Carisia was thinking.
Right now, what is the best choice she could make at this moment?
A sigh mixed with regret escaped her as she realized that she should have followed Orthes when he disappeared, chasing someone suspicious.
To stay behind on the front lines against the psychic parasite to fill the gap left by Orthes was a mistake, wasn’t it?
Putting away her staff, Carisia headed toward Kine.
“Uh, Boss?”
Kine, startled by the sudden appearance of her boss, and Kneamon, looking quite troubled, gazed in her direction. Without any further explanation, Carisia added,
“Everyone step back.”
“Why…?”
Kine’s questioning was reasonable. The mages she had gathered through her political maneuvering were essentially all the mages gathered in Algoth City. Retreating with this much power was a foolish choice.
Even now, Blasphemia and Carisia alone were putting the psychic parasite in a disadvantaged position, so wouldn’t they seize the opportunity immediately if they all charged together?
Carisia calmly shook her head.
“It will get swept up.”
The one who first understood the true meaning behind her quiet declaration was Kneamon. Unlike Kine, who was pondering over how strong the psychic parasite was, Kneamon knew of methods like the Bubble of Silence that were “sufficient to sweep others up.”
“What are you planning to do?”
Kneamon’s voice did not tremble because he was already prepared. Whatever means that woman, who was Orthes’s superior, would employ would surely far surpass his imagination.
“Just an ordinary method. It’s a by-product of a field that anyone in large-scale construction would study at least once.”
With that, Carisia wrapped her staff once more. Kneamon, trying to convince Kine that they should help, withdrew the mages behind them.
*
Niobe, leading the battle against the Amimone Tower mutation, felt that something had changed. It wasn’t just the increasing speed of the mutation.
“Is there no fire support?”
The massive offensive magic that Orthes had unleashed had suddenly stopped. It seemed the artifact had run out of charging magic power.
This meant that the battle of attrition would disadvantage Blasphemia. Niobe recalled how Orthes had reacted the last time an Extra-dimensional Storm struck Algoth City.
Feeling it was his duty to report back to the Blasphemia headquarters, Niobe maneuvered to escape Algoth City. Though Orthes was nowhere to be seen now, he would surely say the same thing again.
“Give up on the Amimone Tower! Fall back on the front lines! I will take on the attacks of the mutations and buy time, everyone retreat! Immediately report the current situation to headquarters and await further instructions!”
Other Panoptes agents, who had been facing the Followers of Superstition, also began to retreat. With this, Niobe felt he had fulfilled his duties as a commander.
Niobe calmly accepted death. By maximizing the internal magic power of the mana stone implanted through Blasphemia’s enhancement techniques, they could potentially create a significant explosion.
He could inflict injuries on the mutations severe enough that they would have to focus on regeneration. Just as Niobe was about to mouth the self-destruct code.
The attacks from the mutations ceased.
It wasn’t because they had met their end. Slowly warping space itself, leaking out Extra-dimensional Magic, it was staring somewhere.
The “staring” was not a metaphor but a literal description of the word. The distorted spaces rearranged in the air, resembling the form of a gigantic face. The huge eyes created by chaos were focused on a single point.
It was the direction where the offensive magic had been fired just moments ago.
Niobe sensed a huge magic power pulsing from the location where those eyes were staring. It was a wave that made him momentarily lose balance and stagger.
“Senpai?”
Orthes had undoubtedly recharged his artifact again.
*
Carisia unleashed her magic power without reservation. She deactivated all auxiliary magic like optical staffs and concentrated her magic power on a point in the air. The psychic parasite, half-transformed, couldn’t ignore the enormous magic that would surely evolve into a great spell to strike her.
Her own method was essentially a gamble. The amount of magic power she had was far too great for any individual to handle, and she herself couldn’t escape the limits of an individual yet.
Thus, she concentrated her magic power without trying to put it into a specific spell, fearing that she might evaporate both herself and the surroundings of the Amimone Tower if she made a mistake.
Had the parasite realized that it was simply gathering magic power without preparing subsequent spells, it wouldn’t have given Carisia a second thought.
