The hydrogen bomb went off at the very heart of the Sanctuary.
It was hundreds of meters underground, at a depth close to a thousand meters.
If it had exploded that deep beneath ordinary bare earth, it might have ended as nothing more than a tremendous earthquake.
But this was the Sanctuary, filled with countless underground spaces, passages, and facilities.
On top of that, I had bored a vertical cavern all the way to the surface.
In the end, the explosion did not end as a mere earthquake.
***
Flash!
My vision changed with a burst of brilliant light.
One moment I had been deep within the Sanctuary, and the next I was floating high in the sky.
Below me was a vast, sunken basin and a mountain at its center.
I was directly above the mountain where the Sanctuary lay, hundreds of meters up in the air.
It seemed as though I had been caught in the explosion, but fortunately, my short-range spatial movement—Blink—had succeeded.
I had moved over a kilometer in an instant, but now was not the time to celebrate a successful Blink.
Crackle!
The instant the spatial movement ended, the flash and heat rays rising from the underground passage struck my shield.
Light bright enough to blind an ordinary person.
Heat rays intense enough to burn me if not for the shield.
More terrible still was the invisible light of death.
For an instant, a blue flash swept across the shield.
A flash, heat rays, radiation—all passing in a single moment.
That alone would have been enough to leave one senseless, but this was only the beginning.
A pillar of flame was surging up through the vertical cavern.
The energy was in chaos; spatial movement was impossible for the moment.
I stretched out my hand and cast air magic.
“Explode!”
The strongest air magic I could manage.
The air I had drawn in and compressed in an instant burst out in front of my hand.
Kwaaang!
With the sound of a bomb going off, my body was flung in the opposite direction.
“Ghk!”
An immense pressure crushed down on my body.
It was the kind of pressure that would have flattened an ordinary person, but thanks to it, I was able to avoid the surging flames.
Kwaaaaang!
The vertical cavern erupted, and a massive flame shot up above the mountain.
At the same time, a shock wave swept through.
The shock wave slammed into my shield, and I was flung away once again.
Bang!
It was an impact that would have knocked me unconscious before. The world spun round and round.
[Get a hold of yourself!]
Amid the chaos, Soph’s voice reached me.
Hearing Soph’s voice, I moved my energy and barely managed to come back to my senses.
I just barely stopped my body as it shot through the air and checked the situation.
Fortunately, the shield was intact. Soph had maintained it for me.
But outside the shield was another matter.
“My God.”
Outside, a horrifying sight unfolded, enough to make me let out an exclamation.
[The nuclear explosion we saw before was nothing compared to this.]
Above the mountain, an enormous mushroom cloud bloomed, covering heaven and earth.
The pillar of flame was no longer visible, but instead, rocks weighing dozens or hundreds of tons were scattering like volcanic ash and pouring down like rain.
It was like watching a storm made of stone.
Boulders and rocks battered the shield.
They were so large and fast that they were enough to send impacts through even an Archmage’s shield.
Avoiding the boulders that were too large, I looked down at the ground.
The surface was a mess.
Following the nuclear explosion that had gone off aboveground just yesterday, this underground nuclear explosion had once again dealt a brutal blow to the gathered monsters.
Monsters blown to pieces by the shock wave, monsters engulfed in flames and screaming, monsters turned into corpses after being bathed in radiation.
So many monsters had died, and even now, countless more were dying, struck by the falling rocks and buried in the earthquakes.
Of course, a few monsters seemed likely to survive, as before, but this time the army of monsters had been destroyed so thoroughly that it could not be revived.
“With this much, we shouldn’t have to worry about the other monsters for a while.”
[We stopped worrying about the other monsters some time ago.]
“That’s true.”
Even if we wiped out all those monsters, it meant nothing if we failed to kill the Demon King.
Rumble, rumble, rumble.
And now, the hydrogen explosion had become meaningless.
“He’s not dead.”
The enormous energy that had been hidden by the explosion revealed itself once more.
The contaminated energy rising from underground, felt through my senses.
