Summoner Sovereign

Seeing the magnitude of firepower, I realized that even Black Tortoise"s water barrier wouldn"t be able to protect me from such a powerful spell.

Before I could fully rise to my feet, however, someone tackled me. I found myself hurled out of the way, cras.h.i.+ng several meters away from the h.e.l.lish stream. Even from that distance, I could feel the intense heat from the flames, and my skin began to blister.

I managed to catch one final glimpse of Anastasia before she vanished in the flames. At that moment, I understood what just occurred. Ana had just saved me, shouldering me out of the way, and in doing so she ended up bearing the full brunt of the two-headed dragon"s attack.

"Ana!" I yelled, my voice drowned out by the crackling roar of the h.e.l.lfire. Not that she could hear me.

The two-headed dragon ceased its spell. It glowered at me murderously, but before it could unleash another horrifying spell, Draco recovered and charged into it, knocking the Blood G.o.d aside. The two gigantic monsters crashed into the ground, razing another crater in the already weakened earth. Geysers of soil and clouds of dust rose from the tremendous impact.

Leaving the two-headed dragon to Draco and Kagutsuchi, who had just gotten up to rejoin the fray, temporarily, I rushed over to Anastasia"s side even before the flames fully died down. She was lying on the ground, incredibly still in one piece and mostly unblemished. I was relieved to see that she hadn"t been completely burned to ash.

Actually…aside from soot here and there, I didn"t see any signs of burns. Er…what was going on? Even then, Anastasia was lying motionlessly, as if she was on the verge of dying.

Dropping to my knees, I tried to help her without aggravating her injuries.

"Are you all right?"

"Do I look like I"m all right?" Anastasia snapped, barely able to open her eyes, her voice a soft croak. Yeah…stupid question. I decided to focus on checking her for injuries, but surprisingly enough I didn"t see any wounds except…

…except for a small cut on her side.

"…huh?"

I stared at the cut on her side, and even though I didn"t waste any time stemming the bleeding and dressing it with emergency first-aid (no healing magic, I"m afraid), I couldn"t help but be bemused by what I had just seen.

This made no sense whatsoever. There were no other injuries except a…cut. How the f.u.c.k did Anastasia get cut by the two-headed dragon"s firebreath!?

If she had ended up a charred corpse, I would understand. If she suffered from horrendous third-degree burns all over her body, I would understand. If there was nothing left of her but ash, I would understand.

But…what the h.e.l.l?! A single small cut on the side of her waist? From a two-headed dragon"s firebreath? How…?!

"…you"re kidding, right?"

"Do I look like I"m in any condition to joke?" Anastasia snarled, wincing. Then she coughed out some blood. Seriously? How did you get internal hemorrhaging from getting roasted by the two-headed dragon"s fire spell? Could someone explain to me what the h.e.l.l was going on here?

"Is she all right?"

Lilith had hurried over, and then she stopped when both Anastasia and I shot her a bewildered look. Crossing her arms, she scowled.

"What? Why are the both of you looking at me like that?"

"No, I didn"t expect you to rush over and check on Ana"s condition. I figured you would be standing uselessly some distance away, watching her die or something."

"Yeah," Ana agreed. "Giving me a weird reason to think, "oh, my feelings are one-sided." And then dramatically die just like that." she snapped her fingers.

"What on earth are the both of you talking about?!" Lilith demanded furiously.

"An anime adaptation based off a badly written light novel," I replied. A roar then drew my attention back to the two-headed dragon, who was busily dueling with Draco and Kagutsuchi. Gritting my teeth, I drew one of my swords and pointed it at the Blood G.o.d. "Crater!"

A colossal cup-shaped cannon materialized in the air, its rim pointed toward the flailing two-headed dragn. Azure light began to gather within the hollow of the cup-shaped cannon, superheated plasma that swirled violently and causing the very air around the Constellation cannon to s.h.i.+mmer from the extreme temperatures.

"What the h.e.l.l is that?!" Lilith cried out, her jaw dropping.

"The Constellation, Crater. It depicts a cup that belongs to Apollo…and hence it contains the caged fury of the sun."

