“What’s wrong, Sasha?! Must be nice bein’ a princess who watches from on high without havin’ to lift a finger, huh?!”
Past the giant shield of light that stubbornly refused to break under my barrage of spells, Sasha silently stared as I made a funny face and blew a raspberry at her.
Finally, my dedication to provoking her seemed to have gotten through. The archangel beat her giant wings.
“You fool. I was simply giving you the chance to show off. If you’d really like me to end it, then I will without delay,” the archangel said coldly without even the slightest hint of a grin or smirk as the two pegasi obediently made way for her.
In the next moment, the shield of light disappeared, and the flame spell I’d unleashed collided directly with the descending angel, but it wasn’t as though my human magic would have any effect on a creature of fables. The bright-red eddy of flames crashed into her abdomen and simply poofed into white smoke.
“I suppose that thing that used to be a giant is meant to be your secret weapon? Or do you have another trick to delay the inevitable?”
“Heh! We summoned this lug to have a brawl with your archangel! I’m gettin’ a punch or two in, you’ll see!”
“A brawl, you say? This is rather small for a descendant of a giant, if you could even call it that. You have some nerve making such large claims when this thing isn’t even half the size of Cecelia.”
“Ha-ha-ha-ha! You’ve got a point! But height ain’t what decides who wins in a fight!”
“Supposedly, the weaker the dog, the more it yaps… I see. Feil Fonaf, it sounds like you underdogs are ready to lose. All right, then. I think it’s time to put my foot down and bring an end to this.”
Right as I was wondering what she meant by “put her foot down,” I realized everything in my vision had suddenly gone dark. I lifted my eyes, trying to find the source. Only then did I realize that towering above Myfila, the giant’s corpse, and me was the archangel.
The sunlight had been blocked by her gigantic form and the six wings that stretched from her back.
Apparently, she was even faster than the human eye could perceive.
All I could do was watch as she produced a blade of light from her armor-ensconced right heel and pierced straight through the crown of the giant’s head. As the archangel descended to the ground, she sliced the giant’s corpse right in half.
It tumbled to the ground. I held on to the giant’s hair, but that was no use anymore, seeing as the whole thing was coming down and I was being dragged with it. I watched as the scenery rushed up in what suddenly seemed like slow motion.
As the world seemed to lag around me, I saw Sasha’s beautiful but cold face watching me from the solar plexus of the archangel.
Then I pointed at her with all I had and shouted, “Ya fell for it, Sashaaa!!”
Right at that moment, Sasha and the archangel were both covered in a black mist that flowed out of the giant’s corpse before my eyes.
The black “fog” was my summon, a swarm of winged insects and beetles—hundreds of thousands of them, to be exact.
This was the epitome of a combo summon. We’d set up a surprise attack. After Myfila had performed her summon, I’d called forth bugs to embed themselves in the corpse so that the person who attacked the giant would be countered with the creepy-crawlies.
“Ha-ha-ha-haaaa!! Must feel terrible with all those bugs crawlin’ over your bare skin, Sasha!”
Right before I was about to hit the ground, the giant’s corpse moved to catch me.
Bisected or not, the corpse was still home to the necrospecters. The thing could’ve been torn limb from limb, but it’d still move because it was Myfila’s summon. Gross but reliable.
I tumbled off the hand, and the giant quickly crawled along the ground even as its own viscera sloughed out of it. Then it latched itself onto the archangel’s leg. In fact, each half of its body had laid claim to one.
Meanwhile, the archangel’s upper half was still surrounded by the pitch-black swarm of insects, which was in a layer so thick that I could no longer make out the angel’s masked face, her large chest, toned abs, or even her stomach, where Sasha should have been.
I could hear the sound of beating wings and cracking insect shells as the black swarm writhed.
Then in the next moment, I heard the loud roar of a beast.
The Tiger-Saber King, Zylgar—a gigantic beast—had bolted along the ground and leaped onto the archangel.
The four-legged beast wasn’t tall in comparison to Myfila’s summon, but it was larger all around and incomparably stronger. It was monstrous—four times the size of any normal tiger or lion.
Its fur was ashen gray, but other than the horns, which were sharp as swords and protruded at random from the center of its head, it sure looked like a normal tiger. Its thick front paws were capped with frightening claws.
I saw Cyril with it.
“Is this good enough for you, Feil?!”
The handsome dude in his military uniform was mounted on top of Zylgar and using the beast’s fur in place of reins. In his other hand, he brandished a large sword in the air.
In the same instant, both the sword and the beast’s claws came sailing down. Though we were up against an archangel, she couldn’t block Cyril and Zylgar’s attack if she couldn’t see them.
My lips twisted as the assumption that we’d won wormed its way into my mind, but then a pure-white flame flared from the angel’s entire form. She burned away my insects instantly, even reducing the corpse of the giant still grasping her legs to ash.
While I was left dumbstruck, Zylgar’s claws bounced off her, too, in a shocking turn of events.
With a longsword of pure-white flames, she had blocked the claws of a beast known to make sport of hunting dragons. Though she’d just been holding Sasha on top of her overlaid hands, she now gripped the sword in her right. Then her left hand went on the move as she removed the silver mask covering her face.
The next thing Myfila, myself, and Cyril, who was balancing on top of Zylgar after they made their landing, realized was that the archangel’s uncovered face was actually an exact copy of Sasha’s.
“Thank you. That was a rather quaint trick.”
We could only murmur to ourselves in disbelief.
“A Volte-face…”
“I heard Sasha could do it, but still,” I said, “we’re up against an archangel and a Volte-face…”
“This isn’t even funny,” Cyril said. “We were doomed from the start…”
To merge with one’s summon in both body and mind was to perform a Volte-face. It was supposed to be the ultimate secret for summoners. In this day and age, you probably couldn’t find many summoners who could perform one. I estimated there had to be no more than thirty at most.
“Ahh, what a nice breeze.”
The angel with Sasha’s face whipped her wings, buffeting us with a gust of wind that sent the pure-white flames along with it.
Though our robes whipped up in the wind, we all braced ourselves and held out against the tempest. Myfila and I were both gripping the front of our robes hard as the pain of losing our summons assaulted our hearts.
Eventually, Sasha addressed me. “Now, Feil Fonaf,” she said, her gaze dropping to me and only me as she pinned me with an icy glare. Still an archangel, she thrust her longsword—large enough to slice a castle in half—into the ground.
“Will you forfeit?”
I simply glared right back at her beautiful face and didn’t give her the satisfaction of a reply. Still gripping my chest, I tsked in frustration, gritting my teeth to hold back the chagrin of my surprise attack failing and the pang in my chest from losing my summons.
From a distance, I heard the bell ring out to call the match.
The professors presiding over us as judges must have determined there was no point in continuing. In other words, they’d decided that my friends and I had no chance of winning at all.