That horrendous black aura, one even the explosion could not conceal, was none other than the Demon King’s energy.
“Damn it. Even a hydrogen bomb wasn’t enough?”
A curse escaped me at the Demon King’s aura.
Unlike my cursing, Soph answered calmly.
[It would seem so.]
Soph’s answer made me frown.
To speak so calmly in a situation like this.
“You don’t seem surprised. Wasn’t I needed so we could use a hydrogen bomb?”
I asked Soph in an angry voice.
This time too, Soph answered calmly.
[If it had merely been to use Earth’s weapons, it did not necessarily have to be you. It was not because of Earth’s weapons. It had to be you.]
I could not say anything in response to Soph’s words.
Because he was not wrong.
[Shamara did not tell us why she needed you. I can make a certain degree of conjecture, but that is only my conjecture.]
“Then tell me that conjecture at least.”
At my blunt words, Soph asked in return.
[You already know it yourself, don’t you?]
Soph was right. I knew too.
My ability was different from other people’s.
Different from the awakened Earthlings, and different from the mages as well.
Unlike them, I could learn magic through sensation.
I had learned only recently that this was the same ability as the Demon King’s.
If it was not because of the hydrogen bomb, then Shamara had chosen me because of this ability.
That was why I had thought the hydrogen bomb was the only way to take down the Demon King.
The Demon King was sturdier than me, and his abilities surpassed mine.
Unlike me, who had only just managed to use magic like the mages through a sort of shortcut, the Demon King obtained magic the moment he saw it, modified it, and found its weaknesses.
The Demon King possessed an ability above mine—no, on an entirely different level.
With my current ability, I could not defeat the Demon King.
[Then will you wait for the next opportunity?]
“That would be difficult. If we leave the Demon King alone, the people on this planet will be in danger, and I doubt an opportunity like this will come again……”
The underground city on the ice planet would probably be fine, but the expeditionary force on this planet and my own squad members would have a hard time surviving.
If I had simply sent them all to the underground city, I would not have had this worry.
To think that leaving them on this planet out of concern for the Demon King’s pursuit would become a problem.
On top of that, I did not think another chance to deal this much damage to the Demon King would ever come again.
I wanted to run, but right now I could not.
At the very least, I had to confirm it.
I stopped in the sky and waited for the Demon King to come up.
The contaminated aura continued to rise.
That dreadful aura finally emerged onto the surface.
The Demon King’s aura came out through the vertical cavern that had grown vastly wider.
The Demon King’s form, hidden by the surging clouds, gradually revealed itself.
A black hand slipped out from within the clouds.
A broken, shattered half of a hand.
Following the hand, an arm and body appeared in turn.
There were no legs, and the other arm was nowhere to be seen.
Only half of the upper body remained, and the head was not visible at all.
As falling rocks struck it, the Demon King’s body kept breaking and repairing itself.
The Demon King’s body, which had not budged even from Soph’s ultimate attack, was continually being destroyed.
It was remarkable, but this was within expectations.
The problem was the Demon King’s core, the black stone.
As long as the black stone was not destroyed, the H-bomb would be useless.
[It is not unscathed.]
I nodded at Soph’s words.
“Yes. The H-bomb wasn’t useless.”
Within the Demon King’s broken body, I caught a glimpse of the black stone.
A faint crack had appeared in it.
It was not a deep wound, but there was definitely a crack in the black stone.
“I guess I can’t run away.”
Considering the monsters so far, the wound on the black stone would surely recover as well.
If not now, while the black stone was cracked, there would be no chance.
No, I had never intended to run from the beginning.
My squad members were my family. I could not leave them on this planet and flee.
As I made that decision, the Demon King moved.
Grind, grind, grind.
The monster corpses scattered across the mountain and around it began moving toward the Demon King.
A scout’s torn tentacles writhed as they climbed the mountain, hardened fossils rolled uphill, and the shattered bodies of defense monsters burst out from underground and crawled toward the Demon King.
Those were not the only things moving toward him.
