Fairy Tale Chronicles

「Big Sister…」

In the end, she was never able to come to a mutual understanding with her half-sister. Unable to endure seeing her last moments, Aearis was ready to spill out tears…

「Aearis, don’t slip up!」

Layotte gave his sister a shout of warning. When she lifted her head to her brother’s tense voice, she noticed Barold, shouldering a magic circle drawn in the air and poised for a quick descent.

「Older Sister, Aearis! Do you have any protection magic that can splinter that power!?」

「Unfortunately, I don’t seem to have any on hand!」

「I’m sorry, we probably wouldn’t make it in time right now…」

Hearing their answers, Layotte made alternate preparations for a powerful move that he had saved for a situation like this for dropping an opponent’s speed. Douga crouched in order to raise his defense to the max so as to be prepared. As time went by like slow motion, their eyes focused on Hiroshi, who took something out of his bag and thrust it against Barold’s face as he charged in.

With unbelievable focus, all four of them immediately knew what it was that Hiroshi had thrown and almost wanted to immediately blurt out their surprise. Just a moment before they were about to, however, an incredible explosive sound rang out through the temple. The temple shook from the impact of the explosion simultaneously. After somehow making it through that vibration, Layotte had an odd expression on his face as he muttered.

「……No way, did he just……」

「……W-Well, at least we managed to escape the danger, Big Brother……」

「Although thanks to that, any sense of anxiety has been blown away……」

The serious atmosphere that had been here until now had vanished without a trace thanks to Hiroshi’s string of actions. Even Aearis, who had almost cried upon seeing Katrina in her final moments, had gone completely blank.

「……So in this situation, who’s more pitiful? Katrina, or Barold……」

Both of them were certainly small fries, but to end things like this? Elena couldn’t help but feel sympathy for them from the bottom of her heart for the first time, just because of how screwed up this all was.

「Sacred Strike!」

First, as if testing the waters, Julius threw in a Holy-type attack befitting of his position as a paladin before jumping back. After he had done that, a Dark-type magic blasted at Hiroshi, cancelled and destroyed.

「I am truly being underestimated if you think that amount of Holy power can actually work!」

Barold didn’t seem to have felt any pain, instead launching out a large amount of transparent black tentacles from the shadows. However, before they could reach anyone, they encountered Hiroshi and vanished.

「What, this is magic too！?」

While totally let down by how Barold’s unpleasant attack had literally no effect, Taiyou decided to throw a Smash uppercut. Stunned by how his attack was canceled by a non-magic attack, Barold took the hit and flew into the air.

「Break Spiral!」

「Shine Saber!」

When Hiroshi sent Barold flying in the air, Rayna and Julius let out a volley of powerful techniques so as to prevent him from regaining his balance. The slash that spread through his body in a spiral and the slash from the big, holy blades of light did not give him any grave wounds, but dealt enough damage to threaten him, and Barold’s posture crumbled.

「Haruna!」

Taking advantage of the timing, Makoto gave Haruna the signal. She nodded while singing an improvised song for Over-Accelerate, while Mio, silent, lay resistance enchantments on the weapon. As soon as the spell was activated, Makoto accelerated to a speed faster than the naked eye could detect, firing out a myriad of devastating attacks at Barold, still frozen in midair, before jumping back precisely at 50 seconds of real-world time before cancelling the spell and gulping down a stamina potion.

The dozen or so miasma bullets that Barold had unleashed out of frustration, as expected, did not put even a single scratch on Makoto, with 70% going to Hiroshi and the remaining 30% blocked by Douga, everything smashed without harming anyone.

「Mako, how’s your body?」

「No problem with 50 seconds!」

Mio called out to Makoto to confirm her status, and Makoto responded not without any sort of bluff; just plain conviction. In actuality, having practiced numerous times with Hiroshi and the others, she had eventually become able to use the skill multiple times in 50 second intervals without being hurt enough to have to use a potion. Level 600 hit points and stamina were not just for show. While her resistance and defense were inferior to Hiroshi’s, her being five times his level allowed her to have far more hit points than even a shut-in craftsman. She wouldn’t win in terms of overall survivability, but she wouldn’t die from every little thing.

「How vexing this goddess is!」

Barold hatefuly spat while becoming more and more tattered. As expected, the damage dealt by rushing at him a hundred times faster was fairly decent. Hiroshi was one thing, but Makoto’s power was a sight to behold. In addition, this time around, she didn’t merely ram a bunch of regular attacks into him, but was throwing out skills that didn’t run into delays and taking care to attack him to the point where they didn’t break. The skills she used were in fact all beginner skills, but the overall damage she did to him was to the point where he should absolutely be done for. All the advantage that he had obtained via his transformation had been snatched away, and he was fully aware of how helpless of a predicament he was in.

