Chapter 381 - 381: Purity and Essence

They had been prepared for this all along.

The Magic Kingdom's technicians had connected the [World Tree] to the very first alchemic puppet standing before Isagi — the one they called "Unit-01."

And then.

The magic core inside the puppet's body swiftly filled with power. The hundred-meter-tall construct of dull gray-black steel, its surface rough as raw stone, began to glow with a brilliant, deep azure light.

Like countless rivers of shimmering stars.

At the same time, a violent humming roar began to erupt from within the giant iron puppet—

"It's not going to explode, is it?"

That was Isagi's first thought.

Then he considered — if this was supposed to be some kind of "trial," it was honestly a bit much.

Seriously.

All this buildup just to set a giant bomb waiting for him?

Of course, that wasn't it.

The shrieking hum now rising was because the magic core within the puppet was spinning at a furious rate, nearing its limit.

In theory, the [World Tree] could convert an infinite amount of Magic.

But in practice, of course, that wasn't so.

Speed, efficiency, and the upper limit of what it could bear — converting the entire world into Magic was only theoretically possible. What was actually happening now was that the countless "energy sources" the Magic Kingdom had stored deep within the mountain were being converted at tremendous speed and fed into the puppet's body.

But.

This wouldn't cause the prototype before him to explode, nor would it make it move.

Because from the moment it was built, it had never been meant to move at all. Its entire purpose was simply to verify whether certain technologies were viable — nothing more.

So what was Odin planning to do now?

Actually, it was simple.

"Throw a punch."

From somewhere unseen came the one-eyed old god's voice, resounding like distant thunder.

And before Isagi, the alchemic puppet's massive iron fist did indeed lie flat against the ground, slightly raised, like a great slab of black stone.

Many of the tourists present had no idea what was happening; they couldn't grasp the situation at all.

But Asfi seemed to sense something.

The gathering Magic had become the very force sustaining the puppet.

So.

If Isagi truly swung his fist now, his target wouldn't be the nearly hundred-meter alchemic giant standing before him — with the destructive force of a Lv. 8 adventurer, even if the puppet were forged from the hardest metal, Orichalcum, it would be smashed to pieces without question.

In truth, beneath the puppet's steel shell flowed a layer of magical barrier.

This was the purest form of Defensive Magic.

And it wasn't a one-time thing, either — it was being drawn continuously, endlessly, from the entire Magic Kingdom... and quite possibly more than that, including the mightiest nation on the continent, the Empire, and the many nations bound to it.

From such a vast expanse of territory, Magic was being gathered here without pause, constantly replenished.

In other words.

What Isagi now faced could genuinely be called an entire world — an exaggeration, perhaps, but not far from the truth.

Clearly, this "punch" was the trial the great god Odin had prepared.

Just what kind of power.

Could stand against Magic gathered ceaselessly from so vast a domain?

That was, quite simply, impossible.

Just imagining it — no, merely standing here, feeling the immense Magic converging from every direction — was enough for Asfi to understand that this was an impossibility.

So what result did Odin actually want?

No one knew.

No one understood what outcome the god was after.

As far as Isagi was concerned, this was basically a strength-testing machine. Was the old god just trying to measure the power of his punch?

Hmm—

Isagi began to think.

Even a single punch required technique.

It was the same with anything — how one used one's body was a matter of great subtlety.

It was like having a massive boulder set before you — how exactly should one go about moving it?

Brute force alone wouldn't do.

How to generate power, how to keep one's stance steady at the same time, and even some intangible thing called "conviction" — all of it mattered.

A person could summon power far beyond what they imagined themselves capable of.

The god didn't rush him. Like everyone else present, he simply waited.

He watched as Isagi slightly raised his hand, tilted his head, lowered it again, shifting his stance over and over, drawing back again and again just as he seemed about to throw the punch.

What the boy meant to deliver was the ultimate punch.

Honestly.

Since he'd never had reason to think this deeply about such a thing before, now, finally, he actually had to consider it.

Meanwhile the bewildered tourists began drifting away, some of them turning to leave outright.

The strange behavior of Unit-01 earlier had been eye-catching enough, but as time dragged on with nothing further happening,

the silence around them grew almost tediously quiet.

