"Flame, thy power is my power. Burn thy magical power at my will and scorch the enemy. Thy traits are spreading conflagration, hellfire. Increase thy firepower with my magical power as the primer."
Rei held the Death Scythe and chanted the spell.
The spell produced ten fireballs.
It was only possible because the spiral staircase was wide enough for even a giant to traverse. If the stairs where Rei and his party stood had been an ordinary staircase, casting this spell would likely have been impossible.
"Ten Fireballs."
As Rei swung the Death Scythe, the ten fireballs shot straight downward.
However, precisely because there were ten of them, carefully guiding all those fireballs was no easy task. That was why the released fireballs did not land on the giants near the Black Crystal, but instead struck the edges of the horde.
The moment they landed, violent explosions erupted across the area.
And that was not all that was unleashed. From Elena, several Wind Blades flew forth, while Marina used Spirit Magic to transform the floor where the giants had been sleeping into stone spears that impaled them from below.
Yet the only attacks that landed properly were from those three.
Byune, refusing to be outdone, hurled Long Needles—but they barely pierced the giants' skin. As for Vihera, lacking any means of ranged attack, she could do nothing but watch in silence.
Of course, if she had thrown one of the weapons stored in Rei's Misty Ring—such as a short sword—dealing damage to the giants would not have been difficult. But rather than killing or wounding a giant or two, Vihera judged it wiser to stay ready to respond the instant anything happened to Rei and the others while they focused on ranged attacks. Thus, she dedicated herself to guarding against emergencies.
For Vihera, who found pleasure in combat, it was a bitter decision.
At any rate, the onslaught from Rei and his party tore through the giants clustered around the Black Crystal, dealing damage one after another.
Some giants died in a single strike, but many others sustained injuries ranging from moderate to severe, even if not fatal.
The number of giants gathered underground was roughly fifty. Nearly half of them perished effortlessly from that single attack.
Many of the survivors bore wounds of varying severity as well.
"Now then, how will they respond?"
If the giants stayed put, Rei and his party could simply keep hammering them with ranged attacks from their current position until every last one was annihilated. But if they came charging after them...
As that thought crossed Rei's mind, the giants that had been curled up and sleeping began to rise.
Despite their injuries, they stood as if feeling nothing at all and surveyed their surroundings. Once they determined there were no enemies nearby, their gazes swept outward.
From there, it took no time at all to spot Rei and his party. The giants found them with ease.
"GRAAAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAHH!"
In an instant, battle cries erupted simultaneously from the surviving giants. Those roars were laden with rage beyond measure—the kind of fury that screamed of wanting to kill, slaughter, and crush the ones before them this very instant. Such hatred was plain to anyone who heard them.
"Seems we might have gone a little overboard. Looks like that was the last straw."
Rei muttered, but before anyone could respond, the giants made their move.
Driven to act on their fury, and to crush the source of it, the giants broke into a full charge toward the spiral staircase.
A horde of over twenty giants thundering toward them all at once—their momentum was beyond imagination. Giants were enormous to begin with, as the name implied. Seeing such creatures charging together, brimming with fury and killing intent, would normally be enough to send anyone into a panic.
Unfortunately for the giants, Rei and his party were far from ordinary.
The moment they confirmed the horde was charging, they retreated up the staircase to the fourth basement floor. Better to fight on an empty floor than risk destroying the Black Crystal on the fifth.
Under normal circumstances, such a retreat might be called suicidal, given that a giant's strength was more than any ordinary human could handle. But to Rei and his party, these were not opponents they couldn't deal with—and more importantly, fighting on the fourth floor had the advantage of not having to face a large number of giants at once.
The spiral staircase was sturdy enough for giants to climb, but physically, only two could advance at a time. Even that required both to carefully accommodate each other's movements—a condition completely impossible in the berserk, blood-rushing state they were currently in.
If two giants tried to climb the stairs together in such a state, there was a very real chance one would knock the other off the edge. A giant sent tumbling from the staircase would naturally slam into the floor of the fifth basement level. Worse, it would crash down onto the comrades still trying to climb, inevitably causing further injury.
Yet the giants, driven by rage, scrambled up the spiral staircase again, treating such setbacks as insignificant. Whether knocked off the stairs or crushed by a falling comrade, neither gave them pause.
Such was the intensity of their fury—a wrath so fierce that simply killing those responsible would not satisfy them. They would not rest until they had devoured every scrap of flesh, every eyeball, every fragment of bone, and drained every last drop of blood.
Driven by that fury, the giants charged up the spiral staircase.
The first to race up the stairs and reach the fourth basement floor didn't even realize it had arrived first. It simply spotted Rei and his party standing a short distance away and let out a roar of rage before charging forward to crush them.
Even Jaya had apparently decided that leaving the giants completely naked was unsightly. The giants wore animal fur wrapped around their waists, so they were not so hideous as to be unbearable to look at.