「But if that was your stupid trump card, I doubt you can use that more than once!」

With that being said, Barold wouldn’t be defeated that easily either. He was able to see the nature of the magic as well as see through its weaknesses in an instant. In actuality, just as Barold had pointed out, Haruna’s mana would have to regenerate in order to use it another time, and even without the mana issue, the only people who could use it in battle were Hiroshi, Makoto, and Mio. Julius and the other two could probably endure the magical acceleration, but they didn’t have a grasp on their limitations. Also, accelerating Makoto after she had already done so had too much risk and was out of the question, plus the very thought of carelessly making the tank, Hiroshi, fatigued was too scary. Besides, in terms of firepower for Hiroshi and Mio, even acceleration wouldn’t give them that much of a power-up.

Maybe if the caster, Haruna, had more power then things would be different, but as of right now she could only use it once with extreme difficulty; hardly a reliable trump card.

「I’ve seen through your weakness, fools! Your lives end here!」

Barold flew high up with his batlike, wyvernlike wings to where he was almost touching the ceiling of the temple’s reception hall. Storing up powerful miasma in his body, he began to rotate in order to draw a magic circle. Seeing this, Hiroshi realised that he could not fully defend against this attack by any fair means.

（This sucks! It’ll pierce right through!）

Most likely, the next attack to come would be a full-on assault, accelerated to the max with magic. A purely physical attack might be different, but charging in like that with plenty of speed would make Hiroshi’s trump card difficult to maintain in terms of weight. Hiroshi himself wouldn’t take all that much damage, and Douga would also probably get next to no wounds. Makoto, Julius, and Rayna wouldn’t become incapacitated even if they were launched flying because of their overwhelming amount of hit points. Not even Mio would really be an issue.

However, Haruna and Tatsuya were much closer to the line. Even Layotte didn’t seem to have as much life force as the others, so if he were to make one wrong move, there would be no guarantee on his life. Elena and Aearis were out of the question. Now, it wasn’t like there wasn’t an optimistic outcome where the seasoned tank, Douga, used his finesse in order to protect the three royals.

（Is…Is there nothing we can do!?）

While flustered internally, Hiroshi instinctively activated Outface. Seeing him out of the corner of their eyes, the other members let out a volley of projectiles so as to keep their opponent in check. Elena and Aearis, who had actually succeeded in taking Katrina off guard, assisted them with backup fire. However…

「Don’t think that you can stop me with those petty tricks!」

With the speed of his revolution and irregularity of his movements, it was difficult to say that they were putting up much of a resistance in terms of hindering him. Some of Mio’s shots were barely hitting him, but weren’t affecting him enough to be very damaging. Aearis had already been busy with purifying Katrina, so her power was ebbing. Seeing that these interferences were decreasing one by one, he took it as an opportunity to increase his speed further, still carrying the magic circle that had been written with miasma.

（Oh yeah! What if I do that!!）

In order to further realize the idea that had flashed in his head as the other guy began to quickly descend, Hiroshi panicked as he took it out from his bag. Barold aimed for that spot, plunging forward.

「Take that!!」

Able to take it out of the bag in the nick of time, Hiroshi held out a huge pome that was about double the size of an average watermelon and threw it mercilessly at Barold’s face. Everyone gawked at this scene, especially because this was such a dire situation. Regardless, the speed of the pomegranate increased to a hazardous degree as it burst into his face, causing a large-scale explosion enough to shake the entire temple. Completely losing his balance from the incredible explosion, Barold was slammed into the opposing wall.

「Hell yeeeah! I thought so!!」

「Wha-!?」

Suppressing the shock wave with Around Guard, Hiroshi made a fist bump as Haruna exclaimed in surprise. The situation was so unexpected that the song itself was completely interrupted.

「He-Hey, Hiroshi!」

「Whazzup?」

「Pomes don’t usually…make such ridiculous explosions, right!?」

「Well yeah, if you mean regular pomes.」

Hiroshi readily agreed to Makoto’s objection. In actuality, the explosive power of pomes could at most only reach bone fractures if things went south. No matter how you slice it, they simply did not have the sort of extreme explosive power to send a five meter-long organism charging with all their might flying off ten meters into a wall and smashing through it.

「You do something again, Hiro?」

「Was thinkin’ that the taste or nutritional value would do the trick. Back over where we were, I secretly mixed in some hot spring water ‘n a special plant fertilizer blend ‘n had it propagate a bit.」

No one could stop their faces from gaping at just how mad Hiroshi’s reasoning was. Incidentally, in terms of the pome’s ecology, not only could you attach the calyx to the hot spring, but you could even put the torso itself into the hot spring and it would grow leaves all the same. In other words, if you were to separate the calyx and torso and put them in the hot spring, what would have originally grown into only one pome would be two instead. It would take time and effort, but using this unique capability, it was possible to artificially hasten its growth.

「By the way, seems like the taste ’n nutritional balance of a pome tends to be proportionate to its explosive potential, so I bet that there pome right now was purty darn succulent ’n rich in nutrients.」

「Don’t even think about cooking with that scary thing!!」

Haruna’s objection reverberated throughout the temple. The tense atmosphere had vanished in an instant, leaving them with a somewhat indefinable one instead.