The entire cavern began to tremble. Floor, walls, ceiling, the crisscrossing waterways... everything heaved and split apart at once.
The ground fractured like a spiderweb, and from every crack, dense tangles of vines and roots erupted like waking beasts. They spread outward in every direction with Aura at their center.
Under Aura's control, the vines struck like merciless spears of judgment, showing no favoritism. Some monsters were snared and drained, their life force sucked out until they crumbled to ash. Others were simply impaled straight through their armored shells and powerful bodies, leaving nothing behind but Magic Stones clattering across the ground.
The monsters, thrown into chaos by the sudden onslaught, were swallowed whole by the endless tide of vines and roots.
Not a single monster survived the wide-area annihilation magic.
Reinforcements kept flooding into the meat grinder, but with Aura going all-out, the kill rate once again overtook the spawn rate, clawing the situation back to where it had been before their stamina started flagging.
Feast of the Bacchanal Harvest: summons countless thorned ivy vines to form a wide-area barrier, torturing all enemies within range while draining their stamina and magic to restore the caster. Wide-area annihilation magic.
Persephone stumbled back a few steps, watching the Blue Crabs thrashing desperately against the roots and vines coiling around them, her face slack with shock.
"This is Aura's magic? I had no idea it was a rare wood-element spell... not only does it have wide-area annihilation capability, it comes with area control too!"
Before she'd even finished speaking, the monsters right in front of her were drained dry and dissolved into ash.
"What...?"
She hadn't even recovered from the sheer overtuned power of Aura's magic when the second-stage effect hit, and her jaw dropped all over again. It was like watching a real-life version of Deep Forest Emergence.
Leon caught the stunned look on her face and smirked.
"You missed a detail. Beyond the annihilation and control, what makes Aura's magic terrifying is this: every target caught by her spell gets drained of its life force and mental energy in seconds, and all of it feeds back into Aura's own stamina and spirit recovery. If she's injured, the spell prioritizes healing her first."
"...!?"
Persephone's eyes went wide. She stared at the quiet, slightly old-fashioned young elf in disbelief, a storm of shock rolling through her mind.
"So you're saying... as long as Aura keeps killing enemies, then..."
Leon chuckled.
"Exactly. As long as there are enemies to kill, her magic can sustain itself indefinitely."
He glanced over and noticed Aura's delicate face had already flushed red. He added quickly to Persephone:
"Uh, in theory, anyway. There's one teeny little side effect."
Persephone fell silent.
Jeanne, commanding from the front, was the first to notice Aura's state. She could tell Aura was nearing her limit. A quick scan of the battlefield showed the Monster Party had been nearly halved in an instant, and she immediately called out:
"Aura, that's enough! Cancel the spell and recover. We'll handle the rest of the small fry!"
Aura bit her lip. Hearing Jeanne's order, she fought through her trembling body and nodded.
"Understood!"
...
Nearby, Laurier stopped her supporting fire and jogged over, catching the nearly spent Aura as she sagged. She stared at the devastation her friend had wrought, eyes wide with awe.
"Aura... that was amazing! You wiped out over a hundred monsters in seconds. Having wide-area annihilation magic must be incredible."
Aura's legs were shaking. She leaned against her friend's shoulder, doing her best to steady the strange sensations running through her body, and managed a weak shake of her head.
"It's just a mage's job, that's all. And you don't need to be jealous. Any dedicated rear-guard mage with proper cover from their party can pull off something like that. Compared to Lady Riveria, I'm still leagues behind. Besides..."
She lifted her gaze toward the distance.
"Compared to me, needing Chanting and cover... look at Kureha. That's what real power looks like."
Laurier followed Aura's line of sight.
Her jaw hit the floor.
There, in the thick of the swarm...
Kureha, a fellow Level 1, was dancing through the monsters.
"She's... she's incredible!"
It wasn't just them. Leon, who was supposed to be keeping one eye on the perimeter, had stopped watching the perimeter entirely.
Kureha moved like she was dancing on a knife's edge, one bad step from being opened up.
Her kill efficiency looked like it actually exceeded Laurier and Aura's coordinated assault, but everyone in the party understood the truth.
What let Kureha go toe-to-toe with monsters whose potential sat around Level 3 while she herself was at the peak of Level 1 was hyper-specialized attack power, combined with insane perception, speed, and reflexes in close-quarters combat. Well-rounded stats had nothing to do with it.
Put bluntly: Kureha's damage output, compared side by side, surpassed even upper-tier Level 2 Adventurers. But in every other category... Endurance, resistances, Dexterity... she fell far short.
In practice: she could pull off the incredible feat of punching nearly two full Levels above her weight class, but the moment a monster actually landed a hit on her, it was over.
So when Leon called it dancing on a knife's edge, he wasn't exaggerating in the slightest.
"A dancer on the edge of a blade..." Persephone murmured, cutting down monsters without pause. She cast a long look at Leon. "That fits her perfectly. I have to wonder where the hell you found companions like these."
Leon's eyebrow twitched. Without missing a beat he snap-cast Ice Ring, freezing the nearby monsters in place, kicked off the ground into a light backward hop, refreshed his Frost Armor mid-air, and landed as a red magic circle bloomed beneath him. He flung two Fireballs behind him without even looking.
He turned around. Heat and thunder rolled at his back as the explosions blossomed, and he smiled.
"Now that... touches on certain secrets."
Watching that cryptic expression of his, Persephone thought about his bizarre collection of spells. She split a Blue Crab clean in half from top to bottom, then pushed her gold-rimmed glasses up with slender fingers, blue eyes narrowing.
"Interesting."
...
Monster killed. Excelia +1.
Monster killed. Excelia +1.
Monster killed. Excelia +1.
...
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