The ordinary tourists eventually lost patience and wandered off, until eventually only Asfi and the dwarf tour guide auntie remained on the scene.

Meanwhile, elsewhere,

the gods and the assembled nobles of various nations were still waiting.

They understood exactly what was happening, which was precisely why they were curious to see what would come of it.

By now,

Unit-01's body had filled completely with Magic.

But that, in truth, wasn't the important part.

What mattered was that Magic — drawn as "capital" from all the kingdoms — kept flowing in, and would continue to do so.

Odin had truly lost his mind.

If the airship crash from before had threatened the lives of tens of thousands,

then—

if this standoff continued, as the conversion process pressed on, everything belonging to the nation — its land, its forests, even the formless clouds themselves — would eventually be converted into Magic.

The consequences of such an irreversible transformation were terrifying beyond imagining.

But the one-eyed god was willing to gamble.

He was a madman.

In truth, this was also a trial for Isagi.

And Isagi's response to it was —

one punch.

It didn't actually take him very long.

Isagi carefully sensed the flowing veins of Magic coursing through the massive alchemic puppet before him.

Like an ocean.

Or perhaps like a city wall.

No weaknesses, no gaps — nothing to exploit save meeting it head-on.

This was the collision of pure Strength, nothing more.

Perhaps.

The great god Odin simply wanted to use this to test just where the limits of his power lay.

Very well then — Isagi would give the one-eyed god his answer.

This single punch of his.

Would be enough to—

Shatter heaven and earth!

Boom!

The boy's fist collided with the massive black steel fist before him!!

Immediately after,

Asfi, along with Odin and the assembled nobles of the various nations who watched the scene unfold, all heard a clear, unmistakable cracking sound.

What had broken?

Not the massive alchemic puppet standing there.

Just as Asfi had thought earlier, with Isagi's true strength, destroying a hundred-meter steel giant would have been almost laughably easy.

What had actually broken

was the "Magic" contained within the alchemic puppet.

[Magic is a tangible thing, and can therefore naturally be physically shattered.]

This, too, was a kind of theory.

In fact, it was precisely from this idea that so many weapons and pieces of equipment capable of resisting magic had been born.

But to use one's own body to tank Magic head-on and Crush it outright — that was already something bordering on absurd.

But thinking it through carefully, it wasn't really so strange.

After all, people could use their fists to shatter an enemy's sword or blade.

So then,

why couldn't Magic be crushed by a fist as well?

No — anything in this world could be broken by one's own body, given enough force.

That was the purest form of "Strength."

Had Riveria and Lefiya been present, they probably would have let out a small gasp of surprise in that instant, because the punch Isagi had just thrown was almost identical to what they understood as [Primordial Magic].

A return to the essence of all things, reduced to the purest, simplest contest imaginable.

And without question,

Isagi was the victor. The Magic within the alchemic puppet, along with the Magic still converging endlessly from every direction, and even the distant [World Tree] itself — not housed within the puppet, but anchored to the whole mountain and buried deep underground far away — all of it was Crushed.

Everything, without exception, had shattered.

In that single instant, what the boy had truly broken was the very concept of "an enemy that could stand against him."

Anything connected to that concept crumbled beneath a single punch.

Far away,

a muffled roar, like an explosion, seemed to rumble up from beneath the ground.

The once-streamlined azure lines running across the alchemic puppet's surface began to crack and crumble away, one after another, like stars fading from the night sky.

Isagi showed no reaction to any of it.

The boy was still savoring that punch — a strike that had exceeded even his own imagination.

A critical hit?

A stroke of luck?

Call it whatever you liked. Sometimes it just happened that way — a sudden burst of power far stronger than usual.

After leveling up to Lv. 8, Isagi's power of wishes had become [Never Disappearing].

At its simplest, it could be understood as "he cannot die no matter what" — the so-called [HP Lock] and [MP Lock], granting him infinite life and stamina.

But now,

Isagi had grasped something further still.

The ability to search through countless repetitions and find the single, truest, most perfect "strike."

It felt a little like finding the most perfect possible future.

In that single instant just now,

Isagi felt as though he had thrown his fist countless times, each attempt yielding a completely different result, each process unfolding differently.

