I rested my spear and shield against a furnace and spread my arms wide.
“Ligatur, nodus, obligatio… ”
A colossal amount of mana converged and darted at high speed. My Words, incanted quickly and with extreme precision, flew at Valacirca like shooting stars.
“…conciliat, sequitur!! ”
While the dragon’s vision was obscured by the collapse of the platform, I bound him in chains of mana that formed a multilayered magical seal.
“Vastare! ”
The dragon immediately fired off the Word of Destruction. At the moment his vortex of devastation was just about to wrench apart the chains, I finished my response. The Word meaning “guardianship” drawn by my right hand obstructed the vortex. The Word meaning “erasure” drawn by my left hand wiped it out.
“…?!”
Triple casting. It was Gus’s specialty, and a technique that I had been practicing constantly. This particular combination was the most hidden of hidden techniques, burned into my eyes on the day I saw that battle between Gus and the god of undeath’s Echo.
“Pallida mors aequo pulsat pede… ”
With my arms spread wide, I visualized myself scooping in the enormous amount of circulating mana and gathered it at a single point. And all the while, I weaved fluent Words and scribed fluid Signs.
“You would cast that in a real battle?!”
“…pauperum tabernas… ”
I ignored the dragon’s roars. In an almost trance-like state of extreme concentration, I made fine adjustments to the mana and carried out the ritual movements in an abbreviated form.
“…regumque turres! ”
“!”
For the first time, Valacirca cut the idle chatter. In a rasping kind of voice unique to dragons, he started reciting some kind of Word at a furious pace. But it was too late now. This was a ritual spell intended to be cast by a team of several people working in tandem. It was one of the ultimate magics, which was virtually impossible to perform on your own.
“Damnatio memoriae! ”
It was a colorless, invisible pulse of destruction. As it traveled, it tore to shreds the connections between all of Creation’s Words, breaking them apart and isolating them. The body, the soul, the phenomenon — it rendered them all meaningless and returned them to mana.
The acme of destruction through Words, the devastating pulse of the Word of
Entity Obliteration slammed into Valacirca.
A crater was gouged out of the floor, as though a humongous creature had taken a full bite out of it. Strong winds blew about the Great Cavern, as if to fill in the blank formed by the pulse that had wiped everything from existence. The dragon was nowhere to be seen. It had… looked as though the pulse had engulfed and annihilated him…
“Did we… do it?” Al said while looking all around the cavern.
“Seems kinda like it,” Menel said cautiously.
Ghelreis agreed. “Victory sometimes comes with unexpected ease.”
Reystov cast his gaze carefully around the cavern and eventually nodded too, the hem of his cloak flapping in the raging winds.
The dragon had been annihilated. Thanks to an opening created by Al, his very existence had been wiped out with the ultimate destructive magic before he ever took us seriously.
And yet, somehow, I couldn’t convince myself we’d won. Was it because it had been so sudden, so anticlimactic? Not every encounter ended with a high-stakes, intense battle to the death. Sometimes you could be stabbed without a fight by someone who should have been below your level, and conversely, sometimes you could be facing someone better than you and have a fluke drop a cheap win into your lap. I knew all that, and yet for some reason it still didn’t feel real. Had we really won? This victory had fallen into our laps so easily that it still didn’t seem to have sunk in for any of us.
We stood there feeling strangely empty as the wind blew between us, howling.
The wind was… howling?
The moment I realized, an extreme chill ran down my spine. I immediately guarded with my spear and large shield as I shouted.
“No! He’s still—”
But it was too late. Four bodies sprayed blood. At the same time, a violent impact slammed my shield. I was sent flying backwards. I rolled and bounced across the rubble-covered ground.
The wind had claws. It was a nonsensical description, but there was no other way to describe it. The wind blowing about had changed for an instant into sharp claws.
Suddenly, an old story I’d heard from Gus when I was a child crossed my mind. It was the story of a sorcerer who transfigured himself into an animal, took on the animal’s thought processes perfectly, and ended up as nothing more than a wild beast.
“Trans…formed?” I mumbled, stunned.
“Ghaha… Precisely.”
The wicked wind that had sucked four people’s blood swirled inward, and the shape of a dragon once again formed in the crater.
Metamorphose…
Just as the name suggested, it was transfiguration magic. However, this was an extremely risky Word beyond a human’s ability to control. Anything more than changing into a different person with a similar body shape was very dangerous. Just spending a short amount of time transfigured into an animal, even one with similar body mass, could result in your mind being held back by the animal, preventing you from returning. And transforming into something inanimate with completely different mass? That required you to prepare yourself for the possibility you would never be human again. Using it that way was equivalent to taking a revolver loaded with a few randomly positioned bullets, putting it to your temple, and pulling the trigger. The circumstances would have to be very extreme to even consider it.
But now that I thought about it, how had Valacirca even entered thisunderground kingdom with a body of his size in the first place?
“So you realized. Yes!”
The foul-dragon laughed. It was howling laughter, as if he couldn’t contain his amusement.
“We are close in nature to the Words.”
The elder dragons were denizens of myth, the closest beings to the Words of
Creation.
“Yes, the Word of Entity Obliteration probably would eradicate even
me.”
His golden eye pierced me. Scorching breath flowed slowly from his powerful jaws.
“If you could hit me with it, of course.”
He had completely predicted the Word of Entity Obliteration’s trajectory. Not only had he predicted it, he was well aware that strong winds kicked up afterwards and had used the Word of Metamorphosis to transform into wind to make it look like he’d been annihilated. He had disguised himself among the raging winds that followed the blast and struck everyone down with his claws.
He was well versed in how to counter even the strongest destructive magic.
No, not just destructive magic; I was sure that whatever other Word I had chosen, the result would have been the same. This dragon had fought on all battlefields and battled against all Words, including all those Words and Signs that were lost to the past. He was familiar with them all, and he had conquered each.
So this was a dragon. This was a foul-dragon as old as the gods.
A cold, clammy sensation spread through the core of my being.