Hard Carried by My Sword

Chapter 256

The moment Rodlin’s cannons locked onto them, Leon, Elahan, and Karen scattered, each darting in a different direction as though they’d agreed on it beforehand. Six cannons near the abdomen immediately began tracking Leon, while the six mounted on the shoulders angled toward Elahan and Karen.

The reaction speed of the cannons was terrifying. They were to follow Aura Masters who crossed dozens or even hundreds of meters in mere tenths of a second.

Even Robin, the famed imperial Aura Master nicknamed the “Divine Archer,” could only rely on instinct and luck when aiming at another Aura Master moving at full speed. Yet this golden golem kept pace through pure speed alone.

Rodlin announced her calculation.” Calculating mobility patterns for all three targets... Calculation complete. Probability of landing a hit within 127 seconds: zero. Switching artillery magic to spread-type. Changing munitions to Fire Burst.”

A shower of red flashes burst from Rodlin’s cannons as it finished its analysis. It was Fire Burst, a fifth-tier magic, unleashed in rapid-fire style.

Each blast had firepower worthy of a ship-mounted cannon, and Rodlin was firing nearly a hundred rounds per second. An Aura Blade could withstand one or two shots, but the accumulated impact would quickly overwhelm its capacity. Standing still and trying to block it would drain Leon dry in under five minutes.

So, Leon deployed the Icarus Wing behind him. As several afterimages split away and he broke completely out of the barrage zone, Rodlin blinked its oval eyes as though surprised.

“Updating data. Mobility stat of ‘Leon’ increased. Changing munition type to Lightning Spear.”

Despite the look of surprise, its judgment was still brutally fast. The six shoulder cannons spat lightning instead of fire, and this time Leon couldn’t dodge everything. In terms of speed, the difference between flames and lightning was enormous. Fireballs held vastly more destructive force, but a point-focused lightning spell packed its own kind of punch.

With crackles, a series of lightning spears zig-zagged through the air and struck Leon in the back. Even a B-rank monster could have its organs charred through by one such spell.

But Leon wasn’t singed. The flames of the Icarus Wing canceled most of the lightning, and his cloak—Grania’s personal creation—was a masterpiece. Only magic of sixth-tier or higher could hope to pierce its defenses.

Then, Elahan, having reached Rodlin’s feet once more, muttered a prayer. “O Goddess, grant me the courage to stand unfaltering before great tides and the strength to remain unbroken before winds that snap mighty trees.”

Her murmur flowed out softly as she forced her way through the barrage of Fire Bursts with her Holy Barrier. For a clergy, prayer was the same as self-hypnosis. It banished mortal frailty from the mind and aligned the body with the Goddess’s will and grace. This was why the Holy Iron Inquisitors constantly recited lines of prayer alongside their Holy Law.

“I pray that you would bless these small hands with the strength to crush adversity!”

Light answered her prayer. Holy Power surged through her body, dyeing her silver armor gold. Her physical abilities tripled on the spot.

She had already surpassed an ogre in raw strength, and now the power coiling in her grip looked ready to explode. As soon as Elahan felt that strength, she swung her Holy Iron Breaker down.

This time, she swung vertically, smashing down on the top of Rodlin’s foot rather than the ankle. The ground cracked, and one of Rodlin’s legs sank into the earth. Even its previously unyielding armor plating showed dents. It was a truly monstrous force.

Rodlin announced its damages. “Right-leg function reduced by 23 percent. Attack rating of target ‘Elahan’ greatly increased. Activating Exile Barrier.”

Even the golden golem couldn’t ignore the damage and responded immediately. A barrier unfolded around its twenty-meter-tall form. A blue-tinted wall expanded outward, pushing Elahan back with overwhelming force. It was exactly as the spell’s name implied—a wall that repelled, a barrier that banished.

Elahan swung her Holy Iron Breaker experimentally, but it bounced off in the opposite direction with a strange sensation. She slid back nearly ten meters, eyes wide.

“This is...!” she muttered in disbelief.

El-Cid spoke.

—Exile Barrier. A seventh-tier spatial spell that reverses the direction of external force.

How do we break it? Leon asked.

—You must either destroy the space itself or apply more force than the magic circle can handle. But if you fail to break it in one blow, most of the force will reflect back at the attacker. Be careful.

What a pain.

