Ferius's Searing Breath
On the swaying deck, flames danced. “I’ll kill them with magic.”
“What? With magic… so, a destruction-type spell?”
I nodded lightly.
The first man to find me had died on my blade. I’d stabbed him again and again until he collapsed; it must have hurt, but at least the severed carotid meant the pain hadn’t lasted long. Unfortunately.
The two who had been holding me simply unraveled into clumps of cells and vanished when time rewound.
It was almost a pity. They never even felt what was happening to them, let alone suffered, before being erased from this timeline.
I couldn’t grant that same mercy to the others—the ones who had violated my last remaining family, tortured her like a toy, and killed her the moment they grew bored.
…Though Rin was family too.
“You learned it at the magic academy, so you’ll know the name. You’ll remember the formula too. Ferius’s ignition-series destruction magic—Ferius’s Searing Breath. …They said burning alive was the most painful way to die.”
Ferius’s ignition. A spell that could kindle firewood even in a raging storm. Its targets weren’t limited to logs. It could ignite wet grass, a ship… or a person.
When used as a simple “ignition,” the range was too narrow to be practical against people, but the researcher who developed it, Ferius himself, expanded the concept into a full destruction spell.
A trained mage supported by an army could blanket entire mountains and fields in indiscriminate fire, or incinerate an entire force hidden in the woods while leaving every tree untouched and uncharred.
Yes. That was the end these men deserved.
To be burned alive with full awareness, thrashing in agony as their lives were scorched away, drowning in torment until the very last moment.
As I clenched my fists, Rin spoke uneasily.
“Mother, ever since that day in the forest… you’ve been strange. I could understand it, but you were never someone who thought such cruel things……”
I already knew. I repeated to Rin the same words I had once spoken to my horrified comrades in the Mitternburg basement.
“I used to be. But this is me now. This… is who I am.”
“Besides… that kind of large-scale destruction magic requires imperial court approval. It’s strictly military-grade, and the calculations are enormous.”
Rin’s voice, carefully pointing out practical concerns, carried a sadness as though she had already lost her mother.
“…Mother, do you remember? Ferius’s Searing Breath required an entire book’s worth of calculation notes and even a mechanical integrator at the academy. Do you remember how much we struggled just to submit the destruction-magic assignments? One practice formula took a whole month. It consumes several times the mana a normal person’s circuits can prepare in a day, and it needs gunpowder too.”
“I know. But… right now, it’s possible.”
Though I couldn’t see her, I sensed Rin tilting her head in confusion.
“You have hundreds of extra heads to lend me, don’t you? Those magic-born creatures that are basically lumps of mana.”
“Ah……”
Rin gave a bitter laugh.
“I never thought you’d squeeze us dry like this.”
I smiled mischievously at her words.
“Mm. I never thought I’d hear a slime threaten to crush my brain either, back at the alchemist’s house.”
“Eek……”
Remembering what she had once said, Rin’s soft, plump face seemed to flush bright red in my mind.
“They didn’t kill me right away……. …They wanted something else.”
“…Gang rape, you mean. Typical men.”
Rin’s tone was bitter. In truth, I was relieved. If I had been male, they would have killed me without hesitation, and I never would have had this chance to strike back.
“Hmph. I was a man on Earth too, you know. Anyway, thanks to that I bought us time, so let’s prepare now—before they come to their senses and rush me.”
“What the hell did you do? Spit it out, mage.”
The man seemed to have regained some composure. He was still frightened, but with over twenty of them, he couldn’t stay cowed forever.
By now they no longer saw me as a prize to enjoy and discard like trash, but as a dangerous enemy capable of the inexplicable.
One by one, blades turned toward me. The man who looked like their leader aimed the pistol he had taken from the dead Pirel. If that bullet hit me, even I might not escape death.
At that moment, a deafening chorus of shrieks filled the deck, as though the sky itself were screaming. The sound was ear-splitting, like a horde of cats wailing.
Rin’s split bodies, perched on the mast, were circling me in a chaotic storm, threatening the forest bandits. Hundreds of seagulls—far more than dozens—swirled around me like a living cloak. The bandits who had been readying to attack looked visibly unsettled.
Already a few were slashing at the birds or swatting them away. Each individual split body was weak, so Rin’s fragments—my extra threads and cores for calculation—were steadily being cut down. It was fine. There were still plenty left.