"Well, even so... the moment blood rushes to their heads, they're nothing but easy prey... take this!"
With that murmur, Rei took a few running steps and hurled the spear in his hand—Crimson, the Twilight Spear.
He had swapped it in from the Misty Ring the moment they returned to the fourth floor, replacing the Death Scythe. Propelled by Rei's inhuman physical ability and the magical power infused into it, the Twilight Spear cut through the air in a straight line toward the giant.
The giant leading the pack never imagined something would come flying at it. No—so thoroughly dominated by rage, it probably couldn't even process that an object was hurtling toward it. By the time it registered that something had come flying, its head was already pierced and shattered by the Twilight Spear, snuffing out its consciousness completely.
The Twilight Spear did not claim just the lead giant. The giant right behind it also took the spear through the head, and the second giant's skull slightly deflected its trajectory. Thanks to that deflection, the third giant was spared a dead-center piercing—instead, about half of its head was shattered.
The first three giants to reach the fourth basement floor had their heads shattered and lost their lives in an instant.
The spear that had claimed three giant lives embedded itself halfway—no, roughly eighty percent of the way—into the wall of the fourth basement floor. Pulling it out would normally have been a struggle, but when Rei willed it, the Twilight Spear vanished from the wall as though it had been an illusion, reappearing the next moment in his hand.
"I'd like to say 'as expected'... but what's the deal with you taking out every giant that shows up right from the start?"
Vihera spoke with admiration, but her expression quickly shifted to one of dissatisfaction. She was clearly asserting that she had wanted to fight.
"Even so. There are plenty of enemies, so there's plenty for you too, Vihera."
"Then I'm going next. If it gets to be too much for me, I'll call for help."
With that, Vihera broke into a run toward the healthiest-looking giant among those that had climbed up to the fourth basement floor.
Rei had some slight misgivings about her rushing ahead, but judging it couldn't be helped given Vihera's personality, he turned to the others and issued instructions.
"The giants come out from that staircase, at most two at a time. Leave the vanguard to Vihera. We'll provide support from the rear."
"Considering Vihera's personality, it can't be helped."
"I suppose so."
"Mm."
Elena, Marina, and Byune each nodded and moved to support Vihera.
Elena shifted Mirage into its whip form and attacked from midguard, while Marina attacked from the rear guard using both Spirit Magic and a bow.
Byune also attacked the giants with Long Needles, but while her strength could pierce a giant's skin, she couldn't sever flesh or bone. As a result, she targeted the giants' eyes, mouths, and noses—the spots they would find most unpleasant.
It was a deeply unsatisfying method for Byune, forcing her to confront her own lack of strength, but she judged it was the only thing she could do in her current state and threw one Long Needle after another.
...Contrary to Byune's own frustration, even for giants in what could be called a semi-berserk state, having Long Needles hurled at their eyeballs, mouths, and noses was apparently quite unpleasant. They tried to block the incoming needles in irritation, but there was no way they could so easily deflect the Long Needles Byune threw.
"GAAAAAAAARGH!"
One giant bellowed in frustration and shifted its target from Vihera to Byune, intent on reducing the insolent attacker to a lump of flesh.
"Do you think I would allow such a thing so easily?!"
"GRAAAAH!"
With a sharp cry, Elena's Mirage lashed out in whip form and coiled around the giant's neck. The next moment, the blade pulled taut with magical power and sheared through its neck effortlessly.
The severed head sailed through the air and hit the floor with a dull thud.
Without waiting to see the result, Elena swung Mirage again and again, tearing into the giants one after another. Not slashing at random—she systematically targeted the tendons of their legs and arms, their joints, and other areas to seal their movements.
The giants naturally fought back when attacked, even against someone other than Vihera. But the sight of Elena evading their blows as if dancing while manipulating the whip-form Mirage was truly worthy of being called a performance.
At first glance, aside from her ample bosom, Elena's arms and legs were slender enough to be called delicate. Yet the whip-form Mirage she wielded sliced through the giants' bodies one after another. She severed limbs, and—as with the giant that had tried to attack Byune—decapitation was not uncommon.
That she could produce such power was largely because Elena had inherited the Ancient Dragon's Magic Stone. Possessing strength that belied her appearance, anyone who knew nothing of her could easily be completely captivated by her beauty and her unfathomable nature.
"Really, it feels like she's even doing my job for me!"
Marina loosed arrows while watching Elena fight. Not only with Spirit Magic but also in her skill with a bow, Marina was first-class. This was the Dark Elf demonstrating her true forte.
The arrows she fired in rapid succession buried themselves in the giants' bodies. While Byune's Long Needles could barely scratch the skin, Marina's arrows punched through with ease.
That was the mark of a seasoned High-Rank Adventurer.
Rei, too, continued throwing the Twilight Spear and recalling it to his hand, thinking the very same thing.