The giant lord emerged from the deeply gouged pit.
The one I had seen in Soph’s memories had looked like a black, elongated alien giant, but the giant before me now resembled a knight clad in tattered armor—or perhaps a statue.
Its egg-shaped head, part of its upper body, and one arm were still their original black, but its other arm, its legs, and most of its body were made of stone and metal it had scraped together from this city over thousands of years.
At a glance, it looked heavier and stronger than before, but according to Soph, that stone and metal that made it seem so powerful was the giant’s weakness.
As I thought that, the giant raised its stone fist.
I was puzzled to see it simply lifting its fist in such an ordinary motion, when dark energy began gathering in front of it.
Then a magic circle appeared before the stone fist.
Fwoooooosh.
Along with the magic circle, a massive fireball unlike anything I had seen before was formed.
Within the fireball, as large as the giant’s upper body, there was a sickening amount of dark energy.
It was a powerful energy that seemed capable of blowing apart an entire city block with a single shot.
Seeing the energy gathered into that fireball, I understood why this city had been so thoroughly destroyed.
After seeing the fireball, I checked the energy I had pushed into my spear, and the comparison was painfully clear.
As my eyes darted around quickly in search of somewhere to dodge, Soph spoke.
[Good. Ordinary fire magic, is it? I thought it was strange that it did not try to speak to us, but it seems its intellect has not fully returned.]
Was it because he had once been an archmage?
That was something I had not expected at all.
“But the energy inside it is no joke!”
It was not high-level magic, but even ordinary magic stopped being ordinary when it contained that much energy.
An ordinary shield could not withstand that spell.
In the end, I had to dodge it, but the problem was that fireball had tracking magic cast on it.
If it were ordinary magic, I would only need to avoid a direct hit, but there was no doing that with a spell that strong.
In the end, the moment the fireball was fired, I would have to run like mad.
Thinking that, I waited for the fireball to be launched, when Soph’s voice reached me again.
[Do not move. I need to adjust the magic for a moment.]
“What?”
The instant I questioned Soph’s words, the fireball was fired at me.
Boom!
Though I was still several dozen meters away from the giant lord that had climbed out of the pit, that much distance was as good as nothing.
Because of Soph’s absurd words, I missed my timing to dodge, and the enormous fireball swallowed me in an instant.
Kwaaaaaang!
One side of the crater was engulfed in flames once again.
The ground was gouged out, and fire surged into the sky.
The calamity that had occurred ten thousand years ago had happened again.
Watching the flames rise, the giant lowered its stone arm.
At that moment, a person shot out from within the flames.
Naturally, that was me.
Even within those terrifying flames, I had not suffered the slightest injury.
That was because of the shield Soph had cast.
Soph’s shield, wrapped around me, had changed from before.
The shield had transformed from a translucent membrane into something like a translucent net.
Just before the fireball was launched, Soph had modified the magic and strengthened the shield.
“It’s a shield specialized for magic. If you had something like this, you should have used it earlier.”
It was a shield that reinforced magical defense on top of the existing shield.
At my grumbling, Soph said,
[There was no need to use it against the previous monsters.]
That was certainly true, but if I had known something like this existed, I would have worried less.
[This is magic imbued with the concept of fundamentally blocking all magic below a certain level. Since it is high-level magic, the energy cost is not insignificant.]
At Soph’s following words, I had no choice but to nod.
Unlike before, I could feel energy being sucked away.
When I had used the ordinary shield, my recovery had been faster than the consumption, but now it was different.
Dark energy was being drained rapidly. At this rate, it seemed hard to maintain the shield for more than a few minutes.
That might become a problem, but for now, I had to take advantage of this opportunity.
Now that the giant lord had taken its attention off me, I had to land a blow on it.
As I said earlier, the several dozen meters between me and the giant lord were as good as nothing.
Breaking through the flames, I arrived before the giant lord in a single step.
The giant lord’s metal leg loomed before my eyes.
In truth, it looked more like a tentacle or a pillar than a leg, but in any case, this metal leg was my target.
I stood before the leg and thrust my spear with all my strength.
At the same time, I converted part of the energy I had been gathering into the spear as I ran into magic.
[Sharp and swift, cold and hot.]
It was not high-level magic like Soph used, but I cast four ordinary spells at once.
Cutting magic, acceleration magic, cold magic, and heat magic.
As I thrust the spear, I cast the four spells simultaneously.
The metal leg, frozen by cold magic and then heated by heat magic, was pierced by the spear that had been made faster and sharper.
Thud!
No, it had not been pierced.
Part of the spearhead had lodged into it, and cracks had formed in the metal leg. That was all.
“Damn it!”
I grimaced and pulled out the shallowly embedded spear.
This was not ordinary metal.
If it were ordinary metal, there was no way my attack would have ended with only this much damage.
This was metal of a hardness I had never seen before.
‘Danger!’
At that moment, my supersense sent me a signal, and I hurriedly retreated.
Kooong!
The instant I stepped back, a stone fist slammed into the spot where I had been standing.
It should have been a fist made of stone, yet as if a bomb had exploded, dirt scattered in all directions, and a huge hole appeared where it struck.
Just as the metal leg was not merely metal, that stone fist did not seem to be ordinary stone either.
