“There are giants there, too!”
“And over there!”
The view from the top of the main gate was quite clear. From their refuge, the duke, court sorcerer, and officials could see additional giants walking in from the horizon.
There were nine coming in from each angle, for a total of twenty-seven. They arranged themselves to form a square around the daemonic legion.
These were the giants that Geo had made with his spells the day before. Each day, Geo could use nine spells from each level. The number of forest giants he could make with Create Monster was three, so he could make twenty-seven each day. Create Monster lasted for one hour, so he used the Infinity spell to prolong it. Infinity extended the duration of the spell to twenty-four hours.
“He created more than fifty giants?” Nathan felt like nothing could surprise him at this point. “Is he an incarnation of the sorcerer-god Soler? Is he really the avatar of Beelzebub, like the Schultz say?”
“I can’t believe I dueled with such a monster…”
Both the court sorcerer and the captain of the duke’s guard were on the verge of passing out from shock.
“Amazing… There are no words…”
“Wow, wow, wow…”
The two beautiful, red-eyed girls with matching faces had started holding hands at some point, and were just staring at Geo and his magic.
“What are those giants over there doing?” the duke asked. He’d managed to maintain his cool, albeit through thick, greasy sweat.
“If you look closer, you’ll understand right away,” Clara answered with a smile on her face.
“Huh? They…” The duke’s eyes opened wide in disbelief.
The new giants that were surrounding the daemonic legion from all sides were carrying multiple boulders in their arms. They dropped the boulders on the ground and then each selected a single one to pick up anew. The duke thought he might have seen such behavior before.
“Impossible…”
The twenty-seven new giants were all behaving in exactly the same way. After jogging a few steps, they planted one of their massive feet, swung their right arms, and then let the boulder roll, aiming for the daemonic legion.
The rocks that the eight-meter-tall forest giants sent rolling were about two meters in diameter. Any daemons who got in their way were smashed, sent flying, or were crushed into dust.
The duke struck his hand to the armrest of his throne, laughing. “They’re bowling?”
✦ ✦ ✦
“What the hell… What can you do but laugh?”
“Oh, gods…”
“It’s just crazy… We’ve all gone crazy.”
By this time, Vike and the other soldiers, as well as the knights and battle slaves, were all numb to their fear. They started enjoying themselves. There were even some who felt a bit of pity for the enemy. The remaining daemons were shredded to pieces by the attacks of the giants that had appeared from each of the three sides. Those giants didn’t just bring a couple of rocks. Each time one of the twenty-seven boulders passed through the daemonic legion, their numbers decreased.
Between those who’d assaulted the giants and those who’d been crushed by boulders, fully seven or eight thousand daemons had already been reduced to piles of meat.
Somewhere along the line, with the number of living and moving daemons so drastically decreased, the effects of the giants’ boulders and brooms began to wane.
“Grooooo!”
“Guh-gaah!”
This time, the sound that roared down from the heavens wasn’t that of fiery rocks tearing through the atmosphere. It was a dragon.
The Create Monster: Any spell required for making dragons was Rank 9. In order to use Meteor—also a Rank 9 spell—multiple times, he had only prepared two spells for summoning dragons. Therefore, there were now six small, red dragons flying in.
“Now dragons?!”
“That’s great! Burn up those daemons!”
The six dragons spewed their fiery breath, burning away the few survivors of the daemonic legion.
The scene had gone far beyond reality into the realm of fairy tales. Really, this sort of scene was too much even for a children’s bedtime story. Everyone present, including Vike, prayed from the bottom of their hearts: Let’s hope the duke never makes this man angry.
✦ ✦ ✦
“I wonder if this is enough…?” I murmured to myself, high in the sky over Filsand on the back of a phantom horse. Below me, the giants were methodically sweeping the ground, gathering the remains of the daemons into a single pile.
The red dragons were burning the small mountain of daemon remains to dust with their fiery breath. If the massive amount of daemon corpses was left alone, they might cause illnesses or transform into undead, so we had to be thorough.
“Mm-hmm. This should be…fine. I think.” Up to that point, I’d enjoyed myself a great deal. Anyone would have. I’d stood against overwhelming odds all by my lonesome and prevailed.
But after that uplifting moment, I started imagining a number of worst-case scenarios. Looking back on what I’d done since my transition to this world at the Watcher’s hands, I felt proud of my record. I’d figured things out and done pretty well. But a persistent fear had stayed with me: that somewhere along the line, I would make a huge mistake. Power like this couldn’t be thrown around without consequences.
Less than an hour later, all traces of the formerly massive daemonic legion were gone, thanks to the work of the giants and dragons. Now all that was left was the crater-ridden land.
“Mmn…”
Once everything was cleaned up, I finally felt some relief. I lifted my arms to greet the Filsand army lined up in front of the city walls, and headed toward the command tower above the main gate.
“Margilus! Margilus! Hail the mighty sorcerer, Margilus!”
My phantom horse had barely even touched down in the command tower before the soldiers started raising their fists and weapons, cheering. I could correct them about my title later.