[151] Forced Breakthrough (6)
"Rian, I'm going. Explain it to Tess and Amy."
"Huh? Hey, Sirone!"
Before Rian could even call him back, Sirone cast teleportation and shot away at a blistering speed.
And a short while later, Amy and Tess caught up to Rian.
"Rian! Where did Sirone go?"
"He sped ahead. Just now."
"What is he thinking? What did he say as he left?"
"I think he means to pre-trigger the traps with Light Frenzy. He said he had to go alone because you wouldn't allow it."
"Of course I wouldn't! Who would green-light such a boneheaded method! Besides, Light Frenzy is a kinetic defensive field—if the timing's off, it can be dangerous!"
"Right. And that's exactly why he went alone—so he wouldn't have to listen to that."
Amy was irritated. Not because he acted on his own, but because the tactic Sirone chose was, in terms of effectiveness, admittedly the best.
But it was far too risky. In ordinary circumstances, even a low-odds plan could be worth a shot, but in this case, no matter how high the odds looked, they had to account for the cost of failure.
"If he fails, he dies! That idiot!"
Amy let out a sharp yell at the absent Sirone, then placed her hands on Rian's and Tess's waists.
"This won't do. We can't stop him, so let's at least support him. Everyone stay sharp. We're going to chase at top speed."
Amy bent her upper body and cast teleportation. A fierce flash split the brook and streaked forward with a crisp hiss.
The upper reach of the valley—the only approach to the hideout—was completely sealed off by a twenty-meter-high curtain wall.
At the moment, a little over ten underlings were arrayed there, and Falcoa's men, who had been setting up the encirclement, were arriving one after another.
"The enemy's coming! Get ready to activate the traps!"
"They're much faster than expected! We're short on time to bring everything online."
The squad leader clicked his tongue. Whoever conceived this was quite clever. With no way to bypass the traps, they planned to sprint the shortest route and mess with the mechanism.
"No matter. The traps were built from the start to massacre hundreds. Even if we only bring half of them up, it'll be more than enough to bury four people."
The leader kept his composure to the end as he issued orders to his men.
But when he saw a lone boy charging from two hundred meters out, this time he couldn't contain his bewilderment.
"What? Why is he alone?"
"Looks like he ran ahead in a hurry."
That wasn't what the leader thought. Granted, it wasn't impossible, but the instant he realized the enemy was alone, a peculiar feeling stirred in his chest.
He began to feel it would be a waste to spring the trap.
"He's good at psychological warfare. Using a wide-area trap just to catch one person is a waste."
"Then what do we do? Go out and fight?"
"What do you think? Trigger the traps! Can't your brain keep up? That's what that kid is thinking. I'll grant he's gambling with his life, but he's underestimating us. If we take even one of the two mages, the tide turns. This isn't the time to pinch pennies."
"Understood. Hey, we're starting now! Everybody ready!"
Sirone fixed his gaze on the top of the wall blocking the valley. A good ten enemies had drawn their bows and were aiming up into the air.
"An arrow attack?"
Sirone was puzzled. With only ten archers, hitting someone a hundred meters away was next to impossible.
Yet the enemies loosed without hesitation, and Sirone stopped running and looked up at the sky.
They looked no different from ordinary arrows—except that the arrowheads were each a different color.
"Magistone rounds!"
Sirone cast teleportation and reflexively backed off. If he hadn't seen magistone rounds himself at the Kergu ruins, he would have been nailed.
"Sirone!"
At that moment, hearing Amy's voice from the rear, Sirone halted his retreat.
From how much faster than expected she'd arrived, he could feel how anxious Amy had been.
But Sirone didn't change his mind. With advance or retreat both impossible, the magistone rounds crashed to the ground.
A powerful explosion erupted. The deafening blast shook the valley, and blast smoke settled thick around Sirone.
Sirone grasped their strategy. They meant to cut his vision and then finish it with the trap.
"Amy! Don't come!"
Even if Sirone hadn't shouted, Amy couldn't bring herself to enter. In the areas the smoke hadn't reached, she could see with her eyes the massive vibration operating atop the valley.
Just as expected, a fearsome contraption, like a trebuchet, revealed itself in a row along the cliff. It had wheels, but even so, it was large enough that several people would have to throw their weight on it to move it.
"Now! Dump everything on them!"
At the leader's command, Falcoa's underlings activated the devices. Enormous boulders were hurled down into the valley by the leverage of the arms.
They were gigantic stones, big enough to fill the cross-section of the V-shaped valley.
Judging by the power, this wasn't a trap made to stop a small force. It was, quite literally, a trump card built to annihilate enemies in a final battlefield.
"Sirone!"
Amy cried out in helpless grief, but it was already too late. One by one, the colossal rocks were thudding down into the smoke.
Her imagination supplied a wet, crushing "snap"—an auditory hallucination. But the next instant, a powerful sonic boom blew that phantasm away.
The smoke that had been slowly filling the gorge billowed apart on all sides, revealing Sirone, wrapped in a sphere of light.
"Light Frenzy!"
The light-orb flashed again and again with Sirone at its center. The Spirit Zone with a maximum diameter of twenty meters was larger than the boulders.
That vast light rampaged at a maddening speed, and it was enough to blind the onlookers.
Light with mass strove with all its might to generate repulsive force. But the boulders answered with their own formidable weight.
