“When will you learn to give up?” The Demon Queen stood up and brushed the dust off her robe. Her magic barrier was gone, but she hadn’t taken much damage. She scowled disdainfully. “Don’t think you’ve won just because you’ve broken my barrier. I still have ample magic to—”
“Miss Lilly!” I yelled, interrupting the Demon Queen.
“R-right!” As we’d planned beforehand, Lilly began casting the time manipulation magic that had once given Claire and me much grief.
“I see. TAIM must have advised you, then,” the Demon Queen said. As her time slowed, I felt her magic weaken greatly. The oppressive aura that had nearly forced us to our knees receded. She still had a scary amount of magic left to her name, but at least now we had a fighting chance.
One thing still bothered me, however. I glanced to the entrance of the imperial castle where Rod, May, and Aleah lay exhausted and unconscious. I was worried stray attacks might end up hitting them.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to aim at someone already out of the fight,” the Demon Queen said as though reading my mind.
“Not even if they have value as a hostage?” I asked.
“Not even then. I’ll devote myself solely to crushing you four.” Her words didn’t sound like kind consideration, simply an expression of her earnest intent to kill us. “All your efforts will amount to nothing, but you’re free to struggle as much as you like.”
The Demon Queen listlessly raised her right arm. Fog began to form around us.
“Miss Claire!”
“On it!” Claire evaporated the fog before it could freeze everything into ice. “Unfortunately, I’ve seen Judecca before. Not even you can catch me off guard with it!”
“Yes, I’m sure you have. That ‘me’ would’ve been weak, though,” the Demon Queen said.
“And you’re weak now. Perhaps even weaker than you were then.”
“I have my doubts about that.”
“Is that so? Well, there’s no doubt that you’ve become a twisted version of who Rae once was. And we won’t be defeated by someone as warped as you!” Claire yelled, closing the gap between her and the Demon Queen as she swung down her sword. That distance was around sixty feet, a distance Claire couldn’t hope to close as fast as she did with physical strength alone. Her feat was made possible thanks to a boost from Manaria’s wind magic.
“Did you really think such a simple attack would faze me?” the Demon Queen held a hand up to block.
“I did not,” a voice said from behind the Demon Queen.
Claire vanished into thin air from in front of the Demon Queen just as another Claire appeared behind her, swinging her sword down.
“An illusion, then,” the Demon Queen said off-handedly. Without even turning to look, she erected a bulwark of stone to block Claire’s strike. The illusion had yet again been Manaria’s handiwork.
“I suppose it won’t be that easy,” Claire said.
The Demon Queen swung her right arm skyward. Sharp blades of stone jutted out of the ground and chased after Claire, making her retreat.
“Sister, Lilly, hold the front line with me!”
“Y-yes!”
“Right!”
“Rae, back us up from where you are!”
“Understood!”
With Claire calling the shots, the four of us assumed formation. Claire continued to dodge the stone blades as she retreated while Lilly and Manaria attacked the Demon Queen from both sides simultaneously. Lilly used her shortswords while Manaria used a longsword, giving the Demon Queen a total of three blades to worry about.
“Humph.” Just before their swords made contact with the Demon Queen, a fierce explosion erupted with her at the center, forcing them to retreat. “How will you deal with this?”
The Demon Queen followed up by unleashing a tornado of swirling blades of ice. They moved to dodge the attack, but—
“And this?”
The Demon Queen froze the ground at their feet, making it too slick to move.
“Soil Change!” I quickly reverted the frozen ground back to normal, allowing Lilly and Manaria to dodge the tornado by a hair’s breadth.
“I’m not done yet!” Noticing the Demon Queen’s attention had finally left her, Claire approached with her sword from behind. She was quick, but her approach was far too straightforward. But that was just how my dear Claire was.
“Flame Lance!” Once only a few steps away, Claire let loose a fiery spear. Such elementary magic was sure to fail against the Demon Queen, but that was fine. Claire wasn’t aiming for her.
“Ah.” The Demon Queen realized all too late as the lance hit the ground at her feet, creating a plume of smoke and robbing her of her vision.
“Now, Sister, Lilly!” Claire called, and the three of them attacked as one. I thought they had her for sure that time, but…
“Naive.”
A blast of pressurized air came barreling at them. They tried to dodge the invisible strike at the last moment but couldn’t do so completely.
“Haaah…haaah…”
“Sh-she’s…strong…”
“She isn’t…the Demon Queen for nothing…”
Claire, Lilly, and Manaria were all exhausted and heavily panting. In contrast, the Demon Queen was unharmed outside of what Aleah had managed to do to her.
“Heal!” I used my healing magic on them. With it, they should be able to fight again—and then what? We’d just be back at square one. In some sense, we were forcing the Demon Queen to fight defensively, but it didn’t feel like we had her on the ropes. If anything, she was running circles around us.
