Chapter 327 - 327: The Third Magic

A sky woven from end to end with cloud and burning haze.

Boundless in every direction. Look up, look down, there was no edge to any of it.

The [Soul Teardrop] could fly, the same as Isagi, so it simply hung there in the open air.

Anything that could not fly would have had to stand on the stones and shattered chunks of masonry that floated between the layers of mist, some no bigger than a fist, some the size of a house.

So this was the Dragon Valley?

It might as well have been another world entirely.

A little farther in.

That was the thought running through Isagi's head at the time, as he stared into the depths of that mist, at the thing that pulsed there like a beating "heart."

And then, in the next second, azure lightning came tearing toward him, and inside it he could make out a face of almost unnatural beauty.

"An adventurer?"

A savage grin filled the whole view. Blue hair. Dragon horns. And a pair of ice-blue slit pupils.

Thunder detonated.

The glare swallowed everything.

Roars answered from far off, one after another. Great Dragons opened their eyes inside the mist. Searing beams lanced in from the distance. Magic chants surged and rolled through the air, and then came a greatsword swung as though to cleave heaven from earth, and that was...

"One of Zeus's lot?"

Riveria knew that sword well.

It belonged to the captain of the Zeus Familia, [Hero] Maxim.

He was dead, then, and his weapon had ended up in the claws of some Great Dragon. What a pitiful way to go.

Against that sudden onslaught, the [Soul Teardrop] held out for a while. Only a few minutes, though. It went down quickly under the combined assault of several "dragon-men," every one of them fighting at somewhere between Level 7 and Level 8.

Once they realized the [Soul Teardrop] was nothing but a magical construct, puzzlement crossed their faces.

One of them, a man with long black hair, even muttered to himself.

"The magic technology outside has come this far? When did they finish [Life Transmutation]..."

After that, Isagi had meant to send the [Soul Teardrop] deeper into the valley for a proper look. Then Asfi had come running to call for reinforcements, so he had gone back to the city instead.

"It's fine. I can always go again next time."

What did he mean, go again next time! What exactly did he think the Dragon Valley was!?

Riveria swallowed the urge to say all of that out loud.

The worry came instead, welling up slow and cold.

Everything she had just watched made one thing plain. The Dragon Valley as it stood now was a dangerous, dreadful place. That was the place that had wiped out both the Zeus and Hera Familia to the last member, after all.

Simply crossing the threshold was enough to draw a pack of Level 7 to Level 8 Monsters down on you, and by the look of it those Monsters possessed intelligence of their own, near enough to a person's that the difference hardly mattered. That was just...

If not for Isagi's special Dungeon, Riveria and Ais would have been struck speechless.

Come to think of it...

The Dragon Valley turning out like that. It wasn't Isagi's doing, was it?

Hard to say.

Isagi himself was a little uncertain on that point, because when the [Soul Teardrop] first entered the valley, something calling itself the "Guardian of the Dragon God" had in fact shown up.

That thing couldn't have been native to the Dragon Valley, could it?

Yet once inside the valley, he hadn't found any boss with a name floating above it. So maybe the Dragon Valley had always been like that?

Never mind. It hardly mattered.

That was Isagi's conclusion. One way or another the place had to be conquered, so what was the point of overthinking it?

The recording was worth its weight in gold.

When it finished, Ais sat with a thoughtful look on her face.

There was probably nothing more he needed to say. The girl would find her own way to adapt to her new Strength.

And as for him, he had a new power of his own to grow into.

Magic.

After returning to Orario, Isagi had gone straight to the Loki Familia's home to check on Ais, and while he was there he had picked up fresh news from the goddesses Astrea and Demeter.

Miss Fels had brought him a grimoire that was "guaranteed to grant a new spell."

Which meant he could obtain a third magic.

Every adventurer's magic slots capped out at three. Why that was, nobody knew.

By rights, the people of the ancient era shouldn't have been bound by that limit at all.

Perhaps it was some kind of restriction that came bundled with a god's Falna. Too many spells and you'd break the game, that sort of reasoning.

Though there were exceptions. Lefiya, Riveria, Ryuu-senpai. People who technically had only three slots, yet somehow wielded more than three spells.

The thin rain of late summer pattered down.

Isagi got up in the afternoon and, rather than rushing to crack open the grimoire sitting on the desk in his room, he washed up and went down to eat first.

At the table he heard some good news about Haruhime.

The fox girl had received her third magic as well.

Apparently it came from joining the expedition against the Corrupted Spirit. Her status had been updated after she got back, and the new spell had surfaced with it.

It had taken Haruhime herself by surprise.

Because in that entire operation, she felt she hadn't been the slightest help.

Everyone told her the fight had gone smoothly from start to finish thanks to her level-boosting magic, but Haruhime couldn't make herself feel it.

Maybe it was that quiet sense of guilt that did it.

The girl gained her third magic.

[Soul Siphon].

Its effect was as follows.

It continuously "stole" the [Stats] of whatever target it was cast upon, and removed the ceiling from the caster's own [Stats].

What kind of skill was that supposed to be!?

Haruhime was baffled.

It looked like some sort of curse, didn't it?

As long as it ran long enough, it would weaken the enemy and strengthen her at the same time?

So the girls ran a test.

Layered on top of Haruhime's magic [Nine Tails], [Soul Siphon] could take as many as nine targets at once, and under that combination her [Stats] began to climb, slow and steady.

An hour and change later, when her mind had run dry and the spell's effect peaked, the goddess Astrea came over specifically to look at Haruhime's latest status.

What she found was hard to believe.

Strength: SSS 4521

Endurance: SSS 5376

Dexterity: SSS 5815

Agility: SSS 4986

Magic: SSS 5189

"...?"

Wasn't that a bit much!?

What mattered more was that Haruhime herself felt absolutely nothing.

Even so, none of the girls dared let her try using that Strength. Numbers like those turned Haruhime into a walking stat monster!!

The drawback was obvious.

Haruhime had almost no combat experience, and not a single offensive skill or spell to her name.

But that was no obstacle!

Once the numbers climbed high enough, technique stopped meaning anything at all!!

Isagi, for his part, had never seen it coming.

That the fox girl would end up with magic like that.

And himself?

Back in his room, he picked up the grimoire that supposedly granted a new spell the moment you opened it, and opened it. And then came the sensation of sinking into a dream, hazy and endless and utterly absurd.

____

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