“Evan said he'd take a few more minutes to return.”
“Okay. Call back when the two of you are ready.”
Noah ended the communication channel with Mia and watched as the second and last talisman he had been given, burn to a charred crisp with a blue flame between his fingers without any heat. With an exhale, he brought it down from its position before his mouth to speak into and stored it back into the small pocket space enchanted onto him. From an external perspective, it looked as if the charred talisman had simply vanished into thin air after he had let go of it.
Wincing, he took a step forward, in pain at both the several broken bones within him as well as at the thought of his rapidly depleting spirit.
‘Don't know how much longer I can continue this. I'd kiss you on the lips if you'd hurried up, Evan.’
He then looked up to see a towering black dragon with a very charred underbelly, a wing torn into shreds with recognizable claw marks of a direwolf on it, the crested head of the dragon crested without jaws, a loose tongue flipping out of said now non-existent jaws, and blood simply pouring out of the gory wound.
A dragon breath began to form before the tongue of the dragon that towered over Noah. With a long exhale, he lowered his stance and extended his direwolf claws.
Like a beast ready to strike.
——
“Mother fucking Calysta, there’s no end to these damn monsters.”
“Don’t be throwing Her name around like that in vain, you bastard. You are right about the mons-...! Oy. Oy! The big ass barrier’s gone down! And there's a girl with a big flaming sword with Archmage Seraphina where it was! Look up”
“Huh? What barr- oh, the fucking sphere! Mother fucking Calysta!”
“Language, you fuck!”
In the darkness of the night, the barrier that had silently gone down had gone unnoticed by most of the soldiers that were valiantly fighting. However, starting from the two soldiers that had stepped back to catch a momentary break and then to the rest of them, they eventually all looked up at some point and noticed the absence of the incredibly conspicuous black sphere that had been floating roughly a hundred meters in the air, a few hundred meters in diameter.
Mia gazed down upon the battlefield. Blood and corpses, whether that of monsters or humans, littered the several kilometers of land. The monsters who had been tightly encircled at the start by the pentagonal encirclement of the fortresses, were now no longer as encircled. Of the almost hundred thousand monsters at the start, their numbers had dwindled down to roughly half that, many of which were the weakest ones that could not have broken out of the encirclement anyway. Those that were left were the stronger ones among the monsters, some of whom didn't even have to struggle to escape the encirclement and do damage from the outside. The S-rank monsters, few though they were, acted in a manner not too dissimilar to the generals as they freely zipped in and out of combat and eliminated their targets like assassins.
Of course, without the protection of a specialized barrier mage like the generals had, a lot of these S rank monsters would still be eliminated anyway, but there was no denying that they were able to cause great damage to the numbers of the already greatly numerically lacking human army. From the almost twenty thousand that they had been at the start, they were now down to fifteen thousand. The number of losses seemed insufficient to hurt the total human fighting strength, but it had to be taken into account that the great numerical imbalance considered, every human lost was a great disadvantage. It also goes without saying that human life was still precious even without the context of war.
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General Drell, the mentor and somewhat of a father figure to Lieutenant Charles, was one of the many who had lost their lives to the S-rank monsters. Drell had sacrificed himself before Charles, a scarring experience for the man who could more or less be considered a rookie to large-scale battles in war such as the one he was participating in today.
Mia recalled the face of Charles when she swooped in to save him, and how she had to restrain herself from taking action when she saw the scene unfold.
After all, as per Noah's orders, she was to avoid making a move until she was activated as a combatant, or if the situation deviated in an unforeseen and fatal direction for the whole.
The mana tremors due to the manifestation of the demiplane affected the barrier of Charles, and that was what caused the predicament that Drell and Charles had been in. At this point, though things had taken a turn for the worse, it was not fatal. If left as is, the human side could recover their momentum. If she wanted to strictly adhere to Noah's instructions, she would not make a move.
But her heart ached for the man who had his father figure wrenched away from him before his eyes. Thus, even if she should not have, Mia had jumped into the fray. And once she took action to save Charles, she saw similar situations breaking out all over the battlefield. Concluding that since she had made a move anyway, she decided to might as well go all out and did the same across the battlefield, though she remained discreet as possible and avoided large scale moves. As she saw it, Noah had to have a reason for asking her to remain on the sidelines, so the least she could do was to avoid drawing attention too much.
But now, she had been activated as a combatant, her first and now completed task being the subjugation of the archlich. In other words, she was now free to make a move. She gazed down at the thousands of human eyes that were looking back up at her, that were in a pentagonal ring formation. She then cast her gaze to the black sea-like mass of monsters within the ring.
She gripped her sword with both handsa comfortable distance before her abdomen and pointed the sword vertically downwards.
Then released her mana.
‘Runic Seal - Release’
If they had been immobilized from the dragon pressure earlier, now it was from the heat of the sword, as if a volcano had erupted unto the land.
The shrieks of the monsters all came to an abrupt halt at that moment.
Above them, the night sky began to be illuminated once more as Mia’s volcanic blade grew longer. The dense orbitals of the pyroclastic rocks and dust colliding, rotating and zipping grew more and more longer and elliptical. From five meters, to ten. To thirty, to fifty.
At the fifty meter mark, the heat was so great, the monsters directly under the blade began to collapse. The scorching blade in the darkness pointing to the earth below was visible for kilometers on end. The volcano, nature's tool of wrath, appeared like the wrath of heaven. Even Charles, far away in the healers tent, who had been blankly staring out through the open tent flaps from the pain of the mental wound of losing his father figure, regained his mental clarity at the sight of the great divine blade. Mia’s tiny figure itself could not be seen because of the great distance, but the blade itself was unmistakably large and bright.
To the humans actually on the battlefield, it was as if,
The sun was rising once more.
‘Second Runic Seal - Release’
With a tremendous roar, a cylindrical pillar of flame that captured almost all monsters within the ring burst down from Mia’s hilt. The pillar seemed to connect the heavens to the earth, and was so large the sides of it would seem flat to a person near it.
There was a slight margin left between the outermost circle of humans and the pillar of fire, so monsters within that margin could have been described as lucky. Or rather, luckier was a more appropriate word. They were not spared the heat and were still far too close to the fiery pillar, so many of them fell to the ground, if they didn't outright die in the heat.
The fate of those within the pillar did not need to be mentioned.
Vaporised.
The more tenacious monsters lasted a few more milliseconds, and a few S-rank monsters that were caught within even managed to live a full second. But these were the ones who had it the worst. Rather than the instant release of death, their final moments were filled with the despair of knowing they would not escape while layer by layer of skin, flesh and organs were melted off of them.
The great pillar of fire lasted a full ten seconds.
When it finally faded and the darkness of night fearfully returned along with the silence it carried, Mia or Archmage Seraphina who had been behind her were nowhere in sight, and neither were the monsters. All the soldiers had seen was a great cylindrical pit, and a pool of bubbling magma at the deepest depths of it.
In the distant tent, a shaky voice leaked out of Charles’ mouth.
“SSS-rank…”