Before the eyes of Rei, Zboz, and Paul — who stood ready with his ice-generating shield — Adria was captured and Dias lost consciousness.
Dias's subordinate had also blacked out from the pain of Byune's long-needle strikes.
Three battles had unfolded here. Every one of them had ended in victory for Rei's companions.
"…Well? What's your move? Your allies are all down, and the odds are overwhelmingly in our favor."
At Rei's words, delivered with the Death Scythe at the ready, Zboz flushed red with anger but fought down the urge to lash out.
Fighting on raw fury would certainly feel cathartic. But he never believed that giving in to rage would let him beat Rei. No — even at full strength, winning would be a tall order. Zboz understood the sheer gap in power that made him think so. Even with him and Paul attacking together, a head-on fight against Rei would be utterly hopeless.
(…Right. In a head-on fight, that is.)
Muttering inwardly, Zboz turned his attention to the trump card tucked inside his robes.
Honestly, he would rather not use it. But avenging Kabajid left no room to be picky about methods. He had never entertained the fantasy of defeating Rei without hurting himself in the process.
(If only I'd had a little more time, I could have finished the final adjustments… No, there's no point dwelling on that now. I stirred up multiple monster incidents for the sake of this experiment, after all. Though as a diversion, I'd hoped they'd cause a bit more chaos.)
Reflecting on everything he had done, Zboz felt a faint pang of regret that he couldn't have executed things more skillfully. But regardless… what he had to do remained unchanged.
He breathed in slowly, then out. Out, then in.
Crushing the last lingering traces of fear and hesitation through sheer willpower, he opened his mouth.
"Paul, hold him off until my preparations are complete. And once I'm ready… get as far away from me as you can."
"Are you going to use it?"
Paul asked without taking his eyes off Rei, watching his every movement, ice-generating shield at the ready.
Running a magic item shop gave Paul a fair depth of knowledge about such items. No — as someone who had once aspired to be an alchemist in his youth, he prided himself on having a deeper understanding of magic items than most.
Even in Paul's eyes, the trump card Zboz had created was highly effective when it came to breaking a deadlock.
…Provided it was a finished product.
He knew the risks. But for Zboz, it was far from the worst option. In fact, the thought that it would let him kill Rei with his own hands made it not quite the best choice — but as close to it as he could hope for.
"Stubborn to the end. Flying Slash!"
The slash unleashed from the swinging Death Scythe tore through the air straight toward Zboz.
If Zboz had a body as rugged as Paul's, that would be one thing. But for an alchemist like him to take Rei's Flying Slash head-on would mean injuries that were unquestionably life-threatening.
Yet before the slash could reach Zboz, Paul stepped in, raising his shield to generate a sheet of ice that deflected the attack.
"I won't let you through."
His words were brief, but the resolve behind them was anything but light.
Taking in Paul's determination, Rei shifted the Death Scythe to his left hand and drew a spear from the Misty Ring with his right.
From spearhead to butt cap, the entire weapon was a deep green — the Thorn Spear, currently the highest-performing spear in Rei's arsenal.
A magic item spear with a special ability perfectly suited to the situation at hand… a Magic Spear.
The Thorn Spear had appeared without warning, but Paul's expression didn't so much as flicker. He simply raised his shield in front of Zboz, silently staking his resolve to defend him no matter what came.
Seeing this, Rei took a few running steps with the Thorn Spear in hand, twisted his body to its limit, channeled magic into the weapon, and poured every ounce of that power into a single throw.
"Uoooooooooh!"
With a near-roaring battle cry, the Thorn Spear left Rei's hand. Imbued with magic, it flew at a speed better described as a streak of light than a thrown spear, bearing down dead on Paul.
Paul, naturally, wasn't about to stand and watch. He channeled magic into his shield, intending to deflect the projectile just as he had with the Flying Slash moments before.
He might not be able to stop it outright, but deflecting it should be possible — or so he reasoned as he poured magic into the shield and generated ice to reinforce it.
…Under normal circumstances, that judgment wouldn't have been wrong. The ice barrier he produced was so solid that an ordinary adventurer would have found it nearly impossible to shatter, and the inherent properties of ice meant that any weapon striking it would slip and glance off.
But… yes, but. Paul's opponent was Rei, Bearer of the Crimson Moniker — a man whose soul harbored magic power on an entirely different scale.
The Thorn Spear, propelled by both the magic channeled into it and Rei's own superhuman physical ability, struck in the next instant and punched clean through the ice shield.
Not shattering it. Not splitting it apart. Piercing through it.
Boring out just enough space for the shaft to pass, the magic-charged Thorn Spear tore through the ice barrier, then through the magic item shield that generated it, and finally through Paul's right arm — the arm gripping the shield — driving it into the ground.
"Guh!"
Even with his arm pinned to the earth, no scream escaped Paul's lips. Only a sharp, bitten-off groan.
But for Paul, the true trial was only just beginning.
The Thorn Spear embedded in his arm activated its ability, sprouting thorns.
Starting from the pierced arm, the thorns spread rapidly — first enveloping the limb entirely, then creeping from arm to shoulder, shoulder to torso.
"Ngh — kuh — damn it—!"
Being swallowed by thorns was something Paul had never experienced in his life. And though he wore leather armor, the thorns found the gaps between the plates, piercing through to break skin and tear into flesh.