Normally, seventh-tier spells lasted only a few seconds, a few minutes at most, but Rodlin had deployed it over its full body while still firing other spells. A trial befitting a dragon, indeed.

But perhaps Karen hadn’t fully understood its nature? Dodging the fireballs and searching for an opening, she suddenly burst from the shadows and sprinted straight at Rodlin.

“Pitch-Black Dance.”

Her white ponytail bounced with each step as she flashed through the darkness, and just a few meters from the barrier, she formed a hand seal. At that moment, the shadow beneath her feet rose and wrapped around her, dyeing her body pitch black. No light passed through. None reflected.

“Illusion, First Form: Dust-Chasing Shadow.”

Still coated in perfect darkness, Karen slammed straight into the barrier, saying, “Coming through!”

Actually, no. “Going through” might have been the more accurate description. She had bypassed the barrier without crashing into it.

Elahan and Leon froze, eyes wide. Albion brightened as if she’d seen something truly amusing, while even Irexana stared at Karen in disbelief.

“What!?”

“How?!”

“Oh?”

Only El-Cid grasped the mechanism. With Roderick himself having created Twilight Waltz, the manuscript underlying Karen’s Pitch-Black Dance, the explanation came easily.

—Hah! She placed her body on the boundary of real and unreal. This is basically learning to fly before learning to run! What an outrageous girl!

Isn’t that dangerous? Leon asked, concerned.

—It is a technique that requires perfect awareness of one’s limits, but she should be alright unless she tries to dig too deep into it.

What Karen had just used was a technique normally achievable only once she had mastered two higher stages of Pitch-Black Dance. Had she not drawn inspiration from the Death King’s ectoplasm or didn’t have the fortunately compatible Aura attribute of Shadow, merging with shadow like that would have permanently ruined a part of her body.

—I’ll have to teach her more once we finish this. Since the cat’s out of the bag about my existence anyway, as long as we don’t trip the causality restriction, we’re fine.

Wait, come to think of it...

During the conversation with Albion, El-Cid had spoken out loud, and yet no one had reacted. Leon wondered about it briefly, but Karen’s shout snapped him back to the present. Whatever the reason, it could wait. Surviving the battle came first.

“Mr. Hero! Ella!”

When Leon looked forward again, Karen, having slipped through the Exile Barrier while it held Rodlin in place, pressed her palm to the golem’s body and activated the same secret technique she’d used once before in the White Peak Palace.

It siphoned the force that existed in the material world into an imaginary dimension, sharply dropping the output of the mana conduits. Unlike in the White Peak Palace, Rodlin’s physical durability was far too high to destroy outright, but if she could at least shut down more than half of its magic circles for a moment, a breakthrough could appear.

“Error. Error. An unknown power leak has occurred in the central mana conduits. Switching to Defense Mode,” Rodlin announced.

Most of the light running across its outer conduits went out. Whether it was to minimize mana consumption amid that anomaly or not, every gunport closed at once, and the armor plating shifted into an even sturdier configuration.

Smooth, flat surfaces folded over each other in dense layers, becoming armor designed to disperse external impacts more efficiently. It barely took ten seconds for the transformation to finish.

For a full-body transformation of a giant golem, that was an absurd speed. However, for the two Aura Masters who had been waiting for that brief instant, it was more than enough.

“I’ll go in first!”

Elahan surged forward first, leaping all the way up to the ceiling and using it as a springboard to accelerate again. With a deafening crash, the ceiling wall cracked like a spiderweb in every direction. If Ground Zero hadn’t been an intentionally created space, the whole place might have collapsed from that rebound alone.

“Haaaap!”

Putting in so much force that her knees throbbed, Elahan kicked off the ceiling and dropped, bringing both arms down in a hammer blow. Her Holy Iron Breaker tore even air resistance to shreds as it smashed into Rodlin’s torso.

Rodlin barely managed to raise its left arm in time to block, but it couldn’t withstand the full impact. The giant arm was driven down, slamming into its face. The force that overflowed past its palm slammed into the golem’s intricately designed interior and temporarily degraded its performance and processing capacity. On top of that, the foot that Elahan had hammered earlier drove back into the ground, pinning it there and preventing any chance of slipping free.

