In simple terms, Julis’s Queen of the Night move was a special technique for converting mana into prana.
Prana and mana were elements with a high degree of affinity. Dantes and Stregas used prana as an intermediary to manipulate mana, so it went without saying that the two operated hand in hand. This was what Julis believed, but it wasn’t simply her opinion—mainstream theories held that prana was an adapted form of mana, made to operate more effectively within the human body.
If that was the case, Julis thought it stood to reason that one might be able to lean on their commonalities to wield mana as though it were prana. However, that would require a device to convert the former into the latter. When it came to exerting fine control over prana and also functioning as an excellent medium, there was only one entity that came to mind—the human body.
That’s right: Julis’s Queen of the Night technique used her own body as a conversion device—which was precisely why Xinglou had described her as the biggest fool in the last several hundred years. Should the conversion process fail and worse come to worst, her physical body could very well disintegrate. Even if it succeeded, there was a good chance that she would burn herself during the process, since her power took the form of flames. In fact, she had come within a hair’s breadth of losing her life several times just perfecting this move. If not for her time at the Liangshan and the presence of Xinglou Fan as her teacher, she would probably have wound up dead long before ever working out how to perform it.
And despite the huge risk, the technique’s effects lasted for only twelve seconds. She had tried to extend that limit through trial and error, but found it impossible. A flower that bloomed for one night only would inevitably wilt come morning.
Its effect, however, was enormous.
Like this, for example:
“Burst into bloom—Longiflorum, Multiflos!”
After activating her Queen of the Night, Julis immediately deployed her Strelitzia wings and soared into the air, then summoned countless spears of bluish-white flames, each one of them longer than her own body. There must have been more than fifty of them in total.
Those spears, in the shape of Easter lilies, launched like missiles, burning through everything in their path.
Orphelia moved to block them with her arms of ominous miasma, but the flaming white flower spears tore straight through them, blowing them away.
“Ngh!”
Orphelia didn’t attempt to block them with her bare hands, as she usually would, instead falling backward. She must have realized the extent of Julis’s power the moment she saw it. In fact, with her current firepower, she ought to be strong enough to break through all of Orphelia’s defenses.
Practically pursuing her, spears of white flame rained down one after another, pillars of fire bursting across the stage. But Orphelia’s physical abilities were astonishing, and Julis was unable to corner her.
And then—
“Burst into bloom—Anemone Coronaria!”
More than a dozen huge flaming flowers, each of which could easily be mistaken for a miniature sun, appeared suddenly in midair.
In this state, Julis could easily perform countless large-scale moves in rapid succession, and even execute them simultaneously.
This was because she could use all the mana around her as her own prana. In essence, Queen of the Night gave Julis the same unlimited store of prana available to Orphelia.
That also meant Julis could pour as much prana as she liked into each technique—so long as she didn’t overload them to the point of collapse, that is. The potency of her moves was now on a totally different level.
A solar flower of roiling flame, its diameter well over ten meters wide, attacked Orphelia, surrounding her. The heat alone would probably have rendered any ordinary Genestella unconscious.
With a time limit of only twelve seconds, Julis could probably pull off only three moves. Half of the Queen of the Night flowers shining behind her had already withered.
If possible, she wanted to finish Orphelia off with her next move.
“Nim a Jimuna.”
“…?!”
Right then, like a geyser erupting, a huge mass of black liquid spewed out around Orphelia—completely vaporizing the fireball that threatened to burn everything away.
A liquefied gas…!
The miasma must have been compressed to liquefy it, and once in that state, its density was completely different. Even with Julis’s current firepower, she didn’t think she could break through it.
If this had been the Orphelia of a few moments ago, the match would already have been decided. It seemed that, at full power, Orphelia was a monster beyond Julis’s wildest imagination.
Julis, however, was the same.
Three seconds left! One more move!
Julis’s fireball and Orphelia’s liquefied gas annihilated each other, and as the resulting steam enveloped them, Julis dashed as quickly as she could straight for her opponent.
Right now, she possessed unparalleled physical strength, since her body was imbued with inexhaustible prana. She could even move her broken right arm without any difficulty.
Orphelia was clearly taken by surprise. She probably hadn’t expected this speed.
“Burst into bloom—Magnolia Grandiflora!”
She put her hands together, aiming straight for Orphelia’s chest, and no sooner had she called out the words than a bright flash of white engulfed her vision, followed by a blinding explosion.
A superpowered attack delivered at close range.
The explosion, which would usually have swallowed the whole stage, had been compressed down to the size of a few petals—producing a technique of absolute destructive potential, only possible while her Queen of the Night was deployed.
Immediately after releasing it, the flowers behind Julis’s back withered away, and the strength quickly drained from her body. Her hair, which the technique had paled, returned to a rosy pink, while her body stung with a lattice of burns.
After using Queen of the Night, her prana was almost totally depleted. The aftereffects were a little less severe each time she used it, though she couldn’t pin down precisely why. This time, too, she seemed to have slightly more prana left over than on the last occasion, though it was still less than one tenth of the usual amount.
“…Wh-whoa! S-sorry, everyone! Watching all that unfold so quickly, I guess I was at a loss for words! But enough about me dropping the ball on the live commentary…er, what do you think, Zaharoula?”
“Assuming it actually made contact, even Orphelia Landlufen should have taken damage from that last attack. The fact that the match still hasn’t been decided must mean that her school crest hasn’t been damaged and she hasn’t lost consciousness… But I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s been downed.”
As the voices of the commentator and analyst washed over her, Julis suppressed the urge to collapse and trained her eyes on the roiling dust cloud, trying to see past it.