As for the expedition force's retreat, Leo had no spare attention left to follow it now.
Caught up in that earth-shattering explosion, he felt the whole world before his eyes dyed fiery red, his entire field of vision seized and stripped away by the blaze.
In his ears was a roar loud enough to rupture his eardrums.
Around him was a heat high enough to cook a human body.
In that moment, even with the Giant's Battle Garb protecting him, Leo couldn't avoid feeling the pain, forcing him to grit his teeth and struggle to adapt to his current surroundings.
"Ais..."
He found himself murmuring her name, the word full of a worry he hadn't even noticed himself.
Even knowing she had a wind-attribute enchantment magic shielding her, Leo still couldn't help but worry about Ais.
There was no helping it. Unlike Leo, who'd kept some distance from the female-form monster, Ais was far too close to it, and the explosion she took was surely far stronger than Leo's.
What if Ariel's protection couldn't block that blast? What then?
Leo couldn't stop himself from thinking it.
But it was still far too early for him to be worrying about others.
After all, he was still caught in the thick of a crisis himself.
"Rmmmble..."
Along with a rumbling of the earth, a huge yellow-green body broke through the blaze and black smoke, charging out of the sea of fire like a massive war chariot.
The stubby legs beneath it writhed without pause as the giant body barreled headlong toward Leo, swinging a flat arm at the battered Leo, whose pupils shrank, sweeping toward him along with the superheated air it carried.
"Bang!"
The first arm came crashing down, shattering the ground, kicking up rubble and dust, blowing away the blaze, but it didn't hit Leo.
In that hair's-breadth moment, Leo threw himself to the side with no thought for how it looked, just barely dodging the blow.
But the female-form monster had four arms in all. The first one missed, and the second came sweeping right after it, a howling gust shrieking in its wake.
Leo dodged with everything he had, pushing the evasion skills he'd drilled sparring with Ais to their utmost, and only just slipped past the second arm's attack, then dodged the third arm's horizontal sweep that followed, narrowly escaping danger.
But the last arm, the fourth, Leo couldn't dodge after all.
"Bang!"
With a heavy, muffled thud, a staggering force came crashing into Leo's body like a bursting dam, sending him flying.
Leo's body shot backward at once, flying clear out of the sea of fire's range and into the gray forest, smashing through one great tree after another.
"Ngh..."
A muffled grunt forced its way out of his mouth. His whole body felt like its bones had come apart, the pain almost matching the level from last time fighting Goliath, when a single punch had blasted him away.
"GAAAAAAAAAH!!!"
The female-form monster let out a screech like a cracked gong, and as if to deliver the finishing blow to Leo, it opened its mouth and spat out dissolving fluid like a high-pressure water cannon.
Having smashed through the last gray giant tree and finally stopped his backward flight, Leo caught the rank stench of the dissolving fluid bearing down on him and, by sheer reflex, burned a large amount of Mind, casting without a chant to fire off a meteor as thick as a pillar.
"Boom!!"
The pillar-thick meteor and the high-pressure-cannon dissolving fluid collided with a roar at the border between the gray forest and the sea of fire, raising a deafening blast.
The meteor steadily boiled away the dissolving fluid, but the surging dissolving fluid kept battering the meteor in turn, the two clashing against each other, sending up brilliant starbursts and purple-black spray, and for a while neither could overcome the other.
As if angered by this, the female-form monster abruptly increased the volume of dissolving fluid it poured out, doubling the scale of the high-pressure cannon and gradually pushing back the meteor Leo had unleashed.
"A contest of raw output, is it?"
Feeling his magic being gradually suppressed, Leo gritted his teeth and turned vicious too.
"In that department, I've never backed down from anyone!"
Leo gave a low shout, burning Mind again and using the properties of his magic to surge its power.
In an instant, the scale of the meteor swelled by more than double, not only holding against the high-pressure-cannon dissolving fluid but pressing back against it in turn.
Before long, the meteor broke through the high-pressure cannon of dissolving fluid and struck the female-form monster.
"Boom!!"
After the blast, the immensely thick meteor blew apart the female-form monster's open mouth, running it clean through.
"Aaaaah!!!"
The female-form monster let out a soundless scream, the stubby legs beneath it and its four flat arms thrashing and kicking wildly as if in agony, churning the ground beneath and around it into chaos, sending rubble and dust flying.
Leo, too, from the massive Mind he'd spent, suddenly went black before the eyes and nearly toppled over on the spot.
At that critical moment, from the other end of the sea of fire, a figure wreathed all over in wind swept in once more.
Ais was covered in scorch marks but had taken no obviously serious wounds, her whole body like a drawn blade as she launched a surprise attack on the female-form monster.
"Shng!"
The silver saber flashed, and she swung with all her strength, cutting into the stubby legs beneath the female-form monster and severing several of them clean at the root.
The female-form monster let out another soundless scream, all four of its wildly flailing flat arms swinging at Ais in unison, only to be dodged by her swift footwork, smashing into the ground instead and sending earth and stone flying.