This was as far as she could go. Having fulfilled her role, Elahan let go of the Holy Iron Breaker and jumped clear. She knew that if she tried to yank the weapon buried in the golem’s palm, she might get caught in whatever follow-up came next. Sure enough, Leon soared in on Icarus Wing, blasting past two sonic booms as he dove.

“All right. Let’s try this again.”

They had only one shot at this. If they missed this window, Rodlin wouldn’t fall for the same trick twice and would push them back hard. A golem personally crafted by a dragon, with self-repair as a matter of course—once the mana conduits recovered, they’d be right back to a stalemate. That was why Leon poured what he’d realized over the past month of grinding practice into the Holy Sword and scattered its light.

The first thing he had to bring out was a thrust. One that pierced space and the target together, pinning them in place.

“Grand Chariot, Wavering Light, Seventh Form: Alkaid.”

He drove in a single thrust with propulsion more than twice the speed of sound, then came to an abrupt halt as all that power left his body. A razor-sharp lance of swordlight shot out and punched straight through Rodlin.

Merak hadn’t worked, but the density of a thrust was not the same as that of a cut. He had used Icarus Wing to turn it into something like a lance charge; the resulting penetration was on a completely different level. Leon’s blade immediately traced the next stroke.

“Heavenly Core, First Form: Dubhe. Heavenly Jade, Second Form: Merak.”

He fired off two consecutive slashes, then twisted his body and drew a connecting stroke that linked those two lines into a triangle. This, so far, was the Four Stars in Vast Heavens, a pyramid of swordlight formed and crushed down onto Rodlin.

The left arm of Rodlin, still pinned by the Holy Iron Breaker, was pushed deeper into the golem’s face, and the pressure was strong enough to make its waist bend backward. It was probably heavier than setting a small castle right on top of it.

Even so, Rodlin held. Its stance had become unstable, its body listing to one side, but its durability still had room to spare. Even Four Stars in Vast Heavens could only damage part of the main body. The armor was that tough. And if its offensive power matched that insane defense? It was practically a walking White Peak Palace.

But Leon’s sword didn’t stop at four strokes. It was already carving out the fifth.

His wrist and elbow drew a smooth circle. The blade moved as if it were one with him, without a single snag, pushed along by the advice El-Cid had etched into his subconscious.

“Rotate your sword force without losing a single grain of power.”

Turn the impossible into reality. That was the higher realm of Grand Chariot.

“Sixth Form: Mizar. Chained Secret Technique.”

Guided by Mizar, the triangular pyramid began to spin. Once, twice, three times—at first the rotation was gentle, but it picked up speed faster and faster until the pyramid accelerated beyond the limits of human sight. Soon it reshaped itself into a cylinder, taking on power that left Four Stars in Vast Heavens far behind.

Having finally reproduced the technique, Leon murmured, “Five Star Chariot.”

As if answering his call, the cylindrical swordlight ramped up its rotation and bored straight in. And then, a sound that should never have come from Rodlin began to echo in Ground Zero.

With an unmistakable crack, fractures began to spread from the palm up through the arm, shoulder, and face. It tried to bolster its defense with what output remained in its mana conduits, but that, too, collapsed in a matter of seconds.

Five Star Chariot was a technique just two steps shy of the Grand Chariot’s completion. Against such a strike, any lower-grade defense was nothing more than paper.

Three seconds left until breach. The swordlight would reach its target before Rodlin’s defensive mode fully stabilized.

“That’s enough.”

If Albion hadn’t interfered right then, that is. With a loud boom, she casually leaped to the side of Five Star Chariot and twisted the swordlight away with a single punch.

The stronger a force pushed straight ahead, the weaker it became from the side. However, this was still something no sane person would ever attempt. Leon and his party stared at her, stunned.

“What’s with those pathetic faces?” Tilting her head, Albion said, “You’re better than I expected. I’ve seen something entertaining, so I’ll end my little temper tantrum here.”

Only then did Leon finally let his sword drop and relax.

“Phew.”

Even now that he could cast Five Star Chariot stably, the burden hadn’t lessened. If he’d used Corona on top of it, he would have ended up as wrecked as he’d been a month ago.

Still, a few deep breaths and his strength returned. Once he’d calmed down, the realization hit him.

Wait. She said this wasn’t a trial, it was to blow off steam, didn’t she?! he shouted inwardly at El-Cid.

El-Cid snickered, —I told you, didn’t I, my disciple. For a dragon, she’s annoyingly human.