The reason I’d swung my sword earlier was to preserve the vector at which it’d been swung so that when I used Puppet Master later, it’d retain the kinetic energy carrying it in that specific direction. I’d applied what I’d learned from using my knives to the sword. Also, I could’ve done all this without snapping my fingers, but I am nothing if not an entertainer.
“Huh? Wh-What happened to my feet...? My feet!!!”
“Shut up. You’re embarrassing yourself.” I used Leap to jump in front of her and then stepped on her shoulder. “Both you and your monsters have been immobilized. I hope you know what checkmate is.”
I looked at my gauntlet and switched out the spell in my Eye of Sigils. Then I tried hypnotizing her, but it didn’t work. Huh. Hypnosis has really been struggling recently. I was starting to lose trust in it. Then I remembered what I’d read in her status, about a hypnosis contract or something. Maybe she was already hypnotized, so I couldn’t also hypnotize her. Also, I was surprised that she hadn’t given up yet.
“This isn’t over! I still have so much left to do! For her sake... Those bastards...”
Even though she was being jammed into the ground by me, she still shot me a sharp glare. Impressive, given you’re missing your feet. Or maybe her sense of pain was dulled due to being a demon sorcerer?
“Who do you mean by ‘her’? What’s your objective? You wanna get revenge on the church?”
She fell silent. I guess I was right. Her title of Avenger, paired with the encounter we’d had outside of the church and the words she’d said to Sister Sensei, made it pretty obvious that she had something against the church. There was definitely some kind of connection between the church, the town, and the Stampede.
“Let go of me! Don’t get in my way! Don’t try to stop me!”
“I’m not really interested in stopping you, but I am gonna get in your way. It’s more convenient for me that way.”
“You should prepare yourself...” Looks like she’s finally snapped. She must’ve really wanted to take revenge if she was acting like this. Hm, this is kinda fun. “I can redirect that entire horde this way. I might die, but that won’t stop their rampage. If you don’t want that to happen, you’d better let me go now!”
Oh—I was wrong. She just hasn’t given up on fighting me yet. She must’ve thought that she still had the upper hand with all those bugs down there. In my opinion, she was naive to think that way. She was either blinded by rage or just really stupid. She should have just thrown in the towel.
I decided to test something out with my hypnosis. Previously, I’d theorized that it was easier to cast it on people with weakened mental states. I strung her up on the branches of a nearby tree.
“Wha— What are you doing?!” she shrieked.
She was really starting to bug me. Ha. I made sure that she could get a good look at the horde of monsters below.
“Fenrir, retreat immediately. Get as far away from them as possible.”
“Oh... I was enjoying myself so muuuch. Yes, masterrr. I will obeeey.”
“Be sure to tell Ariya too.”
Thanks to Will Convergence, a Skill that came bundled with Monarch Caliber, I could communicate with him and the other wolves telepathically, but not with Ariya, strangely enough.
I used Clairvoyance to make sure Ariya and Fenrir had gotten away. Good.
“Let’s do it, Sylph.”
“Wonder how this is going to turn out,” Sylph said with a tinge of excitement in her voice.
“Wh-What are you doing?” the summoner asked, her voice trembling.
My lips curled into a smile. “I’m gonna show you true despair.”
“Despair?”
“I’m gonna see if you really wanna take revenge or not. Do you know why rain doesn’t hurt despite falling from so high in the sky?” I didn’t wait for her response. “Air resistance. Thanks to that, it slows down a whole lot.” I wasn’t really sure she understood what I’d said, but all I needed was for her to vaguely grasp the concept. Not to mention, I was getting excited for the role-play I was about to do. “But my dark magic ignores air resistance. Do you know what that means? What do you think will happen if I drop something...say, a six-ton rock...from a thousand kilometers up in the air, without air resistance?”
A rock in free fall would accelerate due to the pull of gravity, and then when it landed...well, it wasn’t exactly hard to do this calculation. It was something I’d learned in middle school science.
“If you assume that the acceleration caused by gravity is ten meters per second squared, it’d be traveling at about 4,472.1358 meters per second before it hits the ground. It’ll be traveling at 16,100 kilometers per hour—roughly at Mach 13!”
I had no idea if she knew what “Mach” was, but at the very least, units of measurements were pretty much the same as they were on Earth. And thankfully, she seemed to understand what I was saying. She just looked confused as to why I was rambling on about numbers...but she was about to find out.
In the next moment, a large number of things began falling out of the sky at incredible speeds. I felt goosebumps. They were spindle-shaped boulders, each weighing about six tons. They made no sound in the dark of night and obliterated the monsters they made contact with. Everything that the rock shower fell upon was destroyed. Even the monsters with the toughest exoskeletons were blasted to smithereens. All that was left behind were bits and pieces, as well as a large number of craters.
“Ha ha... Ha ha ha ha ha ha!”