Being “me,” she didn’t seem to know how to use a sword, but her magic alone had us beat. Judging from the spells she was using, she wasn’t a dual-caster but a quad-caster like Manaria and May, and with high aptitude or greater in every attribute.
The most problematic aspect, however, was that she could cast her spells without saying their activation words or chants. It was normal for advanced practitioners of magic to discern the effects of a coming spell from the language used to summon it. Take, for example, Flame Lance, a spell Claire often used. Just hearing the first syllable, “Fla,” would let a veteran fighter know to expect a flame attack and begin thinking up countermeasures. But that didn’t work against the Demon Queen. Because of her outrageous magical energy, we could sense a buildup just before she cast a spell, but that was it. The odds were stacked against us.
“Do you still insist on continuing?” the Demon Queen asked.
“Of course. We will defeat you,” Claire said.
“I admire your spirit, Miss Claire. But I doubt it’ll last much longer.”
“Say all you please—you can’t shake me.”
“Very well, then. I think that’s enough wait-and-see from me; from now on, I’ll be fighting seriously.”
A jolt of worry shot through the four of us as we all thought the same thing: She wasn’t serious yet?
“Are you bluffing?” I asked.
“No, Rae,” Claire answered in the Demon Queen’s place. “Look at her feet.”
I did so, which was when I realized that the floor had been demolished everywhere except where the Demon Queen stood.
“No…”
“Sh-she hasn’t moved a single step?!” Lilly shrieked, putting the fear we all felt into words.
“It’s my turn now. Can you handle this, Miss Lilly, Lady Manaria?” With a swing of the Demon Queen’s arm, two dark beams of light rushed toward them.
“Ahhh!”
“Ngh!”
I quickly erected a wall of tungsten carbide in front of them, but the impact still sent the pair flying backward.
“So powerful…” Claire muttered. “And that magic, isn’t that…?”
“Yes, it’s the same magic used that time you two were with Lana. Although Socrat was the one who fired it that time,” the Demon Queen said, finishing Claire’s thought.
Magic like this wasn’t among the four attributes I knew of. Then what was it?
“This is dark-attribute magic. Only demons can use it, but it enables many powerful attacks. Such as this.” The Demon Queen waved her arm again, sending three crescent-shaped black blades at me.
“O-oh, no you don’t!” Lilly got back up to her feet, dodged before me, and tried to slash away the attack. “H-huh?”
But the black blades swept around Lilly and continued to beeline toward me.
“Shoot!” I used Uplift to escape upward.
“They’re still following, Rae!” Manaria warned. I turned around and saw the black blades had turned to pursue me to the top of my pillar.
“Cut me a break already!” I fired off a barrage of ice and earth arrows, somehow managing to eradicate the black blades.
“I’ll have you retire first, Rae Taylor.” The Demon Queen created an uncountable number of the same black blades and fired them toward me.
“Oh, c’mon!” Again, I rained down ice and earth magic, but some of the black blades managed to slip through. Crap.
“If we can just deal with the caster!” Manaria said as she swung at the Demon Queen, thinking she had an opening.
With perfect composure, the Demon Queen simply caught her blade. “I knew you would attack then, Lady Manaria. Your feelings for that ‘me’ run so very strong.”
“Of course they do. And that’s exactly why I can’t stand the sight of what you’ve become!”
“What a sad coincidence. I can’t bear to see the sight of you either.” With a single hand, the Demon Queen lifted Manaria by the sword and threw her at Lilly, who was trying to sneak closer for an attack.
“Eeeeep?!” Lilly panicked.
“No, dodge me, Lilly!”
Manaria’s warning came too late, and Lilly caught her instead. The moment she did, a dark beam fired at them.
“Eeek!”
“Ngh!”
I watched as the pair were blasted back, my hands still full with countering the black blades.
The Demon Queen needed no wind-up to attack. That, coupled with the fact that she needed no activation words or chants to cast, made her magic seem almost instantaneous.
“Miss Lilly, your time manipulation magic is working on her, right?!” I asked.
“I-It should be!”
“And she’s still that fast? Unbelievable.”
Even weakened, she remained the Demon Queen.
“Why do you not target me?” Claire asked as she readied her sword. She was visibly put off, believing she was being taken lightly.
“Forgive me,” the Demon Queen said. “I cannot kill you.”
“But your Three Great Archdemons are gone. What option do you have but to dirty your own hands?”
“Oh, I have options…” The Demon Queen created more black blades and fired them, this time at Lilly and Manaria.
“Stop it!”
“This will end whenever you decide. I just need your death.”
“What…?”
Oh. So that’s what she was aiming for.
“No… Demon Queen, you’re not…”
“What’s wrong, Miss Claire? If you don’t do anything, the others will die.”
The Demon Queen’s message was clear: If you want to save the others, take your own life.