Yuika was at a loss for words. She was one of the characters in MagicalExplorer depicted as being physically strong. Yet even Yuika had yet to beat Yukine in terms of sheer strength alone.
“If I don’t fully enchant my shield, it’d probably get smashed apart, too,” Claris said before running forward. As she did, a sparkling arrow flew diagonally upward from behind her. Once it was right above the enemy, a large magic circle formed from the arrow.
“Lightning Arrow!”
Right as the words left Nanami’s lips, several arrows of light rained down from the magic circle.
This spell was targeting the bow and staff users in the back line. However, the staff-wielding Church follower blocked it by summoning a fire shield. Then the bow-wielder released an arrow up at the magic circle, and it exploded right as it connected.
“They’re using bomb arrows, are they?”
The bow-user immediately shifted their gaze to Yukine and fired an arrow at her. However, Ludie quickly knocked away the projectile with Air Hammer.
Claris, catching up to Yukine’s position, confronted the Church follower with the sword.
Which meant…
“Guess I’m fighting you then, huh.” I confronted the one woman who still hadn’t joined the fight.
I couldn’t tell if she was watching how the battle was going, if she just couldn’t be bothered to fight, or if this was all part of their strategy. Hortensia simply observed me, without attacking or saying a word.
“Not running away this time?”
Despite my cheeky taunt, she still didn’t say anything. When I went to punch her with my Third Hand, she finally did something.
Hortensia removed something from her item box.
“Well, well, that’s quite the flashy weapon.”
It was a scythe, the blade of which was about as long as my arm. In the game, Hortensia is adept at wielding somewhat peculiar weapons, and while she’s with the Church of the Malevolent Lord, she uses a scythe.
She aimed her weapon at my Third Hand and swung it down.
There was a loud metallic clang of the blade hitting something hard. My stole didn’t break at all thanks to the serious amount of mana I had poured into it. Hortensia continued to put strength behind her scythe and jumped off the ground.
“That’d earn you a lot of artistry points for sure.”
She, of all things, used the point of her scythe as an axis, jumping while doing a backflip to land behind me.
It was only for a moment, but I locked eyes with her. Her red irises, beautiful enough to entrance me if I wasn’t careful, stared down at me. I also caught a glimpse of what she was wearing beneath the robe, and it was very racy.
If this was somewhere like a tsundere café that served the customer as poorly as they could get away with, I might have been overjoyed here, but regrettably, I was not far gone enough to enjoy a woman swinging a scythe at me.
Right as she landed back on the ground, she whirled around while swinging her scythe.
Spurred by the centrifugal force, her weapon came barreling toward me, but I met it with my stole.
I successfully defended against her strike, but since she had opened up space between us, I was unable to counterattack.
Again Hortensia used her attack to shift her position. Her movements were very rational, being able to attack and reposition herself at the same time.
And the scythe wasn’t her only specialty. She also excelled at casting dark magic at high speeds.
In fact, she had just materialized a magic circle in mere seconds and cast her spell. To make matters worse, it was the most irritating dark magic spell of all, at least in my estimation.
“M-my body’s so heavy.”
Hortensia’s forte was using debuff spells to weaken opponents, along with curse and poison type spells. If I was going to counteract this…items were really my only option.
“Takiooooto? Are you okay?!”
Thankfully, I had Yuika and her powerful healing magic on my side. I hadn’t anticipated Hortensia would be here, so I hadn’t properly prepared the items needed to defend against her. In some cases, this could have turned into a serious struggle for me.
That being said, though, status affliction recovery items are unbelievably rare in the game and can only be obtained in the second half of the main story or in secret dungeons.
Next, Hortensia materialized several shields made of dark magic. While they were able to block the attacks from my Third Hand and Fourth Hand, the shields were brittle, and each one only lasted for one attack.
However, defending just once gave her plenty of time to make a counterattack.
The scythe pressed in toward me. I attempted to back up, then suddenly noticed something.
There was a dark shield floating behind me. Hortensia had purposefully summoned a shield behind my position to prevent me from dodging.
I couldn’t evade the attack. I took aim at the blade looming in front of me and drew my katana.
“…Can’t cut it, huh?”
While the speed of my blade was several times faster than Hortensia’s, she had made sure to fill her weapon with mana, preventing me from cutting through it. If I built up a crazy amount of mana and concentrated to my absolute limit, it was possible I could cut through it. The question was if she would actually give me the time to make that possible.
My opponent appeared unable to smother all the power behind my blade, and her scythe was repelled far backwards. Yet she immediately changed her stance and flew back to dodge my follow-up attack.
I considered closing the gap between us, but she cast some sort of spell and pointed her off-hand at me, so I abandoned the idea. Inside, I returned my katana to its sheath and gathered mana in it.