Myfila had summoned a necrospecter in the corpse of a giant that had lived long ago. But…which era had she summoned the monster from?
Though the necrospecters controlled decay, there was no way any giant corpses existed in the human age, and any giants from the age of gods wouldn’t have commanded much grandeur. She’d probably summoned it from between those eras—during the age of elementals and beasts.
If I were a gambling man, I’d say the giant came from the time when elementals and beasts were glorified the world over, after all the gods had decided to withdraw into seclusion. So it was one of the great titan’s descendants. The last generation of their race, which had fought against the gods.
In terms of difficulty, it was one of the lower upper-class summons.
It was already unusual enough that the necrospecters were responding to her summons, and even though the giant was only a descendant of a titan, the fact that she’d summoned its body increased the complexity of the feat by leaps and bounds.
It had only looked easy because Myfila was a prodigy.
The titan knelt for her, and Myfila wasted no time slipping out from under Cyril’s arm. “I don’t need you anymore, Cyril. I’ll stand on my own,” she told him as she stepped onto the outstretched right hand of the giant.
“Myfila, I’ll ride, too. Let me ride it, will ya?”
I got onto the hand right after her.
Then the titan stood back up, straightening to its full height, and the scenery swept down around me as I rose to an elevation twice my height, then three times, on and on. It felt precarious so high up, like even a slight breeze would make me lose my footing.
“I’m not getting involved in this,” Cyril said from down below, where his voice came up to us as hardly a whisper. He looked pretty grouchy.
I gave him a toothy smile before replying, “We’ll find an openin’. We’re expectin’ a real big attack from you, Mr. Hero.”
However, all he replied with was another irritated “I’m not getting involved in this!”
But this was Cyril, and Cyril wasn’t the type to abandon anyone. Even though he was angry and making a big show of it, I was pretty sure he’d be there when we needed him for the final blow. And if he wasn’t, we’d have a huge problem. If we wanted to win, Cyril Ojlock’s offensive capabilities were absolutely essential to us.
The giant lifted us to its right shoulder, and Myfila hopped on board.
I stood directly across its gigantic head on the left shoulder, taking a firm hold of a long lock of hair to act as a safety tether, then pointed at the archangel above and laughed loudly. “Dah-ha-haaa!! Come an’ get us, archangel!”
Then Myfila pointed up just like me and hollered, “Archangel!”
Normally, no one would’ve heard our jabs from so far up in the sky, but we were fighting a legendary archangel. Her ears couldn’t miss even the tiniest of prayers, which naturally meant she wouldn’t miss any blasphemy targeting her, either.
She didn’t even need to flap her wings to begin her descent toward us.
With the sun directly behind her, she was blinding to behold. I hoped the clouds sweeping across the skies would block out the light.
Eventually, the archangel stopped at about five times the giant’s height—which was just perfect. Her long hair fluttered in the strong westerly wind as she watched us from beyond her mask.
“Ha-ha-ha! ’Course you’re still lookin’ down on us,” I snorted as I stared at the archangel’s stomach.
Instead of holding a sword or shield in her hands, both were occupied by a single girl. Her platinum hair was less brilliant than the archangel’s golden locks as it whipped in the wind around her cool yet pretty face.
Her nose was beautiful enough that I was tempted to trace its slope. Her alabaster skin was accentuated by her pink lips. And then there were her purple eyes, which were more captivating than any I had ever seen.
They weren’t just an unusual color, either. They were the perfect size and shape, too. Her delicately sloped eyes were draped by folded eyelids. There was something enigmatic about them, though they still gave off a tender impression. Even the bottoms of her eyes were shapely and adorned with long, gorgeous lashes.
Anyone would fall in love upon meeting those eyes, whether they were a demon from hell or a god from the heavens above. Supposedly, the goddess of love and trickery, Pearla, had once stopped the berserk mythical beast with a single glance. If anyone in this day and age could do the same, I was sure it was her.
Sasha Shidoh Zultania.
Everybody at the Academy knew her name, and I’d bet you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone within four mountain ranges of here who hadn’t heard of her.
She was the third princess of the land of Shidoh, which was one of the eight kingdoms reigning over the world. As in a genuine princess. Like wave from the terrace of the palace kind-of-princess princess.
“Sheesh… She could’ve acted a little embarrassed. We went through all that work tryin’ to get the slime on her for the audience… What a pity.”
There were giant holes in her robe, reducing it to little more than rags that barely covered her chest and hips, but Princess Sasha still proudly held herself at her full height, her feet a shoulder’s width apart.
The beautiful (albeit half-dressed) princess was standing on the (also) beautiful archangel’s hands because she was the angel’s summoner, of course.
They were both bursting with dignity, and the moment the angel had responded to the call, their hearts had beat as one. When their souls were tied together, their very senses and emotions would also be shared.
In other words, summoners and summons were essentially one being.
“You have no chance of winning, Feil Fonaf. You should surrender quietly.”
…So it was no surprise when the archangel answered in exactly the way I would have expected Sasha to.
Instead of being whisked away by the wind, the angel’s voice seemed to come down on us like a tempest, like rain, drenching the earth from above. Her voice was clear and beautiful without the faintest hint of a rasp.
And as for me, I looked up at the heavens and laughed. “Ah-ha- ha-ha-ha-ha!
“Sorry! I ain’t just some pushover who’ll roll over ’cause somebody suggested surrenderin’!” I yelled up at the sky as I drew a summoning circle.
“Flame Bullet!”
Once I chanted the quick spell, three hundred gigantic flames leaped out of my magic circle, tearing through the air faster than a military-grade arrow at the archangel. One of the fist-sized flames of hellfire alone would have been enough to reduce a person to ashes.
“Lady Sasha!”
“We will protect you! Holy Shield!”
However, a gigantic shield of light blocked my spell. The two summoners straddling the pegasi at the angel’s feet had cast the spell.
“You always gotta show off! That gets on a person’s nerves after a while! Myfila, cover me!”
“You’ve got it, Feil. Don’t stop till you drop.”
After that, I had a battle of the wills—and magic—with the summoners on the pegasi. A crimson spear of flames. Purple lightning. A deluge of cerulean water. Inorganic boulder bullets. Blades of verdure wind.
I devoted myself to unleashing every kind of offensive spell I could think of as the two summoners blocked it all with their shields of light and countered with rays of light that held their own destructive power.
“Dammit. Karma Light is such an annoyin’ spell to deal with.”
Though Myfila blocked all direct attacks at me by shouting, “Ice Shield,” and creating a thick wall for me, the stray rays that missed the giant would hit the ground and burst.
“Damn! So they are just toyin’ with us.”
I shielded my head from the clumps of dirt raining over me and poured all my focus into drawing more summoning circles. My whole mind was devoted to the sigils at my fingertips as the blue light of the spells continued to glow.
Then suddenly, I felt my head throb, but I knew I should have been far from depleting my magic supply. I was supposed to have more magical reserves than the average summoner. Even within the Academy, I was in the upper ranks when it came to that. A little bit of reckless spellcasting wasn’t going to make me keel over.