How many times had he fought Alfia now?
Rayleigh focused his mind.
His senses grew incomparably sharp, to the point where he could even detect the angle and speed of the wind rebounding from the ground.
The gravel underfoot, even the dust in the air, seemed to form a three-dimensional model inside his mind.
The strongest adventurer.
As an opponent, she could not be more perfect.
Because he did not need to worry about using too much strength and causing irreversible consequences.
"Hadō #57: Daichi Tenyō."
Rayleigh shifted the sole of his right foot outward and poured Reiryoku into the ground.
The earth immediately trembled, then split open into deep cracks.
The ground broke apart, and slabs of stone floated into the air.
Rayleigh controlled the enormous rocks and sent them smashing toward Alfia.
These were not objects purely manifested from Mind, but physical attacks created by using the surrounding environment. Silentium Eden could not nullify them.
The stones all focused on the woman.
Alfia's eyes shifted slightly.
Then she moved.
Her steps turned and flowed, avoiding the falling rocks one after another.
Even when Rayleigh predicted her movement route in advance, his attacks could only strike the traces she left behind, never landing a direct hit.
So he changed his method of control, spreading the stones out to form a dense, inescapable net.
As his hand closed in the air, the countless stones shot toward Alfia together like a tightening web.
Seeing this, Alfia stopped in place and raised her hand forward.
Her fingers, wrapped in black silk gloves, snapped lightly.
"Satanas Verion."
A bomb of sound instantly detonated, blasting the countless hard stones in the air into fragments.
Rayleigh's eyes flashed.
Judging by the power of that strike, it was not hard to conclude that Alfia had already released Silentium Eden.
Otherwise, while maintaining Silentium Eden, the weakened Satanas Verion would not have been powerful enough to sweep away all those stones at once.
And that was exactly Rayleigh's goal.
Without Silentium Eden's magic-nullifying effect, this was his chance.
"Carriage of thunder, bridge of a spinning wheel. With light, divide this into six! Bakudō #61: Rikujōkōrō!"
Rayleigh quickly finished the chant, and the number sixty-one Bakudō shot from his hand.
'Hm?' Alfia noticed the fluctuation of Mind.
But the moment she noticed it, six bars of Reishi light had already been set in place.
Just as she was about to use magic, the ground suddenly broke open, and a large number of golden, serpent-like chains erupted from below, binding her limbs and waist.
"Bakudō #63: Sajō Sabaku."
"Next is this move... Gaki Rekkō!"
Rayleigh summoned a cyan whirlwind to spin before him.
From the swirling wind, more than a dozen green beams of light appeared, twisting through the air before shooting toward Alfia.
"Nicely done."
Facing such a viciously difficult situation, the woman's expression remained as calm as ever.
Her graceful posture did not deform in the slightest.
She was composed and elegant from beginning to end.
The beams of light landed in front of Alfia, only to turn into ripples and dissolve into the air.
"Silentium Eden."
Rayleigh's eyes widened slightly, disbelief showing in his pupils.
This phenomenon proved only one thing.
The Silentium Eden he had thought Alfia had released had actually been operating normally the entire time.
In other words, the sound magic that had just flattened the earth had not been its original power at all, but the result after being heavily weakened by Alfia's own magic?
"..."
Rayleigh instantly retreated.
As he moved backward, he injected Reishi into his blood vessels, blue patterns flashing across the surface of his body.
Then came the next move.
"Bakudō #81: Dan... kū?"
Eh?
The instant Rayleigh abandoned the chant and released Dankū, he saw Alfia's lips move slightly.
In the next second...
Sound vanished.
Or rather, it was blown away!
Boom!
It was clearly a grand, devastating scene, yet it lacked any sound effect matching the visual impact.
The earth was pierced through.
The number eighty-one Bakudō shattered in an instant, turning into countless fragments before returning to the Reishi in the atmosphere.
Rayleigh's figure was sent flying backward.
Like an arrow released from a bowstring, he shot across the ground and slammed straight into the wall at the far end, making the entire underground space tremble.
Plop.
A small stone fell onto Rayleigh's head.
But Rayleigh lay there without any reaction.
More accurately, he could not move.
The Reishi injected into his blood vessels had been shaken apart, its arrangement broken, and his internal organs had suffered a severe impact.
Even breathing felt difficult.
"Cough."
It seemed more than ten bones in his body had been broken.
The power of Kaidō slowly activated, flowing through his body and beginning to treat him.
Rayleigh spent a full four or five minutes before he barely recovered enough mobility to crawl up from the ground.
"Hahaha."
'This gap.'
The slight swelling of confidence he had felt earlier vanished without a trace.
Putting aside how large the gap between him and Level 7 still was, the person before him was Alfia, the incarnation of talent who could fight the Level 9 Empress head-on without falling behind, and might even defeat her.
The strongest adventurer.
The current him still could not even begin to compare.
"Hm?"
Rayleigh sat up.
Then he met a pair of mismatched eyes.
Alfia had actually crouched down beside him, resting her cheek in one hand as she stared at him, like a young girl admiring flowers.
Rayleigh froze for a moment.
Alfia said, "Your growth speed is abnormal."
"Huh?"
'Abnormal?'
"Going from Level 1 to Level 4 in two years is impressive, but that isn't what I mean."
Alfia brushed the long hair by her temple behind her ear.
"When I first met you, the strength you displayed already far exceeded what your level should have allowed. I noticed it then. Every time you release one of your swords, you enter a state of limit break, surpassing the upper limit of strength set by your level. I can do that because of my skill... but you are able to forge weapons like Zanpakutō and achieve it naturally."
Limit break.
The reason the gods divided Falna into levels, and the reason those levels mattered so much, was because they offered the clearest way to display the gap in strength.
Every stage—in other words, every level—had a limit to what it could reach.
The vessel's capacity was finite.
For example, a Level 1 adventurer, no matter how hard they trained, would never possess more than five hundred kilograms of arm strength without leveling up.
Only by leveling up could they raise their abilities further.
That was the boundary that truly existed under the level system.
But the potential of the races of the Lower World could not be fully predicted even by the gods.
There would always be a few exceptional beings capable of breaking through the boundaries set by the gods and displaying power beyond their level.
That special condition was known as "limit break."