Pure water was a perfect insulator, so Meiru’s wall actually made for the best defense against the lightning attack. But while it could keep the electricity out, it couldn’t absorb the full force of the impact. Thus, the water was blown away by the lightning blast, but not for long.
“Tetragrammaton!”
Meiru was able to instantly restore the barrier with restoration magic, but the sheer power of that attack left her a little stunned.
“Future Sight sure is helpful!” Miledi said with a smile.
“Yeah, but that was cutting it a bit close,” Oscar replied.
“Indeed. It’s been a while since an attack scared me that badly. I won’t be able to use restoration magic if their attacks shock me unconscious, you know?”
As the three of them bantered with each other, the Paladins finally started making their way up through Miledi’s Asura. And at the same time, dark clouds gathered in the sky above, the wind picked up, and lightning lanced through the air. A storm was brewing.
“I’ll keep the explanation simple,” Oscar said as he watched the knights start to wreathe themselves in mana. Quite a few of them had special magic that transformed their bodies, similar to Lilith and Zebal. Several knights were turning into ice, or flames, or wind, for example. Among all the flashes of white mana though, Darrion’s mana stood out as it glowed golden.
“The reason your Heavencrushes were destroyed was because of his special magic, Golden Rule,” Oscar explained.
“What’s that?” Miledi asked, prompting Oscar to frown as he analyzed the data his glasses were giving him.
After Lyutillis had mastered evolution magic, he’d added the ability to analyze all information he saw to his glasses with her help. While it wasn’t as accurate as Lyutillis’s magic, it still told him enough.
“It’s special magic that lets you copy your opponent’s magic.”
“Now that’s just cheating!”
“Wait, does that mean he can use our magic as well?”
“I’m not sure how well he’ll be able to wield ancient magic right after copying it, but yeah. At the very least, he can cancel out our spells. The one silver lining is that he can only copy one type of magic at a time.”
Miledi stamped her foot midair, while Meiru massaged her forehead. Unfortunately, there was more bad news to come.
A pillar of silver light shot up from the Holy Cathedral. Lucifer had finally made his move. While the barrage of enchanted swords had turned the cathedral’s roof into Swiss cheese, Lucifer and his four bodyguards remained unharmed.
“Are you telling me that’s still not enough to stop it?” Oscar muttered. His goal with that barrage had been to destroy the Holy Cathedral and put a stop to both Divine Crusade and Sanctified Purge. But if all that damage wasn’t enough to cancel those spells out, it meant there was a core somewhere powering them.
Meanwhile, the storm roiling above grew even stronger, with hail-filled twisters descending from the clouds and yet more lightning splitting the sky.
“Here it comes!” Meiru shouted as another blast of lightning came down. They knew if they stayed in one place they’d get focused down, so Miledi and the others split up in three directions.
“That’s Stormlight, Lucifer’s special magic,” Oscar explained. “It lets him—”
“Control the weather, yeah! You can tell just by looking at it!” Miledi shouted, interrupting him.
“Men like to explain things to people, Miledi-chan! You’ll make Oscar happy if you let him lecture you!” Meiru said with a grin.
“Now you’re just teasing me, aren’t you?!”
Sadly, that was all the joking around they could muster. Miledi was swiftly surrounded by a contingent of Paladins, and they’d all finished preparing their disintegration attacks.
“Don’t underestimate me!” Miledi roared as she pulled several superdense metallic black balls from her Treasure Trove, which then started spinning around her at dizzying speed.
This was one of her new techniques, Satellite Blitz. By making a bunch of superdense objects orbit her at high speed, she could defend and attack simultaneously. After all, any knight who got too close to her would be sent flying by the balls.
Unfortunately for her, Darrion and two of the apostles were both fast and dexterous enough to slip through Miledi’s defense net. She blocked the lightning above her with a Spatial Severance and quickly flew away to safety. She knew she wouldn’t be able to handle Darrion in close combat, especially not if he had apostles backing him up. And so, she took off her three shawls and let them loose into the wind. The first billowed out like one big wave, the second coiled around Darrion, and the third coiled around his spear. While he was preoccupied with them, Miledi dueled the two apostles in the air. One blue streak and two silver streaks darted through the storm, evading lightning strikes and tornadoes.
