The other battlefield.
Timmy was taking a beating and giving nothing back. His legs had spun themselves into wheels, and stopping was out of the question.
Mana swords fell like rain. Dust boiled up around him, and half a beat too slow meant being pinned into a pincushion.
This, he decided, was without question the hardest he had ever run in his life. It might also be the last time.
"Ngoooooh, can't stop!"
A man past forty had never felt so thoroughly humiliated.
If it had been Rolwen? Maybe his eye and his swordsmanship could have carved a sliver of survival out of this rain of blades.
Solitär watched the Human bounding about like a circus acrobat and frowned.
"Wouldn't it be easier to just hold still and let me nail you to the ground?"
"Demons! Don't you ever underestimate a Human's will to live!"
Timmy ran, hollering as he went, drifting farther and farther from the patch of air where Solitär hung.
Not far off, two men and a clump of grass were watching from a low rise.
"Demons. A Great Demon of a kind I've never seen before."
Lois stared at the sky, where Mana swords kept spawning as though an armory had been thrown open, and his face turned grave.
"We pull back first after all. The risk is too high."
Having seen that absurd style of combat with his own eyes, Lois chose to let it go. And just as he was about to look away, the female Demon floating in midair turned a thread of her gaze on them.
A chill ran through Schwenk. "Bad news — she's spotted us!"
Worse still, Lois noticed something else. Whether by coincidence or not, the man being hunted by the Mana swords was running straight toward them.
Mid-stride, Timmy felt the already-thin moonlight vanish all at once. He could no longer make out the road ahead.
The crash of Mana swords burying themselves in the earth behind him stopped too, and so did the spray of dirt and stone that had been pelting his back.
Still running, he twisted his head around on a trembling neck. His pupils shrank to points.
At some point above Solitär's head, the Mana swords she had not yet loosed had changed course. Countless blades converged and wound together into what was very nearly one colossal Mana sword, swords still whirling within it, the whole thing rising until it almost touched the clouds.
Lois understood then that this was meant to wipe them out along with the runner. Escaping by Flight Magic now would be a little too late.
"Ready your Defensive Magic. Monk, use your strongest defense as well."
"No problem." Unease stirred in Übel. Her instincts were telling her she had walked into a crisis where life and death hung in the balance.
"I'm not a monk, I'm the Grand Bishop of the Church of the New God." Schwenk corrected the title first, and only half a beat later did the fear catch up with him.
"Protect yourselves. My magic affects the people around me too."
With that, Lois began gathering Mana. "Why can the rooster never get to the Humans?"
"?"
What kind of magic was this? Never mind Schwenk, who was already hunting for the answer without meaning to — even Übel was completely at sea.
"Because we have Defensive Magic."
Lois unleashed the signature spell he relied on in battle.
Magic whose bad jokes were literally freezing.
The instant those strange words left his mouth, a Mana-born cold front began to sweep along the ground, white transparent currents rolling outward.
Even behind their protective spells and Scripture-wrought wards, the two men standing beside Lois felt as if winter had dropped on them in a single breath.
The freezing tide poured down off the hill like a surging wave and became a vast cold wave.
Out on the plain, still running, still trying to dodge that oversized fused Mana sword, Timmy began to doubt his own eyes.
A wall of white vapor was rolling toward him.
Everywhere the cold wave passed, grass and shrub withered and died, and only snow-white flowers of ice bloomed faintly across them.
Those small lives stood no chance against it.
He gritted his teeth and ran on into it anyway. Turning back now was just a different way to die.
It took no more than an instant. The cold wave lifted his hair, froze it, and set it into a shape like a stiff broom.
Frost coated his lashes. His face went bloodless and white in a heartbeat. His limbs might as well have rusted; the leg he had just begun to raise locked up and would not move.
Timmy felt like an ice sculpture that had somehow kept its awareness.
This time he really was finished.
Had that Demon slipped in some other spell? Or had she been hiding accomplices, reinforcements, all along?
His mind grew dull with the cold in his body, and all the exhaustion from dodging the rain of blades came rebounding on him at once. All he wanted now was to sleep.
Yet somehow his memory drifted back to the days he had spent in the village — his boastful old man, a girl with a brilliant smile, and his own heart pounding hard in his chest.
He really would like to see that girl again. He wondered how she was doing now.
Facing the onrushing cold wave, Solitär narrowed her eyes and opened up the omnidirectional, fully automatic Defensive Magic she took such pride in.
At the same time, she brought the fused Mana sword straight down, with all the force of an intent to reduce everything in sight to nothing.
White frost crusted over the Defensive Magic where the cold wave scoured it.
The outermost Mana swords could not endure the erosion either. One after another they turned ashen grey and dropped away.
The great Mana sword's power was blunted in a single stroke.
"Hey — Übel, what do you think you're doing?"
Übel had charged out, holding her Defensive Magic up in front of her.
Lois, who had just finished casting and was switching over to his own defenses, had no time to stop the girl.
Timmy, whose mind had already blurred past coherence, saw that streak of green come flying toward him.
One foot through death's door, he came back to himself as though by a miracle. He held on — all because of that hair in front of him, so like hers.
"Get behind me."
"Th-thanks."
With a roar like thunder out of clear ground, the enormous Mana sword came down, and even the earth trembled. The flatness of the plain was ruined in an instant, leaving nothing but wounds and cracks across the soil.
And two panes of blue Defensive Magic and one of gold, still standing.
"Why?"
Lois could not work out why Übel had gone out to help of her own accord.
What left him closer to despair was this: that spell of his had always flattened whole swathes of warriors on the battlefield.
Now he had burned half his Mana on one full-strength strike, and all it had done was weaken the Mana swords. It hadn't inflicted a single real wound on the Demon herself.
The gap in sheer Mana volume — that was the reason, of course.
"Hey, Lois, is there still time for us to run?"
Schwenk clutched his Scripture and shivered behind the wall of light.
"A child charged in without flinching. What excuse do we have to run? And did you notice? At some point this whole place was sealed under a barrier. We... can't leave anymore!"
Farther out, on the fringe, a Demon with great horns like a water buffalo's — strangely proportioned, with an enormous head on a very short body — was gazing up at the moon, looking somewhat bored.
____
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