The children stared at Leticiel with blank expressions. They were surprisingly androgynous and had similar features. The only differences that made them a “boy” and “girl” were the differences in their hair lengths and their voices.
They were both as cute as living dolls. The girl had medium-length hair and large, golden eyes, while the boy had pin-straight silver hair and wide, gray eyes. Their manner of speech was as similar as their looks were.
“Spirits…?” Leticiel hid her excitement as she stared at the children. They looked like they might be twins. And those things growing from their backs were…
The children, who would probably only come up to Leticiel’s waist if they stood up, had translucent feathers with an iridescent sheen sprouting from their backs. Leticiel only knew of one race that had wings.
“She knows about us,” the girl said, her emotionless expression not budging an inch.
“She knows about us,” the boy echoed, equally expressionless. Yet, the spirits with the same face and expression seemed to observe her with a heightened sense of vigilance.
Spirits were a race that had lived on the continent since Leticiel’s time. Other than the fact that they lived for an average of 500 years and had wings on their backs, they weren’t much different from humans.
In Leticiel’s previous life, the average human had only lived to be fifty years old at the most. Those who made it to sixty were thought to have lived an astonishingly long life. It wasn’t hard to imagine what would happen in a world like that where there was a race that lived ten times longer than humans and looked a little different.
Because of that, the spirits made their homes in places that humans couldn’t push their way into. Some spirits appeared in the human world, but most of them lived without ever getting involved with the outside world.
A technique to summon them did exist, but because it required a huge amount of arithmetic processing and magic elements that exceeded the limits of what humans could generally control, it couldn’t realistically be used. Plus, the spirits were a fickle race who wouldn’t cooperate if they weren’t in the mood even if you did manage to summon them.
For a while, the twins silently watched Leticiel’s face.
“We need to fight her.”
“We must defeat her.”
“Huh? Wait…” A light spell suddenly flew her way, forcing her to forgo asking why the spirits were in such a place in favor of jumping to the side to avoid the blast. The beam of light hit the ground behind her, gouging through the soil and exploding in a cloud of white smoke.
The light attribute was an attribute that had many sorcery techniques to protect allies, such as barriers and healing. One of the few ways it could be used as an attack was through light rays, which combined light in the air with the sun’s light and turned it into beams. Leticiel didn’t even have time to catch her breath before four beams of light emitted from a small spell technique the twins cast above their heads.
The four beams of light scattered in the air for a moment before rushing toward Leticiel at high speed. Leticiel instantly erected a Darkness barrier, tinkering with the light’s refraction to shift its focus ever so slightly. As she leapt out of the way, Leticiel’s eyes widened when she saw that her barrier had cracked.
How is a technique of that scale so powerful? Leticiel was amazed that the twins had been able to knock out that much power with the small technique they had cast. She knew that spirits were powerful beings, but they still should have needed a formula twice as large to use sorcery that strong.
Leticiel was unable to hide her discomposure, but when she looked at the girl again, she caught sight of the cause.
The boy spirit stood next to the girl, still holding her hand, but he hadn’t made any non-attribute attacks on Leticiel. Yet, their entwined hands were emitting a faint light. This meant that they were both using sorcery and proved that the boy had been using non-attribute enhancement sorcery.
It’d probably be best to do something about the boy first…
Leticiel had used non-attribute magic as a means of attack during her battle with the monster, but non-attribute techniques were not originally intended to be used to attack enemies. The techniques were often used to strengthen oneself, like with physical enhancements, or to boost other attribute magic.
In other words, the girl’s sorcery was stronger than her technique because of the boy’s enhancement technique.
“Human, do not dodge.”
“It’ll hit me if I don’t dodge, so I will continue to do so.”
“…Hmph.” Frustrated that the attacks weren’t hitting, the twins pouted as they released countless snaking beams of light that hit the ground. The snakes crawled on the ground, cutting through the dirt and burning grass as they approached Leticiel, hissing just like real snakes.
Leticiel waited for the snakes to gather in one place. Then she kicked up from the earth and formed a black cage in the place she’d been standing. The Darkness sorcery, which resembled the shape of a cage, engulfed the snakes and expanded around them, exploding like a bomb with a blast of hot wind.
The girl had been preparing another spell technique while Leticiel had been dispersing the snake sorcery. When she raised her hand, countless magic circles appeared in the sky. The magic circles glowed as they rotated at high speed, sucking in the aether in the surrounding areas. The flow of aether made the air swirl like a tornado, drawing in stones and branches.
“…I expected as much from such crazy power.” The scale and power of their sorcery was so great, Leticiel could only laugh instead of giving in to her fear.
Spirits’ greatest characteristic was that they could generate aether inside of their bodies. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that their bodies were made to use sorcery. It was also thought that humans had systemized sorcery by looking at the spirits’ techniques and imitating them.
There were also theories that said spirits created the aether in the air, but Leticiel didn’t believe in them. After all, the number of spirits was remarkably small. One spirit village was considered large if it had one hundred spirits in it. It was impossible for such a minor ethnic group to supply enough aether to cover the entire continent.
Not only could they create their own aether, but they could also take in aether from the outside world, so they tended to use large-scale spell techniques. In other words, their techniques were made to kill with one hit.