The wave of seagulls converged on me, wrapping around my head and back like a massive mantle. From within, Rin extended bundles of thin pseudopods that connected with the amorphous mass of her split bodies behind me, their tentacles linking.
The moment the connection formed, I felt it. My mind, my thinking speed, my mana circulation—all surged upward to a level no ordinary person could ever reach.
“W-what the hell is that writhing… monster!?”
“It’s a slime…? Can slimes mimic things that intelligently? A flock of seagulls?”
The bandits were rattled, but men who had spent their lives killing didn’t lose their will to fight.
“Don’t panic. She’s a mage—she might have invented some magical creature. Still……”
The man leading them showed no outward fear, though his expression was surprised.
“…I misjudged her at first glance. She’s no ordinary mage. She’s dangerous. Forget taking her. Kill her. A corpse’s cunt still has a hole.”
He still didn’t regard me as human, but he was right. And if they attacked first, I would have no way to respond. Even with Veltara’s Transparent Shield, dozens of blades would tear me apart.
The bandits charged without hesitation.
Twenty of them. Magic or swordsmanship alone couldn’t handle that. But—
Still crouched low, I placed my right hand on the deck, fingered the precious object hidden inside my robe with my left, and half-closed my eyes.
I wished for the same thing that had happened in the forest to happen again.
…Rewind.
And I felt it happen perfectly, just as I intended. Everything the deck had touched—everything exposed to the outside air—rewound ten seconds.
Ten seconds. I could have rewound decades, turning them into infants one by one and killing them, or reversed only the time below their necks to bisect them, but I had already decided. I would not grant them such an easy end, closer to erasure than death.
Just ten seconds, to buy time.
“W-what the hell is that writhing… monster!?”
“It’s a slime…? Can slimes mimic things that intelligently?”
“Don’t panic. She’s a mage—she might have invented some magical creature. Still……”
I smiled inwardly. Even after rewinding time, their reactions were exactly the same.
“Since it’s heat-manipulation magic, we need to set the convection conditions before numerical analysis. Are you using the Weis-Schwiert criterion? Or Lamer?”
“Lamer here, Rin. We’re over the river, so we’ll be affected by vapor mixtures.”
“Understood.”
“It’s dawn, so the surface air is stagnant. Assume local thermal and mana equilibrium and calculate accordingly.”
I saw the illusion of Rin nodding.
“We don’t have time, so even if the calculations are somewhat imprecise, limit the finite elements for mana modeling to around two thousand.”
“That’s a lot…. Some of the split bodies might burn out from overheating……. Still, all right. Should we account for convective mixing first at each mana-element calculation step?”
“Yes. Experience shows that keeps the spell from scattering. Please.”
Rin used her own body as a spellbook to implement the necessary analytic-geometric formulas, deriving numerical values for mana channels too complex for strict analytical solutions.
With over a hundred of Rin’s mana cores handling the calculations, I could skip chanting. Chanting was just a notebook for aiding calculation, after all.
While one hand performed the somatic components, the other—
Another ten seconds rewound.
“W-what the hell is that writhing… monster!?”
“It’s a slime…? Can slimes mimic things that intelligently?”
“Don’t panic. She’s a mage—she might have invented some magical creature. Still……”
Simple men. If any of them had been wise, they might have noticed the disjointed, frame-skipping movements of Rin and me, but none did.
Rin placed a small pouch of black powder into my left hand, which had finished the somatic gestures.
“While I was gathering the split bodies earlier, I picked this up near Lady Pirel. It’s the sample component needed for Ferius’s Searing Breath, right?”
“You know your stuff, my daughter.”
The reason I had chosen Ferius’s Searing Breath over other destruction spells rested in my palm.
Most destruction magic was not only calculation-heavy but required rare samples; the only destruction-magic reagent I could obtain right now was this. There had been no other choice.
A pouch of gunpowder.
I swiftly raised my right hand, loosened the pouch, scooped up a generous handful of powder, then pressed my palm back to the deck.
One more time—rewind, ten seconds.
“W-what…? That……”
“Wait, something’s wrong.”
The man who seemed to be the leader frowned.
“Yeah. She definitely did something.”
He raised a hand to halt his men, then quickly cocked the pistol taken from Pirel, ready to fire. He must have decided it was too risky to charge, so he would shoot me himself.
