In the World of Midgar 132 — The Demihumans Union Tyrving (13)

꒰ঌ The Demihumans Union Tyrving 13

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"Storm Slash!"

Pyrrha swung her beloved javelin, launching an invisible wave of wind pressure aimed at Sienna's head. Pyrrha was only using magic, but the magic she used was powerful enough to carve a fissure into the ground several hundred meters long. Even then, it was nothing more than a light punch to Sienna. It wouldn't do much more than distract her, but that was enough. Distracting her was good.

"Luna Tentacle!"

Tayuya followed up by summoning a set of tentacles of darkness that mobbed Sienna. It would be wrong to question her as to why she'd created this cat x tentacles scene. Tayuya was fighting seriously, but the binding only lasted a moment. Sienna easily ripped apart her bindings before charging at Tayuya, who'd been marked as a huge annoyance, but Sienna never reached her target.

Jaune stepped between them, forcing a clash between a giant crab and liger. The aftershocks of their collision snapped trees in two and shook the earth. The Acubens counter sent Sienna flying, but Jaune once again immediately fell to the ground. He'd reached his limit and wasn't able to continue defending against Sienna's attacks.

Jaune's defense was the highest among all the Twelve Zodiac's Guardians; it even exceeded Sienna's when she was in a normal state at level 1000. Adding his defense buffing skill, Tegmine, on top of that made Jaune's defense stat reach over 20,000, which would invalidate most attacks made on him.

But at the moment, Sienna was abnormal. She had enough power to force her way through Jaune's defenses, allowing Sienna to defeat Jaune, who specialized in battles of attrition. On top of all that, Sienna was still on a rampage, even after all this, so it was clear she'd gone berserk.

"Grafias!"

Anko threw her deadly poison breath at Sienna. The poison she unleashed was different from normal poison in that it could stack.

Just as Lucifen had stated before, the hardest part about dealing with this scorpion was the fact that she could poison you more when you were already poisoned. Normal poison worked by dealing 1 damage per second, and that was it. But Anko was different. By applying more poison, she could add even more instances of poison, turning 1 damage per second to 2, 3, 4, or even 10. However, even that threat was nothing but a small decrease when taking Sienna's massive vitality into account. Poison that wouldn't disappear would surely kill her eventually, but that eventually was going to take a long time. At the very least, it wouldn't happen within the time frame of this battle.

"Cheeky bitch!"

Sienna jumped, landing on top of Anko's giant form. Now that the shield named Jaune was out of the picture, there was no way to stop Sienna's attacks. Just one attack put Anko out of the fight, and a follow-up stomp crushed her exoskeleton.

Tayuya leapt at Sienna from behind, but she didn't even turn around. She just swiped her tail to disperse Tayuya's giant phantom clone.

"You…!"

"Stop, Fiona! If you jump in recklessly—"

Fiona used Sienna's blind spot to jump in and unleash a kick, but it seemed as if Sienna had predicted that, as she simply moved her head a little to dodge the attack. Then, she turned around and instantly captured Fiona using her tail.

"Gah! Agh!"

"I finally caught you… You've been buzzing around for too long… Letting small fry like you do as you please for this long hurts my pride. Looks like it's time this small fry started acting like one and shut up," Sienna said, irritated, as she strengthened the grip of her tail.

When she did so, an ominous creaking could be heard coming out of Fiona's bones, and her face twisted in anguish.

Even though Penny and Robyn fired at Sienna, she was able to dodge by jumping with her giant body. Unlike what her size suggested, she was incredibly spritely.

"I'll finish you off later… this weakling is first. Just sit there and wait quietly," Sienna said without even looking at Penny and the others as she gripped with her tail even harder.

She probably intended to squeeze Fiona to death just like that. But no, it didn't turn into something as simple and easy as that. Sienna moved Fiona in front of her face and exposed her fangs.

"I'll give you the end you deserve. I'll eat you like the trash monster you are!"

It was no longer even clear if Fiona was present enough to listen. There was a blank look in her eyes as she'd lost consciousness.

In the end, this was the difference in their strength. Percentile damage was all well and good, but it was still only natural for the side with an overwhelming stat advantage to win. Sienna, sure of her victory, opened her mouth wide.

"Hermes Thrice-Mighty."