The fragments of smashed mummies, the blood spilled by the control entities and the control entities themselves, even the fallen magic monsters—all of them advanced toward the Demon King.
“Don’t tell me he’s going to turn all of that into his body?”
I asked with a sickened expression, but Soph seemed to think it was an opportunity instead.
[He was not the sort to drag things in so haphazardly. It seems he really did take a great shock.]
At Soph’s seemingly pleased words, I shouted in anger.
“No, if all of that becomes his body, we won’t even be able to touch the black stone!”
Even now, the black stone looked impossible to destroy.
And yet, we might end up unable to even touch it.
If that happened, there would be no dreams and no hope.
“First, we have to stop them from becoming part of the Demon King’s body!”
[That should be the priority for now. Hurry.]
This time, Soph did not object to my words.
We shot downward.
Boom!
It was a flight like a fall, accompanied by air magic and flight magic.
In an instant, we reached the ground.
The surface was still wrapped in hellish heat.
The ground was boiling, and mummies were burning.
The winds caused by the heat were blowing like a storm as well.
Even in that situation, the wave of corpses was flowing backward toward the Demon King on the mountain.
“Wind Blades! Fireballs!”
Wrapped in my shield, I descended to the ground and, together with Soph, poured magic onto the crawling corpses.
Kwaang! Bang! Slash!
Fireballs exploded, and wind blades sliced through corpses.
I could not use water magic or ice magic, but fire magic and wind magic displayed several times their usual power.
But it was useless.
The corpses blown apart by fireballs were immediately swallowed by the wave of bodies, and the corpses sliced by wind blades joined the wave while still in pieces.
On top of that, the closer they drew to the Demon King, the harder the corpses became, until magic no longer worked on them.
[It is not even buying us time.]
“Looks that way. In the end, it means we have to face the Demon King.”
After blowing away monster corpses several times, we realized the reality of the situation.
We gave up attacking the corpses and headed for the Demon King.
A gigantic mountain of corpses, half submerged in the surging clouds.
Already, many corpses were covering the Demon King’s body.
The Demon King no longer looked like the black human figure I had seen before.
Other than the shared trait of being black, what stood before my eyes now was an enormous heap of corpses.
A ragged mountain crudely stitched together, and that mountain was still growing.
The mountain began to writhe and move.
At the same time, magic circles appeared around it.
Wind magic, fire magic, water magic, ice magic, even gravity magic.
Countless types of magic unfolded at once.
Kwa-gwa-gwa-gwang!
Flames spewed out, and streams of water split the sky before turning into steam.
Ice spears flew in and melted, and storms clawed at the earth.
Countless spells that were not aimed at me turned the surroundings into a wasteland.
Blocking the rain of rocks with my shield and dodging the magic, I began to create magic myself.
[Existing magic will not work! I have already shown him my magic, so that will not do either!]
I answered Soph’s advice loudly.
“I know!”
I knew that very well.
The foundation of my magic was the spells I had learned from Soph.
All of those spells were unusable.
The same was true for other magic. Every spell I had learned was magic created by the Magic Kingdom.
But I had knowledge the Demon King did not.
“There is one thing I know better than the Demon King.”
And that was Earth’s science.
First, I used earth magic to gather the dust drifting through the air.
Gray powder and shining particles gathered together.
I gathered those particles and made earth spears.
Dozens of earth spears rose amid the storm and magic.
“Go!”
I launched those earth spears at the Demon King.
Riding the storm, the spears shot toward the Demon King.
Thud, thud, thud!
The spears struck the Demon King’s body directly.
Fortunately, they embedded themselves in the Demon King’s body, but they were so small against his enormous form that they could not even be seen.
But the Demon King’s reaction was different.
Kuaaaaagh!
At the unfamiliar pain, the Demon King’s flesh trembled as he screamed.
Blue light shimmered around the spears.
These spears had been made from earth formed by clumping together radioactive fallout drifting through the air and radioactive substances that had adhered to my shield.
I had fed the Demon King a powerful spear of radiation.
The Demon King (3)