However, fortunately, the parasite lacked that level of insight. Perhaps the acting skills she had established while continuously dealing with Orthes were at play.
“You…”
The parasite found it difficult to assess what Carisia truly was. At first, it saw her as the perfect sacrifice; then, for a moment when it was deceived by Orthes, it considered her a new generation crafted by a creator.
Now that all of Orthes’s words had been revealed as cunning tricks, it had given no thought to Carisia.
However, facing her one-on-one now raised many questions. The unlimited power of the creator was swirling inside that physical body.
There was no way Orthes’s words could be true. The creator was surely watching them from a distant celestial realm in incomprehensible silence, detached from the strife of the lower realms.
“But that….”
It couldn’t be explained without the power of the creator. Confused, the parasite decided to choose the most efficient defense, which was to attack.
Since the enemy was preparing a high-level spell, its instinctual calculation was to offset that with an equal or greater power.
Carisia had been with someone so difficult to read for quite a long time. Even trying to guess their thoughts through their gaze turned into squinting, and any attempt to infer emotion from their words only resulted in continued polite honorifics.
But now, Carisia could read even the innermost thoughts of such a person with ease. The parasite’s bewilderment was a distinctly easy emotion to understand.
Now, all the faculties of the psychic parasite were invested in constructing a new spell to overwhelm Carisia’s magic. Carisia analyzed the parasite’s spell and smiled.
She had won.
*
I felt an ominous sense rising. It was not the usual shivers but a dire sense that if I didn’t realize it immediately, my life could be at stake.
But there was no time to ponder over the unexpected anxiety I felt right now. The silver web trailing behind me was just right behind me, hot on my heels.
In an instant.
‘Eyes’ sounded an alarm as if in a seizure. The entire world turned crimson with letters. I felt more perplexed than afraid at the sudden turn of events, for this was what the red letters proclaimed:
10 seconds to detonation.
“Carisia!”
I instinctively spat out the name of the culprit. What in the world have you done?!
*
Ever since arriving in Algoth City, Carisia had consistently committed acts of destruction. She was prepared for the attention of the Panoptes to be drawn to her destructive acts. This was occurring parallel to the search for Argyrion.
Even up until the last day of the tower master selection, despite failing to find Argyrion, the destruction was ongoing. The reason was simple.
To lay explosives.
While Kaicle and other directors were engrossed in creating the Artificial Ten Commandments, there remained only shells of relics, stripped of divine power. If it were Orthes, he would have suggested selling them as antiques, while chief miner Bertrand would have insisted on keeping them for their historical significance, even if merely as decoration.
Carisia thought, shouldn’t she create a prototype before using the Artificial Ten Commandments as bombs?
Having gathered relics that had emptied of divine power but retained their ability to store abilities, she began to craft magic bombs for that reason.
Of course, she originally had no plans to plant such bombs in Algoth City. During the battle with Argyrion, she had only thought to throw bombs over the portal if they tried to escape through space magic.
Carisia’s change of plans to begin laying explosives started after hearing the psychic parasite’s intention to target the Mage Tower Core of the Amimone Tower. It was her trump card in case the parasite were to seize the Amimone Tower.
The timing was also appropriate. As soon as the tower master selection began, Carisia attacked other candidates, leading other factions to engage in candidate hunting as well. While the rate of competition was unexpectedly rapid, the expansion of the battle also worked in Carisia’s favor.
Panoptes had run low on personnel to send for reconnaissance at the battle site. Thanks to their tacit approval of mage duels among survivors as “We only need to evaluate the ones who survive anyway!”, Carisia managed to place her explosives in the proper position.
The means of detonation involved transmitting light waves of a specific wavelength in a defined pattern. This high-level optical sensor, capable of detecting beyond the infrared range, was a collaboration between dwarf Bertrand and Lampades.
Carisia sent out the light wave that would detonate the excess relic-encased magic bombs she had buried abundantly around the underground of the Amimone Tower. This occurred while the parasite was exhausting its magic sensing capabilities on the magic power Carisia was emitting.
And then there was light.
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