That they stopped at the muscle without reaching bone was perhaps the one small mercy Paul could count.
Even so, there was no stopping the thorns from spreading across his body from the arm nailed to the ground. The shield that was supposed to protect Zboz had been shattered by the Thorn Spear. All that remained was the remnant of the ice shield, still partially intact where the spear had pierced through.
The ice shield, forged with every drop of magic Paul could muster, possessed formidable defensive power. It had been pierced, yes — but it should still hold long enough for Zboz to finish his preparations. Or so Paul told himself as he gritted his teeth against the thorns riddling his body and turned his gaze toward Zboz.
There, Zboz had drawn a glass bottle from his robes — not the belt at his waist — and was channeling magic into it, completing the final step. He raised the bottle, ready to down the glowing green liquid inside.
A moment's hesitation. Zboz knew full well that what he held was unfinished. It was something that had never been fully tested — something that could be called a mere theory on paper.
But if that theory was right, the contents of that bottle would grant him tremendous power.
To avenge Kabajid with his own hands.
With that thought burning in his chest, Zboz drained the bottle in a single gulp.
The viscous liquid slid down his throat without a hint of taste. He furrowed his brow at the sensation — but the next instant, even that small luxury of thought was gone.
A pulse. The feeling of something writhing inside his body struck Zboz like a hammer.
"Guh… GAAAAAAAAAH!"
What tore from his throat was a battle cry, a scream — or perhaps both. Either way, Zboz endured the sensation of something squirming within him.
Root-like, pulsing patterns surfaced beneath the skin of his face. And not just his face — the backs of his hands, visible past his robe sleeves, showed the same writhing lines.
If that was what could be seen, then it was easy for both Paul, watching helplessly… and Rei, who had thrown the Thorn Spear, to guess that those root-like patterns were crawling across his entire body.
"Suicide…? No, that can't be it. He did say something about a trump card. …But is it really fine to just take down that alchemist as things are?"
Even as the question crossed his mind, Rei decided that leaving things as they were would only invite trouble. Better to knock Zboz unconscious by force. He started forward — but after only a few steps, he kicked off the ground and threw himself sideways.
An ice spear, wickedly sharp, embedded itself in the spot where he had been standing a heartbeat before.
Rei's eyes tracked the trajectory back to its source. There, he found the ice shield — or rather, what used to be an ice shield.
There was no doubt it had been a shield of ice just moments ago. But what now sat in Rei's line of sight could no longer be called a shield by any stretch. The thin barrier had swelled in thickness, transforming into something far better described as a mass of ice.
That mass of ice shifted — and Rei kicked off the ground again.
Glancing back at where he'd just been standing, he found yet another ice spear jutting from the earth, exactly as expected.
Ice catching the fading light of dusk had a certain fantastical beauty to it. But Rei had no time to admire the scenery. The mass of ice was launching spear after spear in his direction.
"Tch — it had a function like this too!?"
Rei had been thoroughly convinced that Paul was devoted solely to defense with his shield. But the expression on Paul's face — right arm pinned to the ground by the Thorn Spear, more than half his body sheathed in thorns — was pure, undiluted shock.
And lying beside the immobilized Paul was the magic item shield, pierced through by the Thorn Spear.
A bad feeling surged through Rei, and he snapped his gaze back to the mass of ice. Was it possible that the magic item shield's destruction had sent the ice into a berserk state?
(But if it's berserk, why is it only attacking me? Paul's right there next to it.)
The ice was attacking Rei — and only Rei — with an accuracy far too precise to be called a malfunction. It was clearly abnormal.
But Rei's question was answered almost immediately. On the surface of the shattered shield lying beside Paul, a familiar pattern had surfaced.
The same root-like pattern that had marked the skin of the red Cyclops Rei had fought — and the same pattern now crawling across Zboz's contorted face.
"The shield!"
He didn't know the mechanism, but it was certain that the shield was influencing the mass of ice — and that influence was manifesting as this berserk onslaught.
Rei moved the instant he made that judgment. Cutting down the ice spears hurtling toward him with the Death Scythe, he kicked off the ground and charged the shield.
As if sensing the threat — or perhaps by sheer instinct — the mass of ice redoubled its barrage, firing spear after spear at Rei's closing form…
"Too bad for you."
At Rei's murmur, an enormous surge of magic power erupted from his body — condensing, compressing, intensifying.
Who were those words for? Paul, who had created the ice shield? The berserk ice itself? Or Zboz, riddled with root-like patterns across his entire body?
In any case, the magic gathering around Rei flared into visible red light… and in the next instant, Flame Emperor's Crimson Armor activated.
"Fire is extinguished by water. That's a fact."
As he spoke, the ambient temperature around him climbed a few degrees from the sheer heat radiating off the armor. Even so, given the true temperature of Flame Emperor's Crimson Armor, the modest rise showed that Rei was controlling the thermal output with precision.
Whether sensing danger or acting on pure reflex, the mass of ice hurled another volley of spears at him.
Rei's response was simple: he shifted the magic of the Flame Emperor's Crimson Armor enveloping his body.
That alone was enough. Every ice spear bearing down on him vanished entirely. And as if returning the favor, Rei gave a casual flick of his hand.
A portion of the crimson magic detaching from his armor shot forward — touched the mass of ice — and in the next instant, the entire formation was annihilated.
"But there are times when fire defeats water and ice. …Through evaporation."