A voice rang through the air and mana gathered. Right afterwards, three magic circles appeared at the same time, surrounding Sienna's huge body on three sides and exposing her to a flooding torrent of water. The pressure of the unleashed water was comparable to the deep sea, and the water eventually transformed into a fixed pyramid shape. Now that the enormous mass of water had condensed and compressed into a fixed shape, the internal pressure of the water easily exceeded tens of thousands of tons.

Such a sudden attack caused Sienna to let Fiona go, but the attack from the sudden interloper still wasn't over.

"Xgate!"

Time and space wavered. Sienna's surroundings transformed into a pitch-black space with nothing in it, and a single young blond woman appeared in front of the Fauna Queen, who was trapped in a pyramid of water. There was nothing else there — neither the forest, the centaurs's village, nor anything else. The only things still left were living beings like Fiona, Pyrrha, and Haru. Nothing non-living, including Penny, was around.

The blond girl looked down upon Sienna, smiling scornfully as several hundred magic circles deployed simultaneously in the void.

"Planetary Devastation!" The blond girl declared.

At the same time, a storm of meteors rained down in the void.

In order to avoid causing a disaster to the planet and still use this spell, Minako's countermeasure was exceedingly simple. She merely caught everything in a wide area — a radius of several kilometers — in an Xgate. As a result, everything that made up the world had been ejected into a subspace created by the Xgate, leaving behind only living things that hadn't consented to using the Xgate. Minako hadn't forced Sienna somewhere with an Xgate. She'd just gotten rid of everything else with an Xgate, creating a unique point in space where nothing would get damaged.

The shining, golden meteors directly impacted Sienna one after the other from above the pyramid, causing a chain of explosions. Just like that, Minako attacked Sienna while sealing her movements. At the same time, she put up a shield to protect herself and the others from the aftereffects of the impacts. She didn't stop there either. She also pointed a finger at the unconscious Fiona, fully healing her with heaven-arts.

Minako was maintaining an Xgate, using two spells, and two heaven-arts all at the same time. Such abnormally superhuman technique had Mitokado's draw dropping so far it nearly separated from the rest of his face as he muttered, "Impossible…"

Then, the magic ended, and the world returned to the way it had been. Minako confirmed that her surprise attack had worked before noticing that she was being stared at very harshly by Penny. Breaking out in a cold sweat, Minako thought, whoops, I might have revealed too much… While reflecting on that, she opened a crack in space and ran.

"The rest is up to you, Fiona. It'll be okay… You can win."

With those last words, the storm abated. After that, Fiona opened her eyes dazedly, wondering what happened. Meanwhile, Sienna stood up and looked for the interloper, but she was nowhere to be found.

Minako knew her own limits. She knew how weak she was, so she never made the mistake of lingering on the battlefield for too long. She was the fastest in the world at running away, after all.

"Dammit! Who the hell was that bitch?! Come out here. I'll devour you!" Sienna had flown into a rage, while Fiona only vaguely realized that she'd been saved.

From the looks of things, it was probably Minako. I'm fully healed, and there aren't many people who can pull off such a brilliant ambush while healing people. But if that's the case, she could have fixed my clothes, too, while she was at it…

As before, Fiona's clothes were still in tatters, and she was only looking progressively lewder. She sighed, though she had no way of knowing that Minako had left her like that on purpose so that she could get a good eyeful.

Now the situation had gone back to square one, except for the fact that Sienna had lost a lot of health in that ambush, though that wasn't technically correct. Minako had just dealt a massive blow in pure numbers, but in the face of Sienna's incredibly bloated HP pool, one of Fiona's fire-wreathed punches would still have done more. Fiona was still the only reliable attacker in this situation, and the gap in their abilities was still the same.

As it is, things'll just be a repeat of before.

But in the midst of Fiona's worries, she felt someone putting their hand on her head. She quickly turned around, and for an instant, she felt as if she saw her master, Lucifen. Her expression was that of days past, back when she had been feared as a Black Emperor and was full of self-confidence.

"What are you scared of, Fiona? You are one of the Twelve Zodiac's Guardians We've personally approved of. You don't fall short of her in any way. Have confidence. You are strong. Now go teach that idiot a lesson or two. Show her the strength of the one she called a small fry." Lucifen laughed, fearless, before disappearing in a haze.

