It was a sight to behold.
I kept up my vigil on the battlefield from above, taking in the reality unfolding on the ground. Flashes of light ran from corner to corner, blowing away dozens of orcs at once. A loud roar rumbled in the sky as a black dome-shaped something appeared, then disappeared after a few seconds and left nothing but a bunch of glass fused into the earth.
All the orcs there must have been burned into nothing. I could tell what had happened easily enough, but I felt like my heart was still having trouble accepting it. Before it could, tornadoes swirled across the field, sending gale-force winds in all directions and burning the orcs alive with bolts of lightning. It looked like one of the black-armored orcs had either been incinerated or torn apart.
My honest appraisal of all this: What the heck?
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With every swipe of her sword, Shion was cutting down great quantities of orcs. Her blade was glowing a dim shade of purple, infused with her aura. A flash of the same color shot through the air with every slash, cutting orcish soldiers in half with the shock waves. The sword was no kinder to those it physically struck—some literally exploded. A single slash had a range of twenty feet or so, slicing through everyone unlucky enough to be in its path.
She smiled a graceful, fetching smile as she danced her way through the hordes. The attacks just kept coming, uninterrupted, and not a single orc could lay a claw on her.
Her strength was simply overwhelming.
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But there were a couple other guys in battle that made Shion look like a rank amateur. Those were Benimaru and Ranga.
Let’s tackle Benimaru first. What was up with that freaky black dome thing? I had a vague idea when I first saw it, I’ll admit. A combination of my Control Flame, Dark Flame, and Ranged Barrier, I guessed. He used a barrier to freeze the space, Control Flame to accelerate the particle motion inside, and then Dark Flame to convert the excited particles into searing flame. It’d instantly cook everything in the enclosed space, like Ifrit’s Flare Circle except with an even larger range. It disappeared in the space of two seconds, but with temperatures this high, that was enough.
It was a scarily efficient killing device, and the neat thing was how, unlike a nuclear bomb, it didn’t affect the outside area one bit. Not a single shock wave or burst of energy leaked out from the barrier. He must have ranged it carefully to control the temperature inside, and I could only imagine how hot it must’ve been. No way anyone could’ve survived.
The only real problem, I supposed, was the way he took this incredibly dangerous skill—he developed it himself, I later heard, naming it Hellflare—and tossed it around with hardly a second thought, apparently.
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Now for the other guy—er, wolf. Ranga.
Transforming into a tempest starwolf out of nowhere was kind of freaky, I thought, but it was the skill he immediately unleashed afterward that really threw me.
I suppose that was how you were supposed to use Dark Lightning, without placing any limits on it. And he even controlled the wind to enhance its effects. Dang. What was that?
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Understood. I believe the individual Ranga combined Dark Lightning with the extra skill Control Wind, taking advantage of the differences in temperature and atmospheric pressure to create bursts of up-and-down-flowing currents, thus creating whirlwinds.
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Huh. Neat. I don’t get it.
So he generated tornadoes to attack a wider range than he could with just lightning? Well, it sure worked. It knocked out an entire section of the orc horde.
It consumed a ton of his magic, though, so I doubted a second strike was coming any time soon. Which, I mean, if he could rapid-fire stuff like that, I think we’d need to redefine everything about how war even worked on this planet.
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Gauging all of this made me realize something. The brakes I had subconsciously been applying to myself all this time—they had nothing like that. No concept that some skills were a little too dangerous to unleash and just lobbed them willy-nilly at enemies. That was a given in the survival-of-the-fittest world they were born in, I imagined, and really, maybe I was the one being weird about it. It’d suck if I held back and my friends paid dearly for it.
Over in my old world, there was this tacit agreement that, yes, we’ve got all these devastating weapons and stuff, but we can’t actually use them. They were more for deterrence. But was that really the case? What’s the point of spending so much money on weapons you could never use? Taking all that time to develop them? They’re meant for launching when the times call for it, no? And if you’re not supposed to use them on innocent citizens, did that suddenly make it okay to use them on the battlefield? I think if you got your brains blown out in a war, you probably wouldn’t care much about the exact murder weapon that did the deed, wherever you wound up.
Maybe that was the whole point. You needed to show people that you were strong if your weapons were ever going to serve as a deterrent. Maybe there was nothing wrong with that at all, actually. Look at Ranga, for one—he’s just sitting there, observing, and nobody’s daring to go near him. They’re as deterred as they can get.
I mused absentmindedly to myself for a while.
✦ ✦ ✦
The battle had been raging for around two hours.
Benimaru had popped off four of those dark-dome attacks. Not even he could deploy them in rapid succession, but I guess they didn’t sap that much of his energy. Ranga’s attack, meanwhile, was proving more of a one-and-done thing. I guess he put his all into it, which explained his current comparative silence. It certainly helped cow his opponents into submission anyway.
As I saw a bunch of orcs running around in a panic, trying not to get caught in Shion’s attack range, I decided to analyze the situation a bit. I felt oddly calm now. Benimaru decided where to attack first, but I had ultimate authority over where to go last. I wanted to strike the enemy hard on a specific spot, attracting our foes to Shion and hitting them where it hurt.
Hakuro was busy handling the commander-class enemies for me, and I would hardly call that a battle. He approached them soundlessly and diced them up in an instant. The Ravenous unique skill let the armies boost their leader’s strength by consuming the dead, so making the bodies themselves vanish was apparently a priority for him, which I appreciated. Part of his Modelwill Art, maybe? I could see him release an aura from his palm, burning the corpses—or melting them, really.
We proceeded along those lines for a while, with me spotting an enemy commander and sending Hakuro over to erase him. We were overwhelming the orc armies, and zero cost to ourselves. I kept up my watch, trying to stay as efficient as possible.
Even the more eager ogres realized that the tables had turned by now, I was sure. They weren’t attacking as frantically as they were before. They kept their distance from Benimaru and Ranga, fanning out their formations so they weren’t bunched together.
At that point in time, the orcs had suffered about twenty percent casualties. Over forty thousand had lost their lives. And it wasn’t until then that the enemy’s nerve center—the orc lord—finally took action.