On the surface it looked like nothing but a futile, mechanically repeated motion — raise the hand, throw the punch — yet each repetition carried subtle, infinitesimal differences.

And it was within those differences, in a moment he himself could never have anticipated, arriving like a sudden flash of insight,

that he found the one truest, most perfect strike.

Seriously, this actually works?

"..."

"..."

At that moment, the one-eyed old god atop the mountain closed his eyes.

The nobles of the various nations stared at the scene in disbelief. They had imagined many possible outcomes, but never once had they imagined that the boy's attack would blow straight through the "limit" itself.

It wasn't merely that all the Magic gathered from every kingdom had been Crushed — what mattered most was that it had shattered their very imagination.

[Is this something a human being can actually do?]

It was incomprehensible.

For a Magic Kingdom whose very foundation as a nation rested on technology and development, nothing was more hated, or more feared, than power that could not be understood.

And this wasn't even the domain of the gods.

It was a "possibility" that belonged solely to the children of the lower world — something even the gods themselves could never achieve. Only a [Hero] like Isagi could accomplish such a thing.

The one-eyed old god had gotten exactly the result he'd wanted most — and that result had exceeded even his own imagination as a god.

Silence.

A silence spreading across all the assembled nations said everything.

And at that moment...

The instant Asfi grasped what had just happened, her first thought was to grab Isagi and run.

She knew exactly what the Magic Kingdom was like.

There was no question about it.

Isagi had just wrecked some top-secret project or piece of equipment of theirs — what else was there to do now but flee the scene?

It was practically instinct.

Honestly, people always said that a god and the members of their Familia shared some kind of underlying resemblance at the level of the soul, like parents and children.

If Hermes had been here right now, he probably would have made the exact same call as Asfi, without a second thought.

Break someone else's stuff, then get out of there fast and play dumb!

So.

By the time Isagi snapped out of savoring that punch, Asfi had already used her Flying Boots to whisk him all the way out to the city streets outside.

Stars and moon hung serene overhead.

The summer sky was clear and unhurried, without even much cloud to be seen.

The brilliant lights scattered across the night sky mingled, as ever, with the glittering lights of the bustling city below.

It was right around then

that Asfi seemed to realize there had probably been no need to run at all.

For one thing, this whole ordeal had been arranged by Odin as a "trial" to begin with. For another... even if something really had been broken, so what?

There was nothing the Magic Kingdom could actually do to people like them.

Her thinking hadn't quite caught up yet.

After all, for a Lv. 4 adventurer, while she counted as a formidable power out in the world, she still had to tread carefully in front of a great nation.

But someone like Isagi, at Lv. 8, was an entirely different matter.

So—

"Let's go. Back to bed."

Isagi's mood, at that moment, was simple enough.

He was still savoring that punch — how exactly had he managed to pull off something like that?

Tsk, tsk, tsk...

By the time they got back to the inn, it was clearly already deep into the night.

Lefiya and the others, who had gone out during the day, had already returned, and had even left some late-night snacks for Isagi and Asfi — grilled skewers, though they'd gone a bit cold by now.

Isagi didn't mind at all, and sat down to eat with the women, along with some leftover fried noodles.

Afterward, he planned to wash up and head to bed.

As for everything that had happened that day, he clearly didn't feel much of anything about it.

Asfi, too, had completely relaxed. Maybe, just as the boy had said, it really was best to think of this as nothing more than a trip.

Watching the boy finish his late-night snack and head back to his own room, the woman stretched, ready to return to hers to bathe and sleep.

The elves' inn consisted almost entirely of single-story houses, each arranged around its own courtyard.

Gray-blue brick and tile roofs, courtyards full of flowers and grass, tall trees rising here and there — all of it made the place feel especially tranquil at night.

There were winding covered walkways too, strung with lanterns and candlelight.

And it was on her way back to her room

that Asfi thought she heard something unusual again!

Hm?!

In the darkness, a girl's figure was once again slipping furtively through the courtyard!!

Asfi pressed her lips together, as though she'd already realized something.

She stood there for a moment, thinking it over, and finally decided to follow and see what was going on.

____

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