“Wh-what…? Is this a dream?!”
“What kind of lousy dream would this be?!”
Vike shouted along with Bond, who was lying on the ground next to him. The soldiers’ ears were ringing like crazy after the fourth round of meteors, and they couldn’t hear each other without shouting.
Until a few minutes ago, they’d been prepared to be swallowed up by the black tide of the daemonic legion and die. Now, it was the corpses of daemons that filled the land. But upon closer inspection, about half of the imps and fiends were still moving. Most of them were badly injured, but their instinctive hate for human beings was clearly still intact.
Now that they had time to think things through, the soldiers could see this was still a critical situation. However, the repeated baffling events left their senses numb.
“Was that…? That monster did all that, right?”
“Don’t call him a monster! What if he heard you?!”
Vike was looking up at the small, faraway figure of a man straddling a black horse in the sky. To Vike and Bond, his existence was completely unfathomable. The only sorcery they had seen were flame arrows and wind blades that could kill one human at a time. Vike shoved at Bond—who’d called that man a monster—without hesitating. It was only natural to be afraid. What if that man suddenly changed the aim of his meteors to rain on their heads?
“Ah… The daemons are still coming! All troops stand ready. We repel them here!”
They heard the orders from the commander behind them.
That was when they realized there were still four or five thousand daemons right in front of them. The power of the meteors was amazing, but as the daemonic legion had spread out, their own concentrated force had grown less effective. The commander’s anticipation of battle was reasonable. Vike and the other soldiers desperately pulled their shaking bodies to their feet.
“O-okay, everyone. They’re already reeling! All we have to do is finish them off.”
“Yeah! Easy work!”
Vike and the other soldiers knew this was just bravado.
“Gii-shaaah!”
“Greee!”
“Go-gaaah!”
The legion was now a mere fifty meters from the Filsand infantry. They readied their spears.
Just then…
BWOOOOOSH!
A wall appeared in front of Vike’s eyes. The soldiers lost their footing at the sudden impact. The wall had fallen out of the sky to strike the earth.
“Wh-what the hell is this?!”
“Whaaa?!”
“D-did the daemons do this?!”
After falling back on their butts, Vike and Bolt looked up to inspect the wall, but what they saw was a huge warrior clad in thick armor. What they’d thought was a wall was actually its leg.
“A g-g-giant?!”
From high atop his phantom horse, Margilus had created three forest giants using the Create Monster: Any spell. The giants were lined up in a row, as if to make a wall between the Filsand main gate and the daemonic legion.
“Th-these are from that mon…no, from Margilus. Did Geo Margilus make these with his sorcery?!”
“P-probably… I think so…”
“What are they holding…?”
“Hey, could it be…?”
The three giants were armed, but they weren’t holding weapons. They carried bundles of long sticks with thin ends. In other words: brooms.
“Hm…”
Swoosh!
The giants moved in unison, like a reflection across three mirrors. The target of their “sweeping” was naturally the daemons.
“Wha?!”
“Eeep!”
If the movements of the giants were as slow and labored as their appearance suggested, some of the daemons, burning with unyielding hate, might have reached Vike and the other soldiers. However, the giants were able to shift their weight and change positions quite nimbly. They swiftly moved their brooms back and forth, creating a turbulent airflow that would easily send a child flying.
They were lined up alongside each other, establishing a line of defense to protect the Filsand army and the city behind them…but only a few calm people realized that.
They sweep the same way my mom does…
Still sprawled on his backside, Vike absentmindedly watched the giants. How long had it been since he’d last visited his mother, anyway?
“Giaaah?!”
“Ga-hii!”
The swept-up daemons suffered a far worse fate than being knocked onto their backs. Some flew dozens of meters away, some were crushed between a broom and the ground, and some were skewered by the branches. Vike was grateful that the storm of kicked-up dust made it hard to see anything.
“It’s happening again.”
“How many are there…?”
While the soldiers remained stunned, watching the daemons get swept up by the giants, the ground beneath them shook again and again. Each time, three more giants appeared to join the line of defense. In the end, there were a total of twenty-seven giants. They were all lined up in a row and kept on using their giant brooms to sweep away the daemons. With so many giants in the way, the soldiers couldn’t even see the enemy legion anymore.
“Gi-gyaah!”
“Greee!”
The daemons, being daemons, continued to rush into the giants’ attack without fear, almost mechanically. The screeches were enough to instill fear in the soldiers, but from the perspective of the giants, they might have thought: “This dirt I have to clean up keeps jumping right into my broom.”
“At this rate, do you think they’ll get all the daemons?”
“W-well, maybe…though there are still a lot left.”
The soldiers didn’t look depressed anymore.
They now understood that the Sorcerer Margilus, who controlled the giants from above, was using unimaginable power to protect them.
“Errgh… Aaagh…!”
A sound came from the edge of the Filsand army. Brigades of battle slaves were stationed in the most vulnerable spots of their formation. They used battered weapons, and many of them suffered from visible physical deformities. It was easy to pick them apart from the armored regulars.
Among them was the former suitor of Elisabel, an especially huge and misshapen man. Under normal circumstances, he would have let out a bloodthirsty scream and gone right at the enemies with his massive axe. Right now, he wore an expression of fear in the face of this overwhelming power. Although their positions differed drastically, the duke and his entourage felt the exact same fright as their lowliest slaves.