Roughly shuddering, rocks forced their way through Light Frenzy and seemed at any moment about to crush Sirone to death.
Yet halfway down, the rock fractured into dozens of pieces. From there, Sirone's Light Frenzy began to overpower the stone.
As the number of mid-sized rocks multiplied exponentially, chain detonations erupted.
Smaller. Smaller still.
Sirone poured out a photonic rapid-fire until the rock turned to dust.
By the time what had been boulders reached near Sirone, nothing remained but tiny grains. Even those were caught in the cycle of light and flung outward.
The time it took for the rocks to fall to the ground was a mere two seconds—and that matched exactly the time it took to reduce them to dust.
The thousands of micro-events that occurred in that span compressed within human perception, creating the illusion of a single massive explosion.
Dust spread in all directions and settled to the ground with a soft fsssss of commotion.
An eerie wind noise circled the ravine.
Falcoa's underlings couldn't comprehend what had just happened. There was a flash of light, and the boulders burst like dust. That was all their eyes could confirm.
Sirone stepped across the creek now blanketed in dust and glared at the wall. He could see the underlings who had activated the trap hurrying back one after another.
The leader realized something had gone wrong. He'd lived on battlefields for over ten years, but he'd never even heard rumors of a magic like this.
"Damn it! What the hell is that brat!"
"Leader! What should we do?"
"Prepare the magistone rounds! Blast him!"
As the underlings swiftly detached the arrowheads and coupled on the magistone rounds, Sirone, who had been glaring sharply at them, focused his mental power right before his eyes.
With a pop, a sphere of photons was born, sucking in the surrounding light and vibrating violently.
"Leader! Look there! That's dangerous!"
One who had already experienced Sirone's technique at the tavern, Royal Palace, shouted to the leader.
Indeed, even to the leader, the way a light larger than a human face compressed looked ominous.
"Tch! Hurry it up! I said fire the magistone rounds!"
Their hands moved even faster, but the magic was faster still.
It was as if a straight stroke of lightning had suddenly been drawn between Sirone and the wall.
KWA-AAAAAANG!
The Photon Cannon slammed square into the iron gate, and an eardrum-piercing metallic screech set their ears on edge.
The underlings assembling the magistone rounds winced and ducked. The shock was powerful enough to be felt even atop the wall. Even after the magic vanished, the iron gate went on humming—bwoooong.
"W-what? Is it broken? Check it!"
An underling ran down the stairs that connected to ground level and inspected the gate. The thick iron plate had warped overall, but it wasn't destroyed.
Perhaps even this felt like a victory to him, because he shouted back, face brightening.
"The gate is intact!"
"Good! Then it's our turn to attack."
With the Photon Cannon's assault having come to nothing, Tess looked back at her friends and spoke.
"Magic won't break that gate. Rian, we go up the wall."
To take a fortress in a siege, you had to succeed at one of two things.
First, destroy the gate with siege engines or magic, then push troops through.
If the gate couldn't be broken, scaling the wall to eliminate the defenders was another way. And that was a job for swordsmen like Tess and Rian.
"Right. It's better if we go up."
Rian slid his straight sword into the sheath on his back to run unhindered. But as the two of them bent forward to dash, Amy stopped them.
"Wait—hold on."
"We don't have time to delay. We have to strike before they re-form. This is our chance."
Tess's judgment was sound. Amy, being of the fire element, was weak on impact force, and Sirone's Photon Cannon was likewise useless against a thick iron gate.
But Amy knew Sirone had one more weapon.
And it was the spell with the highest efficiency in this situation.
"It's fine. Sirone will handle it."
Not grasping the situation, Tess glanced back at Sirone with a puzzled face—and then her eyes flew wide.
Sirone's body was suffused with a red light.
"W-what? Isn't that dangerous?"
Humans grow uneasy at the color red—it evokes blood.
If even Tess felt afraid to look at that chilling crimson glow, the enemies' wariness was beyond imagination.
"Leader, what on earth is that?"
Sirone sent a crimson flash forward. A thread of laser reached the iron gate in what could only be called an instant and heated the surface.
"Ugh! What the—?"
Having already sampled the might of the Photon Cannon, the underlings flinched and stumbled back in advance.
But the expected shockwave and thunderous boom never came.
The leader, who had moved below the wall to inspect the gate from outside, regained his confidence. This magic was merely shining on the iron gate; there was no detectable force to it.
"Good! Now! Prepare the magistone rounds!"
Counting even the men returning from the trap, their numbers topped forty. With that many, a magistone bombardment could turn the area around Sirone into scorched earth.
As all the underlings finished taking aim, the leader dropped his hand and shouted.
"Fire at—! Huh?"
Kukukukukukukuku—
Just then, the wall began to shudder violently.
The leader, and the underlings about to loose their bowstrings, all stared at each other in shock.
An underling leaning out over the wall to look at the gate spoke in a trembling voice.
"L-Leader! That…!"
The iron gate was shaking like mad. The vibration, which started at the gate, ran up through the entire wall, rocking the very bones of the structure.
Falcoa's men could only gape at the sight, the likes of which they had never seen.
The iron at the point where the laser touched began to boil, bulging up as if it were covered in air bubbles.
Then the wall shook as if it would be uprooted, and at last, with a detonation, the iron gate blew outward.