The gunpowder clinging to my hand began to vanish, absorbed like water into dry sand—sublimating as the final component to complete the spell.
I lifted my head, the back of my neck fully enveloped in slime. I stared straight at the bandit aiming Pirel’s pistol at me. Hatred met hatred.
I raised my left index finger to my lips and exhaled softly toward him.
Hoo.
A warm breath left my mouth. Inches from my face it was only mildly warm, like wind on a melting-snow day, but a few spans ahead it became a scorching desert gale in midsummer.
Then it took on color. Red. Orange. And a chilling blue-white. Scorching blue flames, yet no heat reached me—the caster. That was how the spell had been constructed.
A fan-shaped inferno, greedily devouring mana and glowing an icy blue, engulfed the entire deck. It threatened to burn the whole ship in one go. The livestock in the hold, startled by the ominous light seeping through the planks, began to scream.
“Aaaaaaaaagh!!!”
“Aaaagh!! What is this, what the hell is this!?”
And the screams of the men on deck—worse than beasts.
“Hoo.”
I emptied my lungs completely and held the breath. The fan of flames died with it.
Where the fire had passed, twenty human silhouettes writhed, wreathed in flame. Their bodies blackened and desiccated, they danced the final dance of death, moaning in the most intense burning agony a human could suffer.
Their bodies burned brilliantly, yet the clothes they wore did not catch fire. Of course—they had been meticulously calculated and adjusted that way. Only living humans would burn; nothing else, and the flames would not spread.
“Aaaaaagh!! Water!! Water!!!”
Realizing the river was right in front of them, several leapt overboard, ignoring the already-collapsing charcoal corpses. I watched to see what would become of those who had jumped into the water.
Orange flames blazed beneath the surface. That too was expected. The original Ferius’s ignition could kindle fire even in wind and rain; why would water extinguish it? It was as though they had coated themselves in white phosphorus before diving in.
The water boiled, bubbles rising, until the flames gradually weakened—meaning everything designated to burn had been consumed.
Then, from behind, came a loud bang. I turned quickly.
Smoke curled from the muzzle of the pistol that had fallen at the feet of the bandit leader—the man who had mocked and threatened me, now nothing but a shriveled pile of ash. The heat must have set off the gunpowder prematurely.
Of course. The spell only prevented the fire from spreading; it didn’t block heat. If it had blocked heat as well, there would have been no point in using Ferius’s ignition to light a campfire.
I picked up the pistol that had tumbled across the deck. I needed to return it to Pirel.
Soon the deck, once illuminated by the life-consuming flames, began to darken again.
I looked at Rin, still in her massive protoplasmic form. Roughly half her split bodies had melted into black sludge and vanished. Since these mana-born creatures lived through magic, it meant she had pushed herself to the limit.
“I’m sorry, Rin. For making you sacrifice so many of the split bodies you worked so hard to multiply.”
I said this, then stepped forward.
“It’s… fine… I’m… fine……”
Leaving my daughter, who had forced her vocal cords into shape to answer, I walked to the side of Pirel’s corpse—pale, cold, staring blankly into the void.
It was a gruesome body, yet her face bore almost no wounds or signs of abuse; she looked almost as she had in life. They must have thought there was no point in ruining her appearance if it robbed them of enjoyment.
“……”
After a long hesitation, I gathered the remaining scraps of mana in my circulation and gestured.
“Mother! Don’t do that!”
Rin had realized what I was about to do; her desperate cry came from behind, still in slime form. But it was too late. The spell had already been cast.
I had suspected it before, but now it was certain—what kind of feelings I harbored. Rin must have guessed as well.
The claim that experience was necessary for growth, that the memory must not be erased, had been nothing but a flimsy excuse.
In truth, I was taking pleasure in deliberately preserving these horrific memories I never wanted to relive—memories that amounted to nothing less than cruel psychological abuse toward Pirel.
If enough of these memories accumulated, the young Pirel’s mind would completely collapse.
That was all I had wanted to see. The sight of this small, adorable girl finally breaking under the weight of all the painful memories she had endured during her journey.
Wanting to keep this tiny, cute girl dependent on me, cradled in my arms forever, I—consumed by that base desire—smiled brightly before the miserably dead body of Pirel.