As she watched Miledi fight out of the corner of her eye, Meiru shouted, “Damn, I’ve had enough of this!”
She was currently facing off against the group of knights that had turned themselves into fire, ice, and wind. None of her attacks were hitting while the knights were freezing, burning, and cutting her up in quick succession. But even as she coughed up blood and suffered third-degree burns, she kept using restoration magic to undo all the damage.
“Preserve your mana!” one of the knights shouted. “She doesn’t have much combat potential. Just keep killing her until she’s down for good!”
Meiru seethed upon hearing that and replied, “Oh, I don’t have much combat potential, do I? Why don’t I invite you to my domain, then?! Aerial Sea!”
That was Meiru’s domain-creating spell. It summoned a sphere of water that was three hundred meters in diameter in the air, swallowing up the ten knights facing off against her and the one apostle who’d been heading her way. The knights were left at the mercy of the extreme water pressure and high-speed currents within the sphere. Honestly, it was amazing they didn’t just die immediately. On the other hand, the apostle didn’t feel any pain and thus kept blasting away at the water with disintegration magic, though Meiru simply regenerated it every time.
For a while, the two of them looped as the apostle destroyed the sphere and Meiru instantly regenerated it.
“Oooooo-kuuuuuuuuuuuun!”
While that was happening, Miledi was still struggling to fend off the two apostles and keep clear of the lightning strikes, as Darrion had managed to get rid of the shawls as well and had joined in the chase.
Miledi had to contend with disintegration attacks from two sides at once, and whenever Darrion saw an opening, he used his special magic to cancel out her gravity magic. Her Spatial Severance was nearing its capacity limit as well, with all the bolts it had taken.
“Do something, O-kun! I’m kinda in a bind here!”
“Well, I’m preoccupied too! Do something with your spheres or something!”
Miledi’s black spheres were more than just superdense lumps of metal. Oscar and the others had already seen before that the church had ways of interfering with their ancient magic, so of course they’d come up with countermeasures. Those spheres were one such thing. If someone managed to interfere with Miledi’s casting or disrupt the control of her mana, she could still cast gravity magic through the spheres by using them as focal points.
“Why are you so cold, O-kun?! I thought you loved me!”
“Shut up! I’ve got a lot going on, okay?! Save it for later!”
It was true that Miledi was able to deftly manipulate her orbs to keep Darrion at bay while also taking out more shawls to slow him down, but even if she didn’t actually need his help, she still pouted as she zoomed past him.
Even though she was ostensibly the one being driven into a corner, Miledi still had time to flirt with Oscar, a fact that irked Darrion quite a bit. As he lashed out in anger, his spear miraculously managed to dodge Miledi’s spheres, her shawls, and even the defense of her Metal Batlam and graze her side.
“Ngh, you bastard! I bet you wanna strip me with that spear and do all sorts of nasty things to me! You pervert! Eek, a pervert’s tearing my clothes off!”
As annoying as Miledi was acting, she was still firing off hundreds upon hundreds of spells each second to keep all of the lower-class Paladins at bay and also dealing with Darrion and the two apostles at the same time. Darrion couldn’t help but be impressed, though he was also still pissed off.
Oscar was so used to Miledi’s screaming that it didn’t even distract him as he focused on his task.
Come on... Where is it?
He was sifting through the massive amount of data his glasses were giving him as fast as possible. He’d summoned ten of his upgraded Shadow Knight Lords to protect him while he worked. They were, of course, completely autonomous thanks to the spirit magic and metamorphosis magic they were enchanted with. There was one other new skill he was utilizing as well. Namely, Dance of a Hundred Blades. He had a hundred of his enchanted blades flying around him, attacking any knights that got close. These were special blades that were enchanted with autonomous flight magic, spatial magic, and the ability to cut through mana. And yet, even with a hundred of these insanely strong swords, he wasn’t able to fully push the knights back.