The Unwanted Undead Adventurer: Volume 11, page 15
Once Lorraine saw that Fuana had fired a Fotiá Volídas, she began moving to the right to get out of its way. Naturally, she’d enhanced her physical abilities with mana, so she could move far faster than your average person. In addition, although she was a mage, she knew her way around non-magical combat too, so her movements were practiced and smooth.
Back when she’d first arrived at Maalt, all she’d had was her skill as a mage. She hadn’t been able to handle trips into the forest or fights with monsters at all, but she’d spent the last ten years diligently training and learning. She was lightning quick on the uptake at pretty much any subject to begin with, and a hard worker on top, as well as extremely intelligent—way more than a guy like me. Before I knew it, she’d learned how to move quite smoothly, with an agility you wouldn’t expect from a mage.
I was happy to see her growth, because I’d been watching her since way back. That said, at the end of the day, she was a mage, so it was rare for her to go into a fight with a sword in her hand.
For this fight, all she was holding was a single, small wand. She could cast magic just fine without it, but when it came to mana expenditure, firing speed, and the like, it made a difference. Not only that, but she’d also told me that she could use it to feint attacks against her opponent. After all, since most mages fired spells from the tips of their wands, her opponent would unconsciously focus on it, despite the fact that Lorraine could fire a spell from anywhere she wished. If the tip of her wand was all they were thinking about and her spell suddenly came from directly below, they’d be in for a shock.
I was getting off topic, wasn’t I?
Lorraine dodged Fuana’s Fotiá Volídas, but the fireball suddenly veered off from its direct course at a right angle and began pursuing her.
This was the strength of the relatively simple-to-cast Fotiá Volídas. After you fired it, you could easily manipulate its flight path. You could do this with other spells too, but the more advanced you got, the harder it was to do.
In that sense, Fotiá Volídas was easy to handle. Needless to say, Lorraine would be prepared for that. She smiled at the pursuing fireball, then ran directly toward Fuana. Right before she reached her, she pulled a dagger from her waist and aimed it at Fuana’s neck. You didn’t see her doing it often, but this was in Lorraine’s repertoire too. Then, the barest moment before the fireball hit her back, she dodged to the left.
The fireball, unable to pursue her, continued straight toward Fuana. Lorraine had been too fast—even more so than earlier. She must have increased the amount of mana she was using to physically enhance herself at that moment.
Just when I thought the fireball would hit Fuana head-on, she stretched her hand out toward it and let out a shout.
“Haah!”
It was suicidal. It went without saying, but magic wasn’t so convenient that your own spells wouldn’t harm you. What should have happened was Fuana’s arm exploding into flames, but instead, the fireball suddenly vanished, leaving only an unharmed Fuana standing there. While that had been going on, Lorraine had backed off, and the two were now facing each other at a distance similar to the start of the fight.
“Is that her ‘Spellwise’ ability?” I asked the old man, who was nearby.
He nodded. “‘Spellwise’ is just what she calls herself, but yes. Like I told you earlier, it lets her see the weakest part in the structure of a completed spell. You might be tempted to think of it similarly to magic eyes, but while those allow a person to perceive things such as the flow or amount of mana, Fuana’s ability is fundamentally different. Hmm, how should I explain this? To use the body as an example, if a person’s magic eyes can see the places where blood gathers and allows them to estimate where the heart and brain are, then Fuana just knows where the heart and brain are at a glance.”
“I’m not sure I get it. The person with magic eyes would know where the heart and brain are too, right? Based on the locations where blood gathers.”
“Yes, but they would have to go through the process of reasoning to realize that. Fuana knows it intuitively, in an instant. She doesn’t have to think; that’s just how it is for her. Keep watching, and you’ll see what I mean.”
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So she could see the weakest point in a spell at a glance. That seemed like a strong ability—enough to make her a natural enemy of any mage. It was equal to Vaasa’s resistance to magic.
“Fuana must be a bad matchup for Lorraine then too, huh?” I said.
The old man tilted his head slightly. “Not necessarily. Vaasa nullifies magic without doing anything, but that isn’t the case for Fuana. Look.”
I did as he said and saw that Lorraine was circling Fuana at a run, looking amused and firing spells at regular intervals. Vráchos Volídas, Hydor Volídas, Anemos Volídas—using the most fundamental of spells of each element, Lorraine cast projectiles of earth, water, and wind one after another.
Nonetheless, Fuana brought her hand up and, with a burst of mana, erased every single one before they touched her. When she’d done that to the Fotiá Volídas earlier, it had looked like she’d touched the fireball, but strictly speaking, she’d just unleashed mana from her palm to disrupt the structure of the spell before it hit her.
Now that was useful. But while I’d have loved to learn that trick for myself, I wasn’t capable of determining a spell’s weak point at a glance. Spell structures weren’t fixed, so their weak points were always moving. I could see that even when the spells coming at her were the same ones, Fuana would reach her palm out to slightly different spots each time. In short, it was a feat that you could only pull off if you had her unique ability.
