Chapter 19
“AM I IMAGINING THINGS, or are they getting stronger for some reason?”
Facing down a horde of fiends which had gone berserk, Mira and her companions continued defeating them without yielding so much as an inch. As they did, Mira suddenly got a bad feeling and turned to Wallenstein to ask what he thought.
It may have been an extremely fierce battle, but thanks to Eizenfald, Alfina and her sisters, and now Wallenstein, who was skilled at taking on fiends, they’d managed to successfully thin the fiends’ ranks. You didn’t need to be a math whiz to figure that out.
And yet, though there were undoubtedly fewer of them, the battle still didn’t seem to be moving in their favor.
In fact, now, it took two holy knights to withstand an attack which before had only required one. This, as well as several other things, seemed to indicate that the remaining fiends were growing even more powerful, if anything.
“I’d say…that you aren’t just imagining it,” Wallenstein answered, seeming to have come to the same conclusion. Taking a look at everything going on around them, he pointed out what he figured the cause must be.
It was incredibly faint, but it certainly seemed that it might very well explain it.
Looking closely, one could see a black mist—that is, the lesser demon’s vengeful spirits pouring forth. Furthermore, these spirits were then possessing the remaining fiends yet again.
“Mira, I’d say that the way the lesser demons you mentioned died might very well have had some effect on their vengeful spirits,” Wallenstein continued.
Just after meeting up, Mira and Wallenstein had explained their respective situations to each other while battling the fiends.
That is, they discussed the dark demon going berserk as well as the fifty some-odd lesser demons self-combusting. He’d concluded that there had to be some connection between those things and the situation they were now witnessing before them.
Previously, they’d observed how the vengeful spirits had simply disappeared alongside their host after the latter was defeated. But that wasn’t the case this time. This time, they’d slowly seeped out of the fiends’ corpses before possessing yet more fiends.
“This is gonna be a problem…”
The fiends continued getting stronger and stronger, until it became quite apparent that the final one would likely become an absolute monstrosity.
Pondering this, the two began thinking that they needed some sort of plan.
While they discussed this, Meilin was having the time of her life, thinking that it truly was the ideal training opportunity.
The reichengiebel was commanding the fiends like a boss would their subordinates. Hoping to fight against it, Meilin defeated fiend after fiend, after which even more powerful ones would take their places. Hoping to fight even stronger opponents, Meilin had begun battling even more ferociously.
“Hey, Meilin…”
“Um, Meilin…”
Meilin was so focused and ferocious that even Mira and Wallenstein’s voices failed to reach her. What’s more, she was now fighting so seriously that she was unleashing techniques they’d never seen before, one after another.
“Damn… What’s she doing having so much fun at a time like this…?!” Mira said, watching as Meilin successively chained together new techniques.
Seeing this, Mira felt an agonizing mix of wanting to watch and take notes, wanting to try out all of her own new techniques, and wanting to do something about the vengeful spirits.
“Mira, I know how you must feel, but right now we really have to worry about the vengeful spirits…”
Once Meilin got into her current state, stopping her was next to impossible. In which case, their first priority was dealing with the vengeful spirits. The plan Wallenstein had come up with was to seal them away after they emerged while finishing off the fiends.
“Ngh… Yeah. That ought to come first,” Mira said.
She’d also been planning on taking on the fiends which had been powered up the most, but since she didn’t know just how powerful they might get, she decided that eliminating the fiends first was the safest and most surefire option.
Having given up on her previous idea, Mira began doing everything she could to assist Wallenstein in dealing with the vengeful spirits which were welling forth.
And so, they had Eizenfald and the other evocations, who could control the rate at which they were destroying the fiends, as well as Meilin, who couldn’t.
Even so, having figured out how the fiends were getting stronger, and sealing them within a barrier, the battle began to shift somewhat in their favor.
However, they couldn’t keep up completely. Needless to say, they had no way to match the rate at which Meilin was defeating the fiends. Furthermore, those vengeful spirits were all sucked into the reichengiebel that was waiting in the rear.
“Damn… And I was hoping I wouldn’t have to deal with such a troublesome foe…”
“I might’ve known this would happen…”
The battle continued until there was finally just one fiend remaining: the reichengiebel.
However, having been possessed by the last dozen or so vengeful spirits, it’d become so deformed that it no longer resembled its original self. Simply put, it looked like some apocalyptic monster that’d crawled out from the abyss.
Furthermore, the miasma that poured out of it created a field around it that they couldn’t simply approach willy-nilly.
“I’d like to see if we could do something about it with dragon’s breath, but that might be an issue considering where we are…”
“Indeed. What would Alma think if we reduced this place to a smoking crater? Not only that, the barrier I put up is specifically tailored for fiends, so I fear it might not be able to stop dragon’s breath.”
Because the miasma was so thick, they couldn’t know for sure whether they could manage to blow it away. What’s more, considering all those nearby who might get hurt, as well as the effect such an attack might have on Wallenstein’s barrier, dragon’s breath seemed to be a bit too destructive.