Wait, was he calling me a pesky little fly? “You an idiot or somethin’? Be serious, hit him already. I’m not dumb enough to get hit by friendly fire.”
“Hm. Very well, boy. Feast your eyes upon what I, Elfeit Mistral, can do with my power unleashed!” Elfeit roared, his robes fluttering, as he summoned a cascade of thunderbolts. “Hm!”
Elfeit’s lightning magic shone so brilliantly it dazzled, and with a crackle of thunder, it came right down on Misery Mosery.
“Great Dark God Great Dark God Great Dark God Great Dark God Great Dark God Great Dark God Great Dark God Great Dark God Great Dark God Great Dark God—ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haah!”
Misery Mosery barely seemed to notice. He unleashed another salvo of his Blades of Nothingness and cut through the lightning itself.
“Bothersome. But a beast that has cast aside its intelligence cannot hope to beat an elf.”
As Elfeit said that, his lightning magic swirled and sparkled, and then it transformed into a dragon. The lightning dragon gazed down at Misery Mosery from above.
“The Great Dark God desires the lives of trash! Not precious lives, but your lives!” Staggering, wobbling, Misery Mosery aimed his blades precisely at the dragon—and at us, too. He moved like a master of the Drunken Fist style of martial arts. His wild movements meant we couldn’t pin him down, couldn’t get him with just any magic.
But Elfeit didn’t have just elemental magic. No, he had complete control of his divine magic, and more than half of the spell rained down on Misery Mosery’s writhing body.
“Boy, go ahead and deliver the finishing blow.”
“Of course!” I was about to start running when I felt a surge of energy in the ground around me—Elfeit’s earth magic. The ground swelled and sent me flying toward Misery Mosery.
“Brr brr brr brr!” Misery Mosery whipped his head round and round, making an awful sound as he spun once, twice, thrice.
The lightning dragon whipped its head between me and Misery Mosery before ramming into the latter.
“Ngghhhaaaahhh!” Misery Mosery’s dull, black eyes gazed at me from behind his mask, fixed only on me. He formed ten blades around him, and at once all of them shot after me.
“Tch!” With ten attacks on my tail, I had to focus on dodging. Two of the blades hit my arms and legs, cutting into my body. My well-trained muscles, normally like armor for me, couldn’t help this one time.
“Ah, Great Dark—!” Misery Mosery screamed and was abruptly cut off.
I dodged the last blade he’d thrown and whipped around. He’d taken a full hit from the lightning dragon. Still looked fully conscious to me, unfortunately. Even if he was unsteady, the intensity of the aura emanating from his body remained unchanged. How was he moving like that even after a wallop with that level of lightning magic?
“Hooah!” My stance wasn’t ideal, but I threw another blow to Misery Mosery. All my muscles worked in concert with each other, and there was a kind of elegance to my strike. Although Misery Mosery had incredible offensive ability, it didn’t seem like he really had that much in terms of physical durability. No way could he get through a full power punch unharm—
“Hhhhghh ha ha ha! Heee hee ha ha hee hee heeghhh!”
Or not. I furrowed my brow. There sure was a big hole in Misery Mosery’s stomach now, but, uh, from the way he was dancing around, it was almost like it didn’t bother him at all.
Come on, who in the world could possibly move like normal when they had a hole in their stomach?! Even I would have a little trouble after that!
“Hey, boy—what is he?”
“That’s what I wanna know. Hey, Elfeit. Was that lightning dragon you just cast your full power?”
“Yes, though it appears it couldn’t render a fatal blow. How troublesome.”
“Can’t you use your ability again?”
“If I could, I would obviously have cast it a long time ago.”
Seriously? Well, in that case, I was gonna have to go back to whaling on him.
“Skreee?” Misery Mosery leaned forward. I could almost hear the sounds his neck made as he moved his neck like a bird’s. “Kree skreeee?” He seemed more like a beast than a human being.
“Kraaahhh—hrrraaagghhh!” Round and round, till suddenly he launched a Blade of Nothingness in a seemingly random direction.
“No!” Elfeit bolted, horror in his face.
What was he so worried about?
Then I saw it. Two elf children in the path of the blade. I was so absorbed in the battle that I hadn’t even noticed the kids. Big mistake.
“Great Dark God, I send heathens unto you! Tear them apart! Please, do it!” Misery Mosery wailed in a high-pitched voice as the Blade of Nothingness hurtled straight for his victims.
“Not on my watch!” Elfeit roared. “Every child of this village is a child of the Almighty Wind God!”
Elfeit threw himself into the path of the blade. It hit dead on.
“Are you okay?!” I shouted, even knowing he wouldn’t be, couldn’t be.
The blade ripped into Elfeit and kept going.
Why hadn’t he used another one of his earth pillars, dammit?! Probably because he was too drained, or panicked, or—it didn’t matter, the blade was going to keep hurtling toward the kids. It was gonna hit them. If it did, Elfeit’s sacrifice really would have been in vain.