"Shng!" "Shng!" "Shng!"
Dodging the incoming flat arms, Ais raced back and forth around the female-form monster like a gale, the silver saber in her hand cutting at the stubby legs beneath it again and again, severing them one by one.
Clearly, Ais meant to do as Finn had earlier, subduing the enemy by breaking down its mobility, then creating an opening for a single killing blow to finish the female-form monster for good.
The female-form monster naturally wouldn't sit and wait for death. Seeing its tentacles never landed on Ais, it immediately drew its arms in and crossed them over its chest.
At the sight, Ais's expression shifted slightly, and instinctively she made to leap back.
But it was already too late to retreat now.
Watching the light-particle pollen flickering between the female-form monster's arms, about to be scattered, Ais could only increase her magic's output, wreathing herself in even fiercer wind to brace against the coming great explosion.
But without any warning at all, several meteors tore through the air and came shooting in, striking the female-form monster's arms and raising brilliant starbursts across its body, blasting it out of its stance, the pollen brewing in its embrace vanishing as well.
"Leo!"
Ais knew at once whose work this was, snapping her head around toward the direction the meteors had come from.
There, Leo was guzzling a Magic Potion while forcing his bloodshot eyes open, glaring at the female-form monster, meteors dancing all around him.
"I'll cover you!" Leo shouted. "Just keep attacking!"
Ais nodded hard, then, like Leo, glared at the female-form monster, raised Desperate, and charged at it, going on cutting at those countless stubby legs.
"Gaaah, ah, ahhh..."
The female-form monster's pierced mouth let out a broken, stuttering sound, and the wound on it was, before their very eyes, visibly recovering.
"...It has regeneration too?"
Seeing an ability that hadn't appeared in the original work, Leo's eye twitched, but he quickly steadied himself again.
Riveria's teachings echoed in his heart, telling Leo that for an excellent user of magic, keeping a composed mind at all times was an essential quality.
Whether a Mage serving as a rearguard or a Magic Swordsman in the high-tier middle-guard class, one had to stay calm and steady in battle at every moment, for only then could magic be cast accurately and quickly.
Especially for the type like Leo, who could raise his magic's power and number of attacks by spending extra Mind, increasing his magic's output and range, the steadier the mind, the more it favored drawing out the magic's full effect, rather than scattering his firepower and wasting it as he had when fighting Goliath.
So, with a steady mind, Leo ignited the Mind he'd worked so hard to recover, spreading a magic circle beneath his feet.
"Try this one, monster."
Leo chanted his magic and released several meteors, but rather than letting them dance around him, he kept them hovering at his side, stretching them out longer and longer.
The greatest property of Star-attribute magic was how easy it was to control, with extremely high freedom.
Using this property, Leo actually shaped his magic into another form, not thickening the meteors but making them as thin and long as possible, until they became spears radiating starlight, sharp beyond compare.
"Go."
Leo pointed from afar, and those meteor spears shot out all at once, breaking through space at unprecedented speed, reaching the female-form monster in an instant like streaks of light flashing and gone.
That staggering shooting speed left even the female-form monster, so acutely sensitive to magic, no time to react, struck abruptly by the meteor spears.
"Shng!" "Shng!" "Shng!"
The blindingly fast meteor spears, like beams of light, pierced through the arms the female-form monster had raised high and kept hammering down toward Ais, leaving them as ruined as its mouth.
"Gaaah, ahhhhhhhh!!"
The female-form monster's screams grew more and more piercing, and its endlessly recovering mouth seemed to splash blood as it kept spewing dissolving fluid.
"Shng!"
Pressing the advantage, Ais turned her whole body into a sharp arrow and shot forward, the Desperate in her hand making its widest sweeping cut yet, severing an entire row of the female-form monster's stubby legs all at once.
The female-form monster's giant body instantly lost its balance, tilting and toppling to the ground, never to rise again.
"Now!"
The same thought flashed through Leo's and Ais's hearts at once. One burned every bit of his remaining Mind, converting it to magic output, spreading the largest magic circle yet and sending a heaven-rending, earth-splitting meteor blasting at the female-form monster. The other whipped a storm across her whole body, turning herself into a spiraling tornado, raising the silver saber in her hand and likewise blasting toward the female-form monster.
The heaven-rending, earth-splitting meteor on the left.
The spiraling tornado on the right.
The two shot at the female-form monster as if to pincer it, and in a single moment landed on it together, running its giant body clean through.
It was, beyond any doubt, a lethal blow.
The endlessly screaming female-form monster went suddenly rigid all over, the sound in its mouth cutting off abruptly as well.
Time, in that moment, seemed to stand still.
The next second, the female-form monster, its giant body run through, swelled all over.
"Boom!!!!!"
That purple-black belly exploded in an instant, the giant body scattering along with it, turning the explosive pollen and dissolving fluid into sparks of annihilation, raising the most terrifying great explosion yet and shaking the entire 50th floor.
Flames and black smoke surged skyward together, soaring straight into the clouds.
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