Chapter 86

Snow-white horns, skin of cerulean blue, membranous wings that resembled a flowing cloak, and disproportionately large hands for his immense frame.

Grand Duke Mikael appeared at the rear of the battlefield, on the hill where Bel and Grisha stood.

‘…Since when?’

Mikael’s method for flanking Grisha and Bel was astonishingly simple.

While Grand Duke Maltiel created a diversion, targeting the boy named Bin, he’d been excavating a tunnel beneath the ground.

An almost absurdly straightforward tactic, yet none, including Bel and Grisha, had noticed it.

The moment the white-haired boy came under attack, everyone’s attention had been completely fixated on protecting him.

It was only natural. It was the boy who, less than ninety seconds after stepping onto the battlefield, had been the target to kill the Grand Duke. This was the same boy who was judged as growing into a monster of equal caliber to the Sword Saint.

A boy whose life was worth sacrificing everything to protect.

“Enshroud us in light, banish the darkness…”

Grisha belatedly began to chant a prayer. A faint light enveloped them both, but the light coalescing in Mikael’s hand was already swollen to its full capacity.

“Well then, from here on out, it’s uncharted territory.”

The perfectly laid plans had crumbled, the trap sprung a leak.

‘…No incantation, not even the name of the spell memorized. Focused on activation time over raw power.’

Bell’s time stretched, slow as molasses.

‘…Even if the magic name and spell were omitted, it’s still magic from a Grand Overlord, especially one like Mikael, specialized in magic. Taking it head-on means instant death, no question.’

A split second; thoughts racing faster still.

‘Damn, too close. No matter how fast I move, impossible to escape the blast radius.’

Calculating escape routes.

‘Can Grisha finish the prayer in time? Doesn’t even seem halfway through.’

Calculating Grisha’s odds.

Bell’s mind, a 9th-circle mage and essentially a staff officer for the allied forces, burned through sugar like a furnace.

Even with death looming, Bell’s mind didn’t freeze, endlessly calculating, searching for the best option.

‘Best case scenario is Grisha finishes the prayer and successfully deploys a barrier before that explosion reaches us.’

But the odds of that happening, Bell judged, were far too low.

‘Miracles,’ as used by the clergy, differed from a mage’s magic in fundamental structure.

Unlike magic, where power could be traded for omitting the incantation, even the magic’s name, priests *had* to finish the prayer no matter what in order to use a ‘Miracle.’

‘…Worst case is I’m caught in that blast here and die.’

The mage Bell wasn’t the type of person to hold his own life particularly dear. He’d sacrificed countless people for the greater good; his own life was just another piece on the board, to be discarded for the cause whenever necessary.

So, judging the ‘worst case’ as his own death wasn’t an emotional conclusion. He wasn’t particularly attached to life.

‘If I die, there will be an unprecedented catastrophe, the likes of which history has never seen.’

The magic of the Veil surrounding Valoran was a twisting of ‘space’ itself, molded to the mage’s desire.

It severed the connection between inside and outside, carving out a sliver of the space that linked them. The result: a spell rendering Valoran impenetrable.

It wasn’t the typical ‘solid wall’ barrier. It bypassed the very notion of space; without access to it, no being could leave Valoran.

Seemingly invincible, the spell harbored three hidden, significant flaws.

Firstly, the mage had to embed scrolls, infused with magic over time, at the key junctures of the Veil.

This drawback, this *necessity*, forced Veil to risk everything, infiltrating enemy territory to conceal the scrolls. A perilous undertaking.

Secondly, the sheer difficulty of erecting and maintaining the Veil was immense.

Veil’s brain cells dissolved in real-time under the strain. Had Grisha not been there, constantly healing him, the Veil would have surely collapsed within thirty seconds.

And finally… each step in enacting the spell was needlessly complex and cumbersome.

Most barriers, though requiring immense effort to establish, posed little danger in their maintenance or dissolution.

But the Veil encircling Valoran was no such simple construct; it was a magic of a higher order.

Even withdrawing the Veil demanded precise steps and proper calculations.

One needed to stitch the severed ‘space’ back into place.

“…Damn it.”

Magic, to the uninitiated, might appear effortlessly convenient, yet in truth, it was a profoundly logical and reasoned discipline.

For every great advantage, a commensurate disadvantage existed.

The Veil that Veil had cast over Valoran, while boasting near-invincible strength, demanded meticulous and troublesome procedures.

What if the mage holding the severed space together died before stitching it back?

‘A catastrophe.’

The front and back, top and bottom, within the Veil would warp, and in the worst scenario, everyone inside would be forever trapped, unable to exit to the world beyond.

Of course, Maltiel and Mikael had no way of knowing such detailed circumstances.

They merely combined the reasonable deduction that ‘such a powerful barrier must have a commensurate risk’ with the prediction that ‘Bel Artois wouldn’t involve the Sword Saint and the boy in that risk,’ choosing the most probable course of action.

‘The Sword Saint is in here, as well as Veen. I absolutely mustn’t let them get caught up in this.’

And their prediction struck its mark beautifully.

‘It doesn’t matter if I die. There are plenty of people to take my place. But not those two.’

Bel relinquished any thought of retaliating against Mikael’s attack, focusing instead on reconnecting the severed pieces of the consciousness-stripped space.

Raising a shield was, naturally, out of the question.

He didn’t have the mental fortitude to spare for such a thing. The amount of calculation his brain could process at once was finite, and his mind was already melting just from maintaining the space magic.

No matter what, he had to safely dismantle the barrier.

Even with the Archduke’s explosion looming before him, Bel’s mind was entirely consumed by that single thought.

Soon, a black sphere unfolded before Bel’s eyes, enveloping his body.

* * *

Light.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned since coming to this world, it’s that explosions always begin with an immense amount of light.