I figured even Lorraine would have trouble dealing with it, but when I looked over at her expression, it was still perfectly at ease. In fact, she looked like she was having fun. It wasn’t the face she made when she’d landed in a sticky situation, but the one she made when she’d found something that caught her interest. Whether it was with her experiments or whatever else, I knew the look she made when things weren’t going well, and right now, she wasn’t wearing it. In other words, she was convinced she still had this in the bag.
Next, perhaps because she’d cycled through the elements enough times to satisfy her, Lorraine cast a different spell. At first, I thought it was a Fotiá Volídas, but upon closer inspection, there was a chunk of rock in the center of it.
There were spells that launched flaming boulders, but it didn’t seem like this was one of them. The reason was because the boulders in those spells would be red-hot by the fire that enveloped them, but the rock in whatever Lorraine had cast was still earthy in color.
Lorraine was more than capable of making that kind of spell adjustment if she wanted to, but I didn’t think that had been the case here. As for why, it was because Fuana, the target of the spell, dodged it instead of erasing it like she’d done with all the others. If that had been a regular flaming boulder spell, I doubted she would’ve had to do that.
As I was pondering that, I looked at the old man.
He nodded. “That was clever.”
He must have seen my quizzical look, because he elaborated.
“That can’t have been a flaming boulder spell. I dare say it was a Fotiá Volídas layered over a Vráchos Volídas.”
I nodded to myself. That was one of the explanations I’d been considering too, but I still wasn’t exactly sure what the point of it was.
The old man continued. “In short, it was a two-spell combination. If Fuana wanted to erase it...”
That was enough for me to connect the rest of the dots myself. “Oh, I get it. Since it’s two spells, it’d take her extra time.”
“Correct. What’s more... Well, this is just a guess, but from the way Fuana was discharging her mana earlier, I think the weak points in Fotiá Volídas and Vráchos Volídas are considerably far apart. When combined together, aiming for both in a single moment must be quite difficult.”
So basically, it was like trying to pierce the hearts of two animals with a single arrow while hunting. Not even a master at their craft would be able to do that. No wonder Fuana was forced to dodge out of the way. That was a surprisingly simple-to-exploit loophole in her ability. She could still get a lot done before her opponent discovered that, of course, but maybe all the ability amounted to in the end was being a first-encounter killer.
As I was thinking it over, the old man added, “Still, there aren’t many folk out there who can do that. Even if you only use simple spells, layered magic is an advanced technique that consumes a taxing amount of mana. It’s a double-edged sword that can harm the caster if they let their control over it slip. You’d have to be awfully confident in your spell control to use it in a real fight.”
Wearing a lot of mana-amplifying objects at once was supposed to cause them to interfere with each other and explode, but Lorraine was the kind of woman who wore them anyway, so...
Despite how she appeared, I thought that maybe “reckless” was a better word for her than “confident,” but for the sake of Lorraine’s dignity, I figured I’d keep quiet. Because while she definitely had the control, it was also true that sometimes her mad schemes made me want to ask her if she was all right in the head.
That said, regarding this current fight against Fuana, I thought Lorraine had made the correct choice. A combination of two or more spells would protect their individual weak points, so Fuana wouldn’t be able to make full use of her ability. Running would be her only option.
The fight continued like that for a while, and I began to think this would be an overwhelming victory for Lorraine. But then she cast another Fotiá Volídas and Vráchos Volídas combination, and Fuana stood her ground and faced it.
Was she going to try and erase it? I’d thought that was impossible. However, what Fuana did was something new. This time, she kept her hand closed, formed a fist, and aimed it straight at the incoming spell. She then punched straight forward, and with a loud bang, struck the flame-encased chunk of rock dead-on. Her fist caved all the way into the rock...and then the spell vanished.
It was abundantly clear that Fuana had just erased it. The way she’d done it was pretty much entirely by brute force, and I wasn’t sure it was sustainable, but the old man looked as though he’d expected this to happen. He’d explained to us earlier that something similar to this might happen, so I doubted Lorraine had been caught off guard. As for what “this” meant...
“Fuana’s a mage, but she’s also a magic brawler,” the old man said. “As you just saw, her weapons are her fists.”
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From that point on, Fuana’s movements changed. Her reactions hadn’t been slow when Lorraine had been firing spells at her earlier, but neither had they been especially fast. Now, however...
Fuana kicked off the ground and closed the distance with Lorraine. It was like the final pounce of a carnivorous predator chasing its prey: powerful and intense.
If Lorraine had been a herbivore, you could imagine that she would have panicked, run, and ended up pinned to the ground in what would have been her final moments. She wasn’t prey though. She was a hunter that used her intellect and exceptionally quick wits to herd predators into traps.
As Fuana closed in on her, Lorraine calmly watched as though merely obeying her natural instincts. Then, just before her opponent’s fist reached her, she threw up a shield spell to protect herself.
Of course, Fuana still had her ability. Even though a shield spell was intrinsically uniform in strength, there would still be minor mana deviations within it. Evidently, she could see the weak point created by those distortions too.
With a crack, Lorraine’s shield shattered before Fuana’s fist touched it, but it took more than that to get the better of a woman like Lorraine.
Fuana immediately went to pull her fist back, but she couldn’t. No matter how hard she pulled, it wouldn’t move, and her eyes widened in surprise. I looked closer, and saw that the shield spell had surrounded her arm like shackles, restraining it in midair.