Taking a deep breath, I finished the incantation by murmuring the name of the stars in the Constellation.

"Crateris."

The ma.s.sive plasma beam streaked from the Constellation cannon and slammed into the two-headed dragon while it was thras.h.i.+ng about. Both Draco and Kagutsuchi instinctively jumped away in time to avoid the devastating plasma strike, and the two-headed dragon vanished in a blinding explosion of blue-white thermal energies.

"Is that your nuke spell?!" Lilith asked, s.h.i.+elding her eyes from the incredible display. I shook my head. Already Draco was gathering mana to complete his Thuban spell. As for me, I summoned Cygnus and heaved the wounded Anastasia atop the white swan.

"No. that"s coming next. So we had better get out of here while we still can."

Lilith hopped onto Kagutsuchi, who took off in the direction of the hovercraft. Once I made sure Anastasia was secure, I also jumped on top of Cygnus, who launched himself into the air at high speeds.

"Hey! Be gentle! You know I"m on the verge of dying, right?"

"…if you can still complain like that, you"ll be fine."

"But I don"t understand!" Lilith shouted from several dozen meters away, Kagutsuchi swooping low in to meet us. "How did Anastasia survive that?! I know that you"re trying to parody the anime adaptation of a certain badly written light novel, but that still makes no sense! That magnitude of firepower is more than enough to raze half a city!"

"Who says I survived it?" Anastasia retorted. When both Lilith and I merely responded with disbelieving looks, she sighed and finally relented. "All right, all right. I had cast Acid Armor on myself. That absorbed most of the blast."

"So what"s with the bleeding?" I asked, pointing at the cut on the side of her waist. Anastasia sulked.

"It"s to make things more dramatic, you know? A heroine who is going to die…so that the protagonist can start screaming, complain to a literal Deus ex Machina to get her to give him even more cheat abilities, and then get a sudden power-up and beat up the dragon."

"If you seriously think I"m going to start ranting about cheats and beat myself up over failing to protect a person important to me, then you"ve got another thing coming." I sighed. "And as you"ve already seen, Lilith isn"t a useless heroine who just stands around and watch other characters get killed for no reason other than to contrive some sort of cheap tragedy. But that"s not the point. HOW DID YOU GET THAT b.l.o.o.d.y CUT!?"

"Because plot. Because the author said so. How would I know?!"

I give up. As long as Ana was all right, I couldn"t care less how she survived, even with such a ridiculously sustained wound from out of nowhere. Still, that must be one h.e.l.l of an Acid Armor if it could protect her from such h.e.l.lish flames. Perhaps my Scutum Sobiescianum absorbed most of the blast before the spillover engulfed her, reducing the damage further. Fortunately, it seemed that the bleeding had stopped, especially since it didn"t hit any vitals, and Ana was rapidly recovering. If there were any more damage, we could get them treated once we caught up with the Silver Wolves mercenaries and have a medic look at her.

Behind, the two-headed dragon emerged from a molten crater, surrounded by glowing magma. Its body continued to smolder intensely. Even if it was a Blood G.o.d, it still couldn"t avoid taking damage from a plasma cannon. Unleas.h.i.+ng the caged fury of a star was not something one could simply shrug off. If it had been any other monster…perhaps even a rank A Behemoth type, it might have disintegrated under the plasma bombardment.

Yet, another spell of ma.s.s destruction added onto my list. A smaller scale one, thankfully.

However, Draco wasn"t going to wait. He unleashed his Thuban the moment the two-headed Dragon took a step forward and spread its wings. The black torrent of calamitous energies struck the two-headed dragon and detonated in a catastrophic explosion that wiped out the entire site from the face of the earth. Even the sinkhole that the Blood G.o.d created while trying to claw his way out to our dimension couldn"t compare.

An entire segment of the Black Underworld Swamp, about five miles in radius, was literally gone. Just like that. Even as Cygnus and Kagutsuchi flew in pursuit of the fleeing Silver Wolves hovercrafts, a ma.s.sive mushroom cloud blossomed up toward the sky, throwing up blazing embers. None of them were radioactive, thankfully.

