“What? Why?!” I exclaimed, subconsciously taking a step closer to Reina.
“W-Well—”
“Stop,” Lardon interjected. “The reason can wait. I doubt this one is the only victim.”
I gasped. “You’re right! Reina, are there any other banshees?”
“Yes, across the Redline...”
“Where?!”
In Reina’s place, the banshee hesitantly raised her hand. Turning her body halfway, she pointed down a path that led to the outskirts.
“Got it!”
I kicked the ground and leaped into the air, taking to the skies with flight magic. I flew along the main road that we’d paved for our trade with Bruno and other humans. In no time at all, I shot right past our national border—the Redline—and entered foreign soil.
Here, I cast Monster Search. This spell wasn’t an original—it had been in the first Ancient Memoria I ever received and was typically used by those who hunted monsters. With it, I detected two clusters. The larger one was behind me, from the magic city and all the monsters living there. The other was a small cluster of just over a dozen monsters. It was a short distance to my front, though a bit off to the side.
“There they are!”
I aligned my flight path toward the smaller cluster, straying off of the main road and veering straight into what looked like a recently ravaged flower field. On the other side was a fairly large lake.
It was there that I finally spotted a group of banshees. They were cornered against the shore, desperately fighting off a mob of armed humans, but clearly they were outnumbered. There were forty to fifty humans, easily three times the number of banshees.
“Stop right there!” I yelled.
The humans and banshees all whipped their heads toward me.
“Don’t waste your breath. Suppress them with force first.”
“Gotcha!” Following Lardon’s instructions, I ramped up my speed.
“Who the—?!”
One of the humans was only halfway through his question when I was already right under his nose, slamming a power missile into his stomach point-blank. The man’s body bent in half as he coughed up blood and went flying across the shore.
✦ ✦ ✦
The humans watched the guy tumble over the ground, but around half of them had the presence of mind to immediately snap their heads back to me.
“Start with them,” Lardon advised.
You read my mind. I went after these sharper ones first, knocking them all out with power missiles.
At this point, my bouts with Sheila resurfaced in my mind. Moving even faster, I darted from blind spot to blind spot—sometimes circling around behind them, other times crouching down low—as I sent the human assailants flying.
“Spread out! Surround him!” somebody yelled.
Those still standing reacted immediately. They pulled back and started fencing me in from a distance.
By a quick estimate, I’d say there were only a bit over a dozen men left—less than half of what they started with. But as their numbers dwindled, so did their rage boil over and senses sharpen. Weapons in hand, they crept closer to me, their gazes constantly flicking back and forth to one another.
It looks like...
“They’ve repositioned themselves. Now, they can swiftly cover for any fallen allies.”
Yeah, I figured.
They were countering my strategy of aiming for their blind spots, which I’d been doing from the start. Worse yet, among the twenty or so men I’d defeated earlier on, around five or six had come to and were now struggling against their injuries to rejoin the battle.
“Perhaps you should have stuck to your usual style,” Lardon teased.
“Maybe,” I admitted. “I just wanted to give it a shot.”
My recent battles with Sheila made me want to try mimicking her combat style. She specialized in exactly what I was lacking, so I’d been thinking that I could try learning from her to acquire a new form of magic combat.
But where did that land me? Right here—surrounded by enemies who were now slowly regrouping.
“Sounds like a new training agenda.”
“Yeah. I’ll work on it.”
With that, I reassessed my surroundings. Thirty men now surrounded me. They’d replenished their numbers, but they remained just as vigilant. Clearly, they had no intention of letting their guards down again.
“Thirty... No, that’s not enough.”
I chanted an aria; I could hardly unleash enough attacks without any preparation, so I boosted my mana first. Then, I raised my hand, firing off 101 power missiles into the air—more than enough to cover all my sides and take out every single human surrounding me.
They collapsed on the spot, falling backward like shards of a shattered glass cup.