The color of the light isn’t that important. It could be red, or purple, or blue.

Lights of various colors are always followed by a tremendous gust of heat. The temperature of the heat varies. Some are so scorching they melt skin and even steel on contact, while others are stifling like the wind of a dry desert, but not life-threatening.

The heat currently washing over my skin was closer to the latter. My skin was quite fragile, so I suffered minor burns on my face and the back of my hands, but it wasn’t enough to knock me unconscious.

The explosion created by the demon was surprisingly small and weak for something supposedly produced by an Archduke.

I could tell even from several dozen meters away that the magic had been hastily assembled. The magic calculations had been executed at an almost slapdash level; the leaking mana was mountainous, and the lump of energy clutched in his hand didn’t look particularly pure.

Magic that even Rexma, the orc standing next to me, could withstand without difficulty, let alone the Sword Saint.

It possessed precisely that level of potency.

‘Crude.’

The thought that filled my mind the instant the magic erupted was exactly that.

However, even that crude magic sufficed.

The magical power held by the demon, Mikael, was comparable to that of a 9th Circle mage. Even if he rushed the calculations, the purity and quantity of magic power stored within him fundamentally guaranteed a minimum level of power.

Enough magic to effortlessly kill one or two ordinary people.

The level of magic Mikael aimed for was likely exactly that.

Freely controlling the level and casting speed of magic according to the place, time, and circumstances.

A masterful application of magic, the kind only those who had reached its zenith could perform…

“General!”

It was also an exquisite move that could instantly overturn the balance of this battlefield.

Crackle!

A sound began to emanate from the ground, a hard-baked clay of the battlefield, something shattering. Suspecting the floor had been damaged by the aftereffects of the explosion, I turned my gaze towards the sound, but I couldn’t see any trace of something broken.

Zzzzzt—

This time, a tearing sound resonated.

It came from behind my head. Again, I turned my head towards the sound, but I only saw a few infantrymen rushing towards the direction of the explosion; there was no sign of anything torn.

“Ha! Unbelievable…”

Maltiel, who had maintained a distance from Lex and I, observed the situation, looking around with clear interest.

Crunch…!

This time, it sounded as if someone was wringing a wad of cloth, twisting it tightly. The source of the sound was the air above Maltiel’s massive, unfurled wings.

Soon after, something, some impossible phenomenon my mind couldn’t grasp, began to unfold across the battlefield in rapid succession.

…As if being sucked into a whirlpool, the very air began to warp.

The soldiers, charging towards the explosion, slowed, their movements becoming sluggish, before freezing mid-stride like statues. As if someone had slowed a video’s playback, then finally pressed pause.

The hot wind turned, in an instant, to a frigid gale, and I could see frost forming on the edges of my robes.

Looking elsewhere, I saw wrinkles etching themselves onto the faces and hands of some soldiers in the blink of an eye, their flesh and muscle withering away. Transformed into the gaunt visages of grandfathers who hadn’t eaten in decades, they looked at each other, their faces contorted with terror.

‘…Spatial magic.’

It wasn’t difficult to identify the source of this bizarre event.

‘That Bell, that crazy b*stard.’

Spatial magic was banned from research in almost every school of magic.

The risk of a wizard’s miscalculation was too great, and even worse, the difficulty of the calculation was unparalleled among other spells.

It was like walking on a sheet of ice one millimeter thick while riding an elephant… no, only a miracle accompanying it could ensure its seamless execution.

“General, what is…!”

And the wizard who had realized such an impossibility had been caught up in the Great Warlord’s small, crude explosion.

It was akin to a tsunami crashing into a semiconductor factory in the middle of its extremely delicate operations.

Space twisted, broke, and tore itself apart repeatedly. The ripped void suddenly surged towards the sky and then plummeted to the earth, again and again, and the air entering my lungs forced its way out through my nostrils before it could even deliver oxygen to my body.

“…We’re screwed.”

No matter how hard I thought, I could see no way to intervene. My mind held no knowledge of spatial magic.

I barely had enough time to read books related to lightning magic, where could I have found the time to learn about a forbidden art?

‘It would be so much better to just die, at least then I could rest easily.’

Such a meaningless thought flickered through my mind.

*Whoosh!*

At that same instant, with a total lack of grace, a refreshingly cool breeze brushed my cheek. All on its own, naturally.

…Wait.

A natural breeze just blew by? Where on earth did that come from…?

“General-nimmm!”

A booming voice echoed. It belonged to the soldier who, just moments before, had been frozen solid like a statue. He seemed completely oblivious to the fact that the surrounding time and space had twisted wildly out of control.

He bolted, running straight towards the direction from which the searing wind had originated.

Searing wind.

The razor-sharp, freezing gale that had threatened to freeze everything solid had, in an instant, reverted back to a scorching wind.

The physics that had been so randomly distorted were snapping back into place. Time began to flow again, and vitality surged back into my mind, which I’d thought was all but finished.

The bodies of the soldiers, which had aged so dramatically, returned to normal, and the spaces that had been torn and broken, flying about haphazardly, stood silently, each holding its position.

“…Haa, *ssseuup*.”

The breeze that had brushed past me swept away the thick, black curtain of smoke that had been shrouding the hilltop.

And then, I saw Bel and Grisha.

“That was a close one, wasn’t it?”

“…Bel?”

Bel was cradled in Grisha’s arms.

Having lost his left leg and right arm, his entire body covered in severe burns.

…It seemed Grisha’s hastily deployed shield had been a fraction too late.

The two were enveloped in a bright yellow shield, but the explosion had already engulfed Bel.

“Ugh, ah. Ahhh…!”

Grisha’s scream echoed within the barrier.

Oblivious, the sky blazed down with cheerful sunlight.