Boom! Koo-boom!
The giant followed me as I retreated, swinging its fists again and again.
Contrary to its sluggish appearance, the giant was incredibly fast.
“You said it was a weakness! It’s absurdly hard!”
[It is plenty weak. Did your attack not leave a mark?]
If this was it weakened, just how strong had it been in the past?
And how strong had Soph and his comrades been to kill such a monster…?
I had no idea how much stronger I would have to become before I could even begin to gauge Soph’s true ability.
Clicking my tongue at Soph’s words, I dodged the giant lord’s attacks.
The giant lord’s punches and kicks kept coming.
They were attacks of incredible speed, completely at odds with its appearance and size.
I could only watch the ground burst from the shockwaves and avoid them with everything I had.
[The modified shield is specialized for magic, so it cannot block those brute-force attacks.]
Even without Soph telling me, I knew that well.
After seeing Soph cast it, I could imitate it, though not in exactly the same way.
But there was no need for me to put up another shield.
After seeing that its first magical attack had not worked, the giant stopped using magic.
That did not mean I could relax.
I could not take down the shield just because it was not using magic right now.
My dark energy was rapidly decreasing.
[Good. Now that we know your weak attacks work on its weakness, let us attack properly. Buy me some time.]
At Soph’s words, I hurled the spear into the sky with all my strength.
The spear rose high into the air and stopped in place.
Wooooong.
A magic circle appeared around the spear suspended in midair, and black clouds gathered.
Soph’s main spell, using the black stone embedded in the spear, had been cast.
As the magic circle began to appear, the giant that had been attacking me stopped in place and looked up at the sky.
It seemed the giant, too, had sensed the magic Soph had begun to cast.
I could not let the giant interfere with Soph.
“Look over here!”
I rushed toward the giant and drove my magic-laden fist forward with all my might.
My gauntlet, imbued with cold magic, heat magic, acceleration magic, and reinforcement magic, slammed into the metal leg.
Kwaang!
With an explosion, the giant’s body staggered.
Unlike its staggering body, however, this time not even a scratch appeared on the metal leg.
It seemed that unless I used the spear Soph had made, even injuring it was difficult.
Still, I succeeded in diverting its gaze.
Kwaang!
Once again, the giant swung its fist at me, and once again I moved my feet desperately.
How long did I keep dodging like that?
Soph’s voice rang out.
[Be careful!]
Along with his words, lightning fell from the sky.
Flash!
Dozens of bolts of lightning poured down on the giant.
It was not on the level of the hundreds of bolts I had seen at the end of Soph’s memories, but it was still a truly terrifying sight.
After hearing Soph’s warning, I ran as hard as I could, but I could not fully escape the aftermath of the lightning.
I was too close to the giant.
I had a shield specialized in blocking magic spread around me, but this shield could only block up to ordinary magic.
In the end, I, too, was electrocuted and sent rolling across the ground.
But now was not the time to leisurely feel the pain.
With my body tingling all over, I worked hard to use magic and send the electricity into the ground.
Once the current drained away, I was finally able to raise myself up.
The first thing I did was check the giant lord.
Fortunately, Soph’s attack seemed to have worked.
The giant had been shattered.
The metal leg and the arm made of stone were smashed to pieces and scattered, and the giant lay on the ground with only its black upper body, face, and one arm remaining.
The newly made body had all been destroyed.
However, even against Soph’s magic, which could destroy controlled entities, the original body remained intact.
In the end, we had not finished it off, but with a body like that, it did not seem capable of moving anymore.
While it could not move, I had to find the black stone.
“Where is the broken black stone? I don’t see it.”
Thinking it might be among the shattered fragments, I was about to walk that way when Soph spoke.
[Step back. It is unharmed.]
This, too, was difficult to understand.
“What? What do you mean? How is that unharmed?”
I immediately questioned Soph’s words, but even as I spoke, I began slowly backing away.
Because I could feel energy gathering around the fallen giant.
And the shattered fragments began to gather again.
Drrrrrrr.
The gathered metal fragments and stones began attaching themselves to the giant’s body.
It was not only the shattered fragments that attached themselves.
The bodies of the dead monsters, and even the surrounding earth, clung to the giant’s body.
[I wondered why it had made its body from such weak things, but this was its intention from the beginning.]
As the giant restored its body, the magic spread throughout the surroundings revealed itself.
The magic the dying giant had laid over this city.
It was magic that had made everything in this area part of the giant’s body.
For thousands of years—ten thousand years—the giant lord had turned this ruined city into its own body.
A body, and a source of replacement materials, should it be destroyed.
In the end, destroying the newly made body was meaningless.
Rumble, rumble.
A moment later, the giant rose to its feet, having taken on an even more grotesque form.
Soph also descended and came into my hand.
[We used about half the black stone. We can use one more attack like that, but I doubt it will have any effect.]
At last, we had encountered an opponent Soph’s sure-kill technique did not work on.
At that moment, the giant moved again.
It swung its fist once more.
I threw myself aside again, but this time, I could not avoid its attack.
Tentacles shot out from the fist it had slammed down through the air.
Come to think of it, the giant had swung its black fist instead of its stone one.
The tentacles pierced through the shield and impaled my body.
Giant Lord (4)