Cyg tripped over his feet and almost fell had Alicia not caught him in time.
“Damn it, this is too much,” he said, sitting down as he arrived at the riverbank. Not only was he walking and talking, but he was also maintaining some mana gems while practicing control over his soul. Theoretically, it should’ve been as simple as keeping his fists clenched. “How long has Merry been at this that it’s become natural for her? I haven’t even started swapping things yet.”
“You did say we’ll try for a million years if we have to,” Alicia replied.
“I think I’d settle for a thousand over a million if I could, but that might be wishful thinking.” He paused, refocusing again. “Anyway, we have to figure out a way to beat her.”
“Remember that disembodied voice that we heard a while ago? Was this what it meant?”
“What, ‘Target the witch’? I really have no idea what that was about.”
She rubbed her temple. “It clearly can’t communicate with us often, but you’d think if it had a few words to spare it’d be smarter with them...”
“Was it trying to tell us to fight Merry? We found that out anyway; that’d be just pointless. Maybe it was referring to the circle?”
“The circle. As in the time travel circle? On Merry?”
Cyg opened and closed his mouth without saying anything. That was the dumbest suggestion imaginable. A second passed. “Okay, moving on. What can she do again?”
“Riiight. It seems that a surprise attack works against her, and for some reason subsequent ones do nothing. She also can heal herself after being grievously injured, even to the point that would render someone unconscious.”
“Then, naturally—”
“—The first thought would be to hit her as hard as we’re able to in an ambush, and we stop her healing somehow.”
“Since you have the same magic, can you counteract it somehow?”
She leaned forward, and she placed her elbows on her knees and her chin on her hands. “I’ve never gotten in a... ‘healing duel’ before. I wonder if Merry has, but my first guess is that I’ll lose. If she’s aware enough that she can use her Aspect in that state, then that means she’s separated her soul from her body enough that she doesn’t ever lose consciousness.”
Cyg groaned. “Is this another thing you can do with domains?”
“I believe it is, and it’s mostly because hers is so well-established and gargantuan. To the point that her original soul must be dwarfed in it.”
“In that case, do you think you can overpower her if she was fighting both of us off? I attacked her with my soul before too,” he mentioned, “As hopeless as that attempt was...”
“We can try until we get the hang of it, right?”
He grinned. “Yeah.”
* * *
They checked everything twice over, from the placement of the bombs to the time of the day. On Saturday morning, at the crack of dawn when Merry walked into the kitchen, Alicia set off a chain of directional explosives. The back half of the house was engulfed in smoke and flame as the shockwave shattered wood and bent steel. In an instant, one of the four walls was gone, the slanted roof rocking for a second before sliding apart and crashing into the small crater that remained.
Cyg braced himself against his overturned bed that functioned as his shield. He covered his head as debris rained down, the ceiling crumbling and almost burying him under. Alicia was in the study, and the bookshelf she used was far less helpful. It took ten seconds for the scene to start to settle, for them to make sure no wooden beam or plank would smack them on the head.
“Go, go!” Alicia shouted, having forgotten just how long it took for Merry to fix herself.
They ran out into the remains of the kitchen and the apprentice blew out the burning dust with a spell circle drawn on a wooden tile.
Scanning the scene, Cyg asked, “Where is she!?”
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“There!”
In the chaos, they could see something moving that obviously wasn’t part of the house. Chunks of flesh dragged themselves together into an inchoate mass.
Never before had Alicia attempted what she was about to do, but there was a first time for everything. Dropping to her knees, she placed her hands on the thing and tried to pry it apart. At first, there was no resistance. A few seconds later, the witch finally took notice, she began to writhe, but Cyg was also trying to perform an attack himself. He wasn’t so skilled he could recreate that one attack from a while ago, so he did the soul equivalent of a headbutt.
“Merry” relented but only out of surprise. Then, she gathered the mana in their surroundings and released it in an abrupt explosion. Cyg and Alicia fell back, shaken to the core, and before they could even get up, the mound of flesh and bone formed dozens of omnidirectional spines that shot outward.
She stuck them both, and they tried to pull her off, but a tidal wave of mana poured from the points of contact and churned their insides into goo.
* * *
Cyg asked, “How is that fair!? I’ve been practicing my soul magic, and she just ignores everything!”
