.
Multiple jets of water had grazed me, staining my whole body with blood. I was genuinely thankful the creature hadn't fought Rebecca at full power from the very beginning.
Water tentacles that endlessly spawned as long as the caster lived.
Super-high-pressure water jets that pierced through human flesh like paper.
This was not an enemy a third-rate martial artist could contest.
Even after awakening as a Rune Mage, I still couldn't so much as get close to him.
But an opportunity remained.
'There's still a function of Nistrond I haven't used yet.'
Nistrond's functions were divided into Rapid Freeze and Blizzard. There were additional functions that would unlock as I grew stronger, but those two were all I could use for now. Among them, I hadn't yet revealed Blizzard to Gallod.
'Could it be that Blizzard's power also increases with impact force? Does hitting something hard let me generate an even bigger storm?'
Rapid Freeze scaled up in power based on the impact force delivered to the staff.
If so, it was worth experimenting to see whether the same formula applied to Blizzard.
"You persistent dream demon scum!"
Gallod's finger-fired water jet punched a hole clean through the stone wall I was hiding behind. The instant the water was discharged, I gripped my staff with both hands. The only things nearby I could hit were the stone walls and the dirt floor.
I chose to strike the ground, not my cover.
"Hagalaz! Blizzard!"
I put every ounce of strength I had into smashing the floor with my staff.
FWWWOOOOOOOOSH—!!
The moment a compressed snowstorm exploded from the tip of my staff, I knew the experiment had worked.
It seemed the Ancient Magic I had learned placed heavy importance on physical force.
Wasn't this, in fact, true physical magic?
The power was definitely stronger than when I'd just unleashed the blizzard normally.
Except the power was a little too strong.
"Urk."
My body was swept back by the intense wind pressure and launched straight up into the air. Gallod stared up at me with bewildered eyes as I, who had been on the ground, suddenly rocketed skyward. It wasn't intentional, but this was the opening I needed.
"Nistrond! Send me flying at maximum speed!"
I flipped the blizzard-spewing staff around and used it as a thruster. In the span of a few blinks, I had closed the fifteen-meter distance and reached Gallod. Countless tentacles tried to ensnare me, but they were just a second too late.
Gallod raised his finger and aimed at me.
As his hand shot upward, I twisted my staff and brought it crashing down with all my might.
CRUNCH—!!
That single strike decided the battle.