Fiona's body immediately swelled with power. It wasn't added power, like the effect of heaven-arts. It felt like her base stats had grown explosively. Fiona looked around and noticed that everyone other than Penny, such as Pyrrha and Tayuya, were looking at their bodies and seemed surprised.

Could this be…? Fiona thought as he looked over to everyone else for confirmation.

"Um, it feels like my level suddenly went up…"

"Indeed. Me too."

The change had happened to all the Twelve Zodiac's Guardians other than Penny and Sienna, which could only mean one thing.

"Ah, looks like Lady Lucy is finally serious. Good work, tiny vampire," Anko said, delighted.

That in itself answered the mystery of the current changes. The Twelve Zodiac's Guardians were all limited to level 800 with the exception of Penny, who had been created by Jenny. That limit was because of Lucifen's skill limits as a Monster Tamer as well as her combined level of 1000. As long as her class level remained at 100, this wouldn't change. But if their levels had changed, that meant one thing — there'd been a change in Lucifen's level.

The level limit was 1000. This was the ceiling set by the Goddess, and thus common sense in this world. However, Lucifen had long overcome that wall, and if she were to go all out, her level would jump to over 4000. All the Twelve Zodiac Guardians knew this. Thus, when Lucifen got serious and only then, the level limits of the Twelve Zodiac's Guardians were raised, and they were able to return to their original strengths.

"We've won," Penny said confidently, and the rest of them all expressed their agreement.

Apparently Ruby had put up quite the fight. She'd gone too far and had forced their master to get serious. But now, the fight is over. At this moment, the battle had been decided. No one could stand against Ouzelia Lucifen once she'd decided to go all out. If a person really wanted to win, they'd need at least an army of dragons. At least, that was what Lucifen herself had once told Mito. It wasn't even a bluff, and the fact that she was serious showed just how overwhelmingly powerful Lucifen was.

"W-with this, I will have a role too…" Jaune said, still having not gotten up.

The rest of the group all shot him down at once, though. Even Minako took the trouble to pop her head out of a gap in space just to pile on, saying, "Even if the tank goes up in level, they won't exactly get more things to do."

Dejected, Jaune's head drooped. The rest of the group left him alone as they looked up at Sienna and took up fighting stances.

"You understand, right, Fiona? Right now, our power is at its maximum, but this won't last for long."

"Yeah. Now that Lady Lucy is going all-out, the fight won't last long… It wouldn't be weird if the fight was settled in the next second."

Lucifen's fighting style, while serious, surpassed a normal person's understanding. The time she experienced was compressed to the limit, since the fight would be conducted at incredible speeds. She would ratchet up her gears, shifting her experience of time up by several stages and leaving everything else in the world behind. It would have been easy for her to exchange several dozen rounds of attacking and defending in an instant.

In other words, it was entirely possible for a serious Lucifen to completely annihilate her enemy in a single second before releasing her serious mode. That was just how strong and fast she was. It was enough that the word "fight" would no longer apply. The only one who could last at least several seconds under those conditions was Ruby. But unfortunately, even Ruby was no match in the end. It wasn't as if Ruby was particularly weak. It was just that Lucifen was so incredibly strong.

"Go, Fiona! Hit her with everything you've got!"

Robyn unleashed an arrow, and Fiona grabbed onto it. The next moment, Fiona had teleported directly above Sienna, her fist wrapped in flames.

Tayuya and Pyrrha used magic to hinder Sienna's movements, and Penny commenced support fire to disorient Sienna. Anko also wrapped her tail around Sienna's leg, and the crab who once thought he had nothing to do suddenly seemed to have hit some sort of inspiration as he activated a skill.

"Accept this, Fiona! Altarf!"

Altarf was one of Jaune's fringe skills, which could only be activated once when he was knocked out of the fight. It was less a counter and more lashing out spitefully from the grave. It would only take effect once. The skill doubled the damage of the very next attack, allowing that attack to exceed the single hit damage limit of 99,999.

Fiona screamed as she became an avatar of fire. A shining rainbow meteor crashed down onto Sienna's head.

If Lucifen were around, she would have been able to use her Observing Eye to see the amazing moment when Sienna's remaining HP, which numbered over 800,000, was reduced to 1 in a single hit.

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