But it wasn’t. The blade was stuck—trapped. Face twisted in pain, Elfeit had grabbed the invisble back of the blade with his own hand while it was caught midway through his torso. He gripped it with a shaking hand. “I won’t let you…lay a finger…on a child of the Almighty Wind God…not on a child of my village!”
The blade remained lodged in Elfeit’s body for a moment. And dissipated. He shouted at the children to run—and they did. Good. My turn.
I lunged toward Misery Mosery again. You need any advantage you can take on the battlefield. And I needed this guy gone or Elfeit was toast.
But Misery Mosery no longer paid any attention to Elfeit. He only had eyes for me. He didn’t give me a chance to get in any closer.
“Ugh, come on, man. Can’t believe you did something so stupid!” I spat without thinking.
“So long as I believe in the Almighty Wind God, I cannot abandon the faithful. Such a thing is only natural, to put faith over my own life,” said Elfeit in a matter-of-fact tone of voice, all with his stomach torn to shreds. Every time he spoke, he coughed up blood.
Man, this—this idiot. Then again, he was a man of heart. He had a strength I didn’t. Yeah, he was the reason Filia had been cast out, but I couldn’t tamp down a faint respect growing for Elfeit. Conflicting emotions boiled inside me, but I pushed them away. No, I had one enemy right now. He stood in front of me.
“Let’s do this,” I said calmly. I was gonna get payback for Elfeit. I looked straight ahead at Misery Mosery, this zealot guffawing and dripping blood, and I clenched my fists.
Just then, I sensed a powerful presence coming from behind. A familiar one? Yet different, somehow.
“Yuri!”
“Filia!”
Filia came rushing in to support me, but this wasn’t the same Filia as before. Just a glance into her eyes told me enough: She’d regained her abilities. Those silver eyes of hers, those eyes that had looked so oddly fragile before, blazed with power.
Filia saw Elfeit lying on the ground, covered in blood, and rushed over to him in a panic. “Chief Elfeit?! I’ll heal you right away!”
“Filia…don’t. Focus on him…on defeating him. He’s a threat to us all.”
“But!”
“We don’t have time to discuss this.”
“Skree caw! Caaww! Open your hymn books to the last page! Bash your head till the pews run red, it’s time for the Kill Everyone Festival!”
Misery Mosery launched a fireball. Must’ve been fifteen feet in diameter, easy, and probably loaded with Blades of Nothingness inside. I couldn’t protect Elfeit alone.
“Filia! Shoot wind up from below, with your full power!”
“Got it! Let’s go. ‘Wind God’!” Filia shouted.
An eerie, lightning-quick wind swept around her, Elfeit, and I. The wind gradually took shape, surging and reforming into the form of a massive woman. The speed of its formation, the pressure emanating from its massive body, they were far beyond what I’d seen during the magic battle tournament.
“Hyaaaaaah!” Filia screamed. The wind raged up from the ground with impossible fury, sending the fireball flying harmlessly up into the sky.
But five Blades of Nothingness still shrieked through the air toward us.
“Here!” I took aim at the back end of a blade and struck. My fist and the blade collided, and the blade was knocked upward into the sky. “I knew it.”
How stupid of me to take the words of my enemy at face value. Impossible to defend against? As if. The only impossible part was the front end of the blade. If you hit the back, you could intercept the thing. I wouldn’t have known if Elfeit hadn’t made his desperate grab earlier.
If Elfeit hadn’t risked everything for us… Well, like hell was I gonna let that go to waste. We were definitely going to settle this, here and now.
“Hooah!” I launched all of the blades up into the sky, one by one, in the same manner as before. “Now, Filia!”
There was nothing in our way, not anymore. I let the plan take shape in my mind, knowing Filia could read my thoughts—she nodded.
Good. I jumped toward Misery Mosery. “Hooah!”
“Haah!” As Filia shouted, the giant wind woman pushed my body from behind. My body, propelled by the swirling tempest, hurtled toward Misery Mosery.
“Great Dark God! Help me! Bestow your blessing upon me! Eeek!” Misery Mosery tried to fire off another Blade of Nothingness, but Filia mimicked my method from earlier and launched the blades off course with swift wind attacks. The blades flew harmlessly away.
“Damn heathens!” Realizing he couldn’t defend himself using his blades, Misery Mosery walled himself up with earth magic. It was the same thing he’d done before, but back then, I hadn’t had Filia’s Wind God to back me up.
“Eat this! HOOAH!”
With all my strength, my fist collided with the wall of earth, smashing through until it made impact with Misery Mosery’s masked face.
“Khgrh…” Blood gushed through the cracks in the wall of earth.
Huh. I’d thought there was something strange when I punched a hole in his stomach. He’d just stood up like it was nothing, pranced around like he didn’t feel pain.
No human could move like that with an injury of that nature, but he had. Which meant he wasn’t human. Not as such.
“Your real body is that mask, huh?”
The mask shattered, and all signs of life in Misery Mosery vanished.