The shield Lorraine had cast earlier must have been double-layered. A fragile, obvious-to-see one to bait Fuana into lowering her guard, and a second one to open up and clamp back down on where she punched through the first, to restrain her movements.
That had been Lorraine’s plan for her spells, and it had worked. Fuana was locked in place. That wasn’t to say Fuana couldn’t attack with the rest of her body, since only her hand was trapped, but it wasn’t Lorraine’s fighting style to get in close anyway.
Lorraine, seeing that Fuana couldn’t move, smiled and began concentrating her mana. She then aimed at Fuana’s arm and fired a thick bolt of lightning. It gave off a loud crackling sound, and Fuana spasmed violently before beginning to fall toward the ground. For a moment, I thought that Lorraine had won, but then I reconsidered. I wasn’t sure that would be enough to take Fuana down.
Fuana, who was falling backward, did a quick flip, landed on her feet, and jumped back to create distance from Lorraine. Smoke rose from her smoldering body, and you couldn’t call her completely unharmed, but she hadn’t lost her fighting spirit. Her eyes still blazed with fiery light like those of a carnivorous animal. It was obvious that Fuana was still raring to go.
Out of everybody, Lorraine seemed the most pleased to realize that. The look she was giving Fuana said: “I’d be disappointed if you went down that easily.”
This was definitely a match worth watching.
“If she could move like that, she should’ve done so from the beginning,” I murmured.
“She does start out like that sometimes,” the old man replied. “But she must have thought it wouldn’t work on Lorraine.”
“In what sense?”
“Lorraine’s a mage, but she’s quite capable with close-quarter combat, no?”
“I guess so...” I gave a vague answer since I didn’t want to give away any specifics.
The old man caught on and only nodded in response before continuing. “In which case, it’s not hard to imagine she’d have defenses prepared to handle a sudden charge from the outset of the match. And even if she didn’t, well, you saw what she could do with those shields.”
“That makes sense. I spar against her sometimes, and whenever I run at her recklessly, she can deal with it more often than not.”
I still sparred against Lorraine, even after my body had become undead. It was fundamentally for both of our training, but to her, it was also experimentation. Ever since I’d become an undead, I’d been developing new abilities on a regular basis. In our spars, we could test the extent of those changes mid-combat.
One example of that was Division, where the me of today would have a better handle on it than the me of yesterday. It wasn’t a big difference though—just stuff like being able to extend my patch of darkness a smidgen farther, or being a fraction of a second faster. In a fight, however, that could be huge. Victory was decided in the quickest of instants, after all.
“I believe Fuana dislikes such recklessness,” the old man said.
“That’s surprising,” I replied. “I had her pinned as the type who only made reckless moves.”
“Despite appearances, she does her thinking where it counts. Although I suppose that’s something else she does instinctively, so maybe you could say she doesn’t think at all, but that’s semantics. At any rate, she was likely trying to catch Lorraine off guard.”
Now that he mentioned it, I thought he was probably right. “Good point. If I was a mage and my opponent made it seem as if she could only move like a mage, I’d be taken aback if she suddenly came at me like that.”
That must have been what Fuana had been aiming for. Currently, she was moving around the arena as freely as she pleased. It was less magic and more the movements of a beast. Most people would never expect a small girl clad in oversized robes like her to be capable of moving like that.
It went without saying that judging a book by its cover wasn’t a good thing to do, but at the end of the day, appearance was always the first thing people formed impressions from.
The old man nodded. “Indeed. Although, she seems to have failed at it. Lorraine was quick to see through her ability. She must have been forced to discard her plan and resort to her fists.”
In other words, Lorraine currently had the upper hand. To prove that, although it looked as if she was the one being pressed right now, Fuana’s attacks had yet to breach her defenses.
I wondered if that meant this would be over soon...
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“Is this all?” Lorraine asked, looking straight into the eyes of her opponent. They hadn’t lost their fighting spirit, even though the girl’s body was scorched. “I’ll be settling this soon then.”
It was hard to tell from appearances which of them was the villain in this scenario. Lorraine was a virtuous adventurer and Fuana was a member of an assassin’s organization, so perhaps you could call the latter the evil one, but currently, Lorraine looked like a villainess from every perspective—like a witch who was looking down her nose at an innocent young girl and slowly driving her into a corner.
“This isn’t over yet!” Fuana shouted, then kicked off of the ground.
Lorraine knew that her opponent’s body should have taken considerable damage from her lightning, but the girl moved so fast that she couldn’t tell at all. She was on Lorraine in an instant, her fist already mid-swing, but Lorraine was protected by a countless number of shield spells. Although Fuana’s fist smashed through them, one by one, she recast them just as fast—no, faster—preventing the girl’s attack from ever reaching her. And that wasn’t all.
“Barqharba Sijn.”
Her offense wasn’t lacking either. As she finished her chant, ten spears of lightning appeared from the sky and slammed into the ground, encircling Fuana. The sky above was still clear, and Fuana made to leap up and escape, but before she could, more lightning manifested and completed the prison. Then...
