Chapter 57. Death by Fire
She refused. The Summoner that had retreated into herself showed no signs of change.
So petty tricks don"t work on her…
I wanted to keep the saint as far away from this as possible. It wasn"t that I didn"t trust her ability, it was just that there were just too many thing that made me worried. After thinking for a bit, I gave the Summoner an offer that I normally wouldn"t have given.
"Listen well. This is your last chance. If you surrender now, I"ll send you back to your former world. That"s a lot better than dying, isn"t it?"
Still nothing. Considering how her former world wasn"t exactly a place that was appealing to her, I suppose this response made sense. In fact, the one who responded to this was Necro.
[Hold up! Hold up, hold up, hold up. For real? I knew your ability had levelled up, but… Something like that"s possible? No joke? For real?]"We can talk about that later."
[Ah, right right right! But… Ah, it"s nothing. Let"s just see if this offer actually works on her. If she agrees to it, just be sure to tell me before you let her go, alright?]Why? I understood that Necro might want to go back to his original world, but I felt that he had a different motive underneath.
Does he not want to let the Summoner go? Was there a reason why she had to die?
I just have to take her equipment, but…
I glanced at the saint and saw that she was in a trance casting an elementary magic of light and water. She revealed to me before that she didn"t know any form of attack magic. But depending on how one uses defensive magic, they could be utilized to kill people as well. I suppose I"ll try talking while the saint prepares her magic. I sat myself down in front of the Summoner.
"The unbreakable Iris. Your specialty is summoning. You usually acted as a counter, shield, or even a scout in the hero party. Your country of origin is Russia. Since you"ve been summoned as a child, I suppose you never went through any proper education. I"ll explain everything in simple terms for you then. If you don"t get out of that tiny world of yours even after listening to what I have to say, then you"ll die."
The Summoner still didn"t respond one bit. It almost seemed like she had fallen asleep.
"Let"s go over your personality and power first. Your personality is social fear. Your power is Absolute Reflect. When I first looked at this, I thought "A person who rejected absolutely everything was b.a.l.l.sy enough to go on a quest to kill the Demon King?" There must"ve been someone who helped you along the way."
The person who most likely helped her was the saint. The Summoner must"ve stepped out into the world with the saint"s help. She must"ve gotten involved in something as scary as the journey to kill the Demon King through this. The saint probably didn"t want to get the Summoner involved. She was probably too worried about leaving the Summoner and let the girl tag along. According to the note that Necro wrote on the report, the Summoner relied almost entirely on the saint, and after their journey, split apart.
And in the end, the Summoner chose her beasts over the saint. She decided to be together not with humans who had the chance of betraying her, but beasts who she could stay relaxed with.
Her idiocy almost rivalled that of the saint"s.
The first magic was cast and a school of fish composed of water appeared. The school of fish reflected light through its body, creating quite a beautiful sight. This seemingly harmless magic would soon work in order to destroy the Summoner.
The school of fish split up and gathered to form a sphere around the Summoner. The sunlight that shined through the sphere soon disappeared. The interior of the sphere was filled with transparent water, and the exterior became covered in mud.
A spherical mirror was formed with this.
"Let"s talk about your ability, Absolute Reflect. If you reflect absolutely everything, you wouldn"t be able to breath or walk. Due to this, the filtering process in your ability is an absolute necessity. Would it be possible to reflect "all kinds of attacks" with a simple calculation? It"s easy to see that your power demands an immense amount of calculations."
If the logic involved with the reflection ability was so simple, there would already be a type of magic similar to it.
"The routine of judging the type of attack and dealing with it was essential to this power. Like a filter, it needs to differentiate between simple air and poison gas. It also needs to figure out how the attack would be reflected. All of this has to be executed in an instant."
The speed of the execution is critical to the power. Just like how she was able to reflect the bullet instantly, the actual ability always has to be executed instantly.
"Let"s say that you got the reflection process to be as efficient as possible. Even then, there"s a limit. Humans aren"t supercomputers that can calculate things infinitely fast. And there"s a limit to how much energy one can have as well. Even if you have the ability to "reflect" anything", would a person born in the universe be able to reflect anything the universe throws at him? Would it be possible to win against the universe? No, something like that"s only possible in children"s dreams."
Information couldn"t be transmitted faster than the speed of light, meaning that no supercomputer could compute things faster than light. The only thing that would allow something like this was to have a computer of the future send information to the computer of the past.
A futurist known as Ray Kurzweil defined this as such.
[The potential amount of computation rises with the available energy.]From this, we can a.s.sume that if two people with reflection powers fought, the one that would lose would be the one to run out of energy first.
"The ability to reflect things isn"t something that belongs to you alone. Surrender."
This was my last warning. The mirror that surrounded the Summoner became fully formed. I activated dematerialization and sent the saint a message. The only thing she was to do now was to cast a light ball within the sphere of water continuously. Normally, this magic would simply light up the insides of caves and such. By casting it like this, the light particles that would all be on the same wavelength to each other would overlap again and again, increasing in its heat and destructiveness.
Soon enough, the inside of the sphere had become blisteringly bright. The light that got reflected by the Summoner would be reflected by the mirror, then by the Summoner. The process would continue again and again at the speed of light.
An optical resonator. The major component of lasers.
Because water could always be resupplied, there were no worries of having the mirror break. Even if the heat from the laser gets far too high, since the boiling point of the water had been modified, the water would not become gaseous.
If we continue to pour more and more light into the sphere, the Summoner"s power would certainly hit a computing limit.
Causing the Absolute Reflect power to overheat through the use of infinite reflection. This was the core of this plan.
The inside of the sphere was filled to the brim with photons. The dirt particles within the fish had been pushed to the outer edges of the sphere due to the heat. I went inside the vault in my dematerialized state, spent my cooldown time there, and went back outside dematerialized.
I checked up on the status of the Summoner by doing this. I couldn"t afford to have her equipment just completely melt away by not paying attention. The Summoner"s clothes started to catch on fire as her power began to overload. The Summoner quickly killed the fire in surprise, but her hair and shoulders caught fire as well. She would soon melt like a candle at this rate.
"No…! Iris doesn"t want to die like this…!!"
She struggled with all her strength.
The little girl scratched at the immobile sphere as she screamed. Well, I suppose this much was a relief because the saint was unable to see inside the sphere.
Seeing how the Summoner was crying and begging to be saved, her power seemed to have almost run out. Her entire body would soon catch fire and she would die. This much was fine. This was all according to plan.
At least, it was fine until the Summoner began to scream out the saint"s name in her dying breath.
"Big sister…! Morto..!!"
The girl uttered the name of the one person she should have never called out to. And the casting of the spell stopped, as if to respond to the Summoner"s pleas.
Abruptly, almost as if I could hear a clack, the gears in the saint"s head came to a halt.