Chapter 423 - 423 - Grind Hard, Grind Harder, Grind Hardest!

"A Strengthened Species at the very peak of Lv.4..."

In a matter of seconds, from the damage feedback coming back through Scorch, Leon had judged this Lance Dragonfly's strength.

"Iri, Margaret, Aura, Laurier, it's all yours. Remember, it doesn't matter whether we can actually bring it down, but you have to pour in as much damage as you possibly can. Only deep participation maximizes your contribution."

"Yes!"

The instant his voice fell:

"Angel's Poem: Falcon!"

"Karmic Flame Inferno: Ignite!"

"Feast of the Bacchanal Harvest: Cuttings!"

"Hurricane Aria: Wind Arrow!"

Spell after spell, primed and waiting, burst loose the moment the chanting ended! Flame, silver threads, wind arrows, roots: attacks glittering with magic light in every color came howling down on that burning figure from every direction!

The impacts punched home in a rapid stutter, then everything detonated. The Lance Dragonfly, the focus of all that fire, had its senses badly dulled by the agony of Scorch, and with the ice's slowing effect layered on top of that twin torment of fire and frost, it never had time to react before every kind of magic rammed straight into its face!

Shrieks vanished beneath a rolling wall of blasts. Frost, flame, silver thread, hurricane, roots: in the blink of an eye, the tide of the Monster Party was swallowed whole by that flood of magic.

...

Ten minutes passed.

Half an hour passed.

Until an hour and a half had gone by.

The battle was still going.

The light of magic filled the entire passage, and the unbroken bombardment sent the densely packed monsters tumbling over one another. Countless monsters howled and thrashed, trying to claw their way out of this mire of death, but everywhere they looked there was nothing except their own kind, shoving and wedging together in chaos.

Monster instinct screamed at them to flee, but the charging momentum of the flood that was the Monster Party made even a single step backward an impossible luxury. The chaos seized up the Monster Party's once-smooth offensive as if the whole thing had glitched; even filling the line was beyond reach now. And as time wore on, with wave after wave of magic bombardment arriving like meteors, the monsters either froze solid in the blizzard or were buried outright by the plunging fire.

One wave, two waves, three...

Like wheat under the sickle, they charged one after another into the domain of Leon's magic.

A wild shriek tore through the air.

Riding the raw performance of a Lv.4 Strengthened Species, the Lance Dragonfly spent its last strength tearing free of the monster flood and bursting into flight. One of its wings had been sheared away by the silver threads, and its body was covered in burns and puncture wounds. It let out a shriek of pure terror, but before it could pull its fellow monsters in front of itself as a shield, the next second, the sky-blanketing attacks came down once more.

A thunderous boom.

Killed Lv.4 monster (Strengthened Species), Excelia +49

...

Killed Lv.3 monster, Excelia +0.1

...

Killed Lv.2 monster, Excelia +0.1

...

Leon sucked in a breath, suddenly feeling that his girls weren't quite so "ladylike" after all...

Especially Margaret. Just how much Magic had she crammed into that single blast of karmic flame?

That temperature was a little too extreme...

The thought flashed by, and he hurriedly gathered his focus, refining Magic faster and using the ice clones to further strengthen the Blizzard's fury.

He was a top-tier Lv.4 Mage, after all. If the Blizzard he'd been maintaining all this time got knocked apart by the backlash of his own Familia's magic...

He'd never live it down.

Fortunately, after that stretch of suppression, the tremors and surging currents of Magic in the frozen passage finally began to settle.

Jeanne swept the area with Revelation, and once she no longer sensed any danger, her expression finally eased.

"It's finally over."

At those words, Rose and Persephone glanced at each other and put their weapons away.

"Good work, everyone."

Now...

Looking out, whole fields of monster carcasses were frosting over at a speed visible to the naked eye. With a fine crackling, the blood pooling across the ground froze in seconds, and the bodies were steadily eaten away by wind and snow. Frost climbed their twisted limbs, sealing each one away, until at last they stood as monster ice sculptures rimed in white, every one frozen in a different pose.

With the fighting over, Leon stopped his magic as well. His belly swelled slightly, then he let out a long, long breath that hung with icy mist.

Jeanne, Rose, and Persephone felt the bone-deep cold rush over them and, expressions unchanged, stepped back half a pace in perfect sync, away from the source of it all. None of them had forgotten that this was the Dungeon. If somebody caught a chill from the sudden swing in temperature and the Expedition had to be cut short barely halfway through, that joke would not be funny at all.

From the mage squad behind the party came waves of ragged, uneven breathing.

Iri, Margaret, and the others either stood with heads bowed and hands braced on their hips, or hunched over with their weight on their knees, minds wiped blank, left with nothing but the instinct to breathe. Worse still was Laurier: after loosing several hundred Hurricane Arrows in a row, not only were her stamina and mind completely spent, her bow arms trembled as they hung limp at her sides. Right now she lay sprawled spread-eagle on the ground, staring vacantly up at the rocky ceiling, her consciousness seemingly burned away along with her strength, the whole of her as motionless as a body with no soul left in it.

"F-finally over!"

"If it... if it hadn't ended, I... I seriously couldn't have held on any longer!"

Laurier lay sprawled on the ground, her little face saying she had nothing left to live for. More than an hour of continuous high-intensity combat had wrung her stamina out completely.

This engagement had been nothing like a Monster Rex hunt.

In a Rex hunt, Leon, Jeanne, and the others were the main force, and the rhythm of the battle still rose and fell. Like a ball game: when a play had nothing to do with you, you could slack off, take a stroll, and nobody cared if you just stood there zoning out.

But in the Monster Party just now, apart from Leon, the other Lv.4s hadn't meant to lift a finger at all.

With the slow field produced by Leon's Blizzard and the fire support of his Ice Lances, Leon alone had used the narrow terrain to keep the monster flood outside the line.

And Laurier and the others, as the main damage dealers, had spent the entire hour-plus unloading at full capacity without a single moment to catch their breath. In a battle that long and that intense, even at Lv.2, she had finally hit her limit.

Fortunately, as Mages, Iri and Margaret didn't burn stamina drawing and nocking arrows the way an archer did; otherwise their condition would probably have been even worse than Laurier's.

As for Aura...

Sorry, but when your magic can "drain," you get to do whatever you want.

...

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