Yu set the field to match his first encounter with the archmage. He endured spell after spell—Perish, Incinerate, Suicide Curse, Mind Blast—as the anti-magic shell nullified each one while he waited for the perfect moment.
“Rot! Burn! Hear, for your demise approaches! Oh, dulcet are the tones of pain and suffering!”
The fight had taken them all the way to the ruins of Osaka Bay. Skyscraping buildings along the sunken streets of the once-thriving metropolis jutted from the water, and the roof of one such obelisk was the current setting for the battle between Devicer Three and Scullchance of the Pride.
Her lower half fused with the lion, Scullchance thrashed a battle-axe while Yu deflected the brutal edge of the blade with the MUV Crow Gauntlet affixed to his right arm. The half-lion maiden’s blows were vicious and precise, and although Yu fought stubbornly with the clawed gauntlet, it was nearly impossible for him to get a strike in. The constant stream of A-class spells only made it that much more difficult.
“Fly, crimson arrows! Halt, thy sands of time! Crumble beneath my might!”
“Hang in there, Rudra!” Yu groaned. “Your anti-magic shell’s all I’ve got!”
Flames doused the Mark III, followed by a surge of numbness, then a powerful shock wave. And while Rudra quelled each curse as best it could, the Chosen’s mystic arts were not trifling things. Yu felt everything before the spells could be silenced—the searing heat, the fluttering of his heart as it nearly stopped beating, and the impact that felt like a truck had plowed straight into him.
The plus side, though, was that he had the enemy’s full attention.
“We’re all set!” Natsuki said.
“Then let’s do it!” Yu replied.
“On it! Let’s see, so I just read this passphrase here... By order of the gods, I command thee!”
Noticing their secret conversation, Scullchance scowled. “You and your primitive ape people are scheming something, aren’t you?!”
“Pretty clever for a bunch of monkeys, huh?” Yu taunted.
Before she could respond, the 256-meter-tall roof exploded into a cloud of debris, the blast extending down and annihilating five out of the fifty-six floors below. But it wasn’t like someone had planted explosives. The bomb had come from the water.
Of course, this was far from enough to end their battle.
Following on Yu’s heels, Scullchance kicked off the collapsing building and pounced through the air with her feline legs as if it were something all lions could do. She looked down at the remains of old, downtown Osaka beneath the waves.
“A drake? An orochi?” she blustered. “Have you primitives gotten your filthy hands on a water naga?!”
Yu faced her in midair. “Not exactly, but I’ll give you partial credit.”
A second burst came from the ocean, and then a third. The rectangular objects that hurtled towards Scullchance were between twenty and forty meters long, and they were familiar. Because they used to crisscross across all of urban Japan—they were train cars. Specifically, they had come from the JR Yumesaki Line, one of the many well-traveled railways of Osaka that had once run every single day.
Nanofactors from Natsuki’s Mark VI had turned the coaches into improvised missiles, packing them with MUV Peek-A-Boo Bombers that could attach themselves to anything, even at microscopic size, and detonate at the Devicer’s command. It wasn’t just one or two, though. No, a veritable rail yard emerged from the bay. An artillery barrage of fifty or sixty train-bombs bombarded the airborne archmage.
Scullchance snarled and began to incant a spell. “Mercy, oh Great One!”
The sadistic Lioness was at last forced to defend herself. A protective light shimmered around her as she leaped out of the way of the oncoming battery, the light shielding her from the flames and explosions of any near misses. It was like a high-budget circus performance.
But what one might forget amidst the chaos was that passenger cars normally held passengers.
Dripping wet with seawater and flying straight for Scullchance, Devicer Six emerged from one of the cars. Her high-pitched yet fierce battle cry ripped through the air together with Vritra as Natsuki brought the guandao’s blade through Scullchance’s axe-wielding arm, severing it at the elbow.
“You...” the mage growled low. “What have you done to my arm?!”
“Now, Three!” Natsuki shouted.
“Let’s go!” Yu cried.
He accelerated into a sonic stream once more and threw himself against the force field guarding the half-lion mage, bearing down with the Asura’s might and the talons of the Crow Gauntlet on his right arm.
“You fight,” Scullchance bellowed, “as gracelessly as your name! Vajra One!”
“Sorry, but heroes don’t play by your rules anymore,” Yu shot back. “No one person can stand alone. These days, we fight together.” The age of the fantasista, of the Maradona and the Zico, was over. Yu stared the girl down, and from one hero to another, as both a tactician of modern soccer and resident of Earth, he spoke. “The key to victory is cracking your opponent’s strategy, regrouping with your teammates, then crushing it with a better one. And that’s exactly what we did. That’s how we won.”
Scullchance unleashed all her magic and all her might to stand firm against Yu’s supersonic charge. Met pound for pound in raw strength, Yu activated the electromagnetic heat radiator in the Crow Gauntlet’s palm as it bore into her barrier. He poured into it every spark of energy that the Prayer Wheel could churn out, and with the combined fury of both the scientific and the arcane, the scorching waves penetrated the enemy’s magical shield.
“You sully my honor!” Scullchance howled. “Curse you! Curse you, Warrior of Earth!”
Even at the very end, as the beautiful lion girl scattered into dust beneath alien skies, incinerated by the Asura’s right hand, still did she refuse to utter the name—Devicer Three.