Alicia had her head in her hands. “Healing is designed to invade other people’s mana. It’s just an unfortunate game of rock paper scissors.”
“Then can’t you fight it back? You have the same Aspect.”
“I tried last time, but it’s as if I’m tossing a bucket of water at her and she retaliates with an entire lake. I’ll better prepare myself next time, but I don’t think it’s wise to let things get to that point.”
“So we should only handle her at a distance? As long as we don’t physically touch her, we should be fine, right?”
She sat up straight. “What if we trap her in something? Then, we can carry her out of the domain and disconnect her direct access to nigh-infinite mana.”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “That sounds crazy.”
* * *
Same day. Same explosion. Same crater.
They ran out with a few metal boxes. Cyg slid in first, snatching up a fist-sized blob of meat in a small container and tossing it to Alicia for the sake of experimentation. It thrashed for a bit and remained oddly still while the other bits combined together. When it became half the size of a torso, he slammed a larger box over it, sealed it shut, and kicked it to the side. Finally, he scooped up a half-formed arm with his last box and started running.
Alicia stayed and watched the scene, trying to trap bits and pieces herself. After a few minutes, everything grew still, strangely enough. She expected more danger considering what happened last attempt. Clearly whatever mechanism Merry was recovering with didn’t consider this outcome, but that was uncharacteristic of her.
She stood a few steps away from where the explosion took place, scanning for any moving parts. There wasn’t any—but only at first. They started off barely perceptible, snowballing into larger and larger chunks. Alicia began to panic, realizing she didn’t prepare enough containers, but as she closed the lid on a fist-sized ball of Merry, blood caught on the edges, preventing a seal. She opened it back up and tried to push it back down, but the liquid was ignoring gravity, creeping on the sides.
“This is so foul...!” she grumbled, trying to control it.
Then, just like before, spikes exploded in every direction, trivially catching Alicia.
Cyg noticed her passing, and he also saw that something changed in the box he was holding. All of Merry’s mana had vacated, and he was just carrying a dead piece of meat at that point. He spun around to notice something pooling near the house—Merry’s soul. It was dragging along the tiniest droplets of blood to form a new body, using them as an anchor to grow more of herself while ignoring all of her trapped parts.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said as Bassy came galloping into view.
* * *
“Let’s stuff her into a cannon and shoot her out of the domain. And then, when she’s outside, we can blow her up.”
Alicia crossed her arms. “Why don’t we just fight her when she leaves for town?”
“Because if we die out there, we die for real?”
“I believe it would be easier than trying to scrape Merry off the ground after turning her to a fine mist. Unless you mean to send her flying while she’s still intact, which sounds equally impossible.”
He rolled a pebble between his hands. “And we have no guarantee she can’t just puppet something inside the domain and turn it into a new body.”
“That’s not true,” she replied, “If she changes bodies, then the key that the domain is tuned to will stop working.”
“...Huh?”
“Keys are just names in the language of the Gods’ runes, or in other words, they are how the heavens see us. That’s called drift, when you slowly separate from the word they’re using to describe you into an entirely different one. At that point, her setup would cease to function, and she would have to reestablish the domain.”
“Wait, then can we force her to drift? That would solve a lot of our problems!”
“That’s what I thought you were suggesting. If we fight and kill her body outside of her domain, then she won’t have infinite mana to revive, and she’ll be forced to possess a new body and render her domain inoperable.”
“And she doesn’t have one already prepared because we would’ve already seen it. We combed every last bit of this forest, after all.” He stopped to think. “And the house. We literally blew it up.”
“I mean... if I were a paranoid immortal living in the middle of a forest, I would definitely have a few contingency plans. For one, I’d have an exact duplicate of my body buried deep in a safe container where nothing could touch it.”
Cyg frowned. “That doesn’t sound like a problem. If that’s the case, then we can just find where she comes out of the ground and deal with it in the next loop.”
“...Ah, there’s also the possibility of her running away. What’s stopping her from flying over us and entering her domain?”
“We’ll have to bait her into fighting us and then beat her faster than she can run.”
Alicia nodded. “Then there we go—the plan is settled.”
“It is?”
“It is.”
“The one where we fight Merry toe-to-toe until we can defeat her outside of the domain?”
With a laugh, she replied, “Isn’t it simple?”