"Amazing," Anastasia breathed. She had laid low for most of the flight, and I forced her to stay down and not look in the direction of the blast. Of course…even with the protective filters that darkened to protect my eyes, I might still have gone blind from looking directly at the pseudo nuclear explosion. Lilith was intelligent enough to wait for the mushroom cloud to billow upward and for the terrifying lights to fade before she dared to look back. So I didn"t have to worry about her.

"You…annihilated everything."

"Let me see!" Anastasia was eager to look as well, and she clambered over Cygnus"s back to stare at what remained of the tomb site and the ravaged Black Underworld Swamp. A crater almost ten miles in diameter had been blasted into the earth. If there was a tomb or temple there, it now certainly ceased to exist because of my extreme measures. Ana"s voice glowed with admiration and disbelief. "Incredible! You…you actually slew a G.o.d!"

"Uh, I"m not even sure if that thing was a G.o.d, to be honest." I shrugged. This wasn"t the forty-first millennium, and I highly doubted if the two-headed dragon was some primordial ent.i.ty of Chaos. A Blood G.o.d he might have claimed to be, but in the end, he was just another monster. Otherwise he would be destroyed by copyright, which would have resulted in his demise either way. Might as well take credit for slaying him.

Lilith shook her head. "You"re crazy, you know that?"

"Only a thin line separates genius from insanity," I responded. Then I nudged Cygnus mentally to have him speed up a little. The hovercrafts were within view right now.

Upon seeing us, the ramps to the back hovercraft lowered, allowing the three of us to jump in. Lilith went first, diving into the interior of the hovercraft. I scooped up the wounded Anastasia despite her protests, and leaped inside the hovercraft as well. Outside, Cygnus and Kagutsichi circled one final time before they disappeared, returning to whatever dimensional soul s.p.a.ce they dwelled in before Lilith and I summoned thme.

Needless to say, I had dismissed Draco beforehand, before he could get consumed by his own nuke spell and get obliterated like the Blood G.o.d. Speaking of which, if Liu or any of the Blood Slaughter Sect people were around, I wouldn"t be able to resist taunting them, "Where is your G.o.d now, huh?"

Too bad they were all dead.

"Little Lilith!"

Princ.i.p.al Porter was so relieved that he crushed his granddaughter in an embrace, despite her embarra.s.sment. Lilith squirmed and struggled to escape, but to no avail.

"Grandpa! Let go!"

"Never!"

"Oh, come on!" Lilith whined, her face reddening when she realized that everyone was watching her, taking amus.e.m.e.nt in her plight. "I"m not a kid anymore! I"m a combat mage, you know?! One of the most powerful among my generation! You don"t have to worry about me! I"ll definitely be all right!"

"What grandfather wouldn"t worry about his granddaughter?" Henry Porter shot back. "Don"t get me wrong. I know how capable and powerful you are. But that opponent is on a whole different level! Of course I would be concerned!"

"Ugh…it"s so embarra.s.sing!" Lilith moaned, visibly wis.h.i.+ng that she could disappear into a hole somewhere.

While she flailed around, I hurried toward the nearest squad. There were about fifty or so mercenaries cramped into what was fortunately a wide and s.p.a.cious pa.s.senger bay, and they had leaped out of their safety harnesses the moment they saw one of their comrades being ferried over, looking feeble and all that.

"Miss Anastasia!"

"Medic!" I shouted. "Someone, get a medic!"

"Here, coming through!"

To my immense relief, a healing mage hurried over, hastily conjuring his mana for a healing spell. He nodded toward me and gestured for me to put Anastasia down so that he could begin treating her. I complied without question.

"Good work, kid. Leave the rest to us."

While he worked on Ana, and the rest of the mercenaries gathered to watch, I found myself a seat in the pa.s.senger bay. The first wave of exhaustion hit me, and I almost crashed to my knees. Evidently I had expended way too much mana with all that summoning and spells of ma.s.s destruction. Closing my eyes, I sank into a leather chair…

…and instantly fell into a deep sleep.