Chapter 111: Absolute Destruction

"...Hahaha... Nio, that really is an interesting thing to find out. So my voice hurts you?" Typhon erects an extremely durable barrier around the two of them while Nio finds herself cornered, still disoriented from the previous "attack."

"You—"

"------------------------------------------------------------" Typhon fills her lungs with air and lets out a roar even more thunderous than the first. This time the sound is so bizarrely discordant from any sound in existence that it simply becomes incomprehensible.

The surrounding barriers lock the sound completely inside, sealing the two of them in with the roar while Nio slams her hands against her head with such violence that her nails scratch her skin.

The sound makes Nio’s brain vibrate inside her skull, making her feel like she wants to rip her own brain out. The sound rebounding off the barrier walls only amplifies the sensation, making Nio scream in pain. Her eyes bleed as she is completely disoriented by the absurd sound.

Even though Typhon is weakened, her true voice still carries as much weight as the version of her capable of destroying a universe, which affects Nio to an extreme degree since Nio doesn’t have the power for such a voice to be treated as mere random noise.

Nio’s tears mix with blood as her lungs and every organ in her body feel like they’re about to burst from the vibration reverberating through every cell of her body.

Nio is so affected by this that she could claw at her own face and gouge out her own eyes—if she could move her hands, which she can’t because her body won’t obey her. Typhon ends her roar by lunging at Nio with a punch straight to her face.

Nio’s body took so much damage from that roar that it can’t even react, which causes the passives and capabilities of her outfit set to stop working because her body locked up.

Typhon quickly realizes Nio is no longer dodging, so she coats her fists in an enormous amount of magic, pummeling Nio’s body with extremely powerful punches that tear through her outfit set.

This makes Nio’s HP drop dangerously fast, and her internal injuries pile up faster than all the regeneration she has. Typhon’s barrier shatters as Nio begins falling from the sky. Typhon, realizing Nio can’t recover, takes the opportunity to cast a spell charged with an enormous amount of Mana.

"..." Nio quickly hits the water, plunging into the lake while gasping painfully, but thanks to her Thief class she wakes up faster than the first time.

Nio looks up and sees Typhon charging a spell, so she uses this time to drink a healing potion—but as she does, she ends up vomiting the potion back up along with a large amount of blood.

"..." She starts seeing everything through red blurs. This is the negative effect [Magic Sickness], which appears when you drink too many high-level healing potions at once, or too many low-level healing potions at once or in sequence.

[Magic Sickness] causes dizziness, nausea, and reduces healing effectiveness by 70%. It’s an extreme Debuff, and now applied to reality, its effects mainly manifest from overstraining the body to heal from fatal damage.

"I-I can’t heal anymore." Nio beats her wings, rising out of the water as an immense structure of black wood like a giant thorn forms in the sky above. Typhon fires this magic at Nio, who is forced to think fast.

"..." Nio spreads her wings completely flat, gliding through the air while aiming her staff at the incoming attack. She does something else the game didn’t allow—firing pure Mana, with no spell attached.

Nio gathers a large portion of the Mana she has, creating a new spell that is added to her spell Deck. Intuitively, Nio realizes this.

"[Draconic Explosive Expansion]"

[Draconic Explosive Expansion] Releases an immense sphere of super-condensed Mana that explodes on contact. This spell grows stronger the more MP is poured into it, expanding the size of the attack, the size of the explosion, and the total force of both.

From the tip of the staff, a sphere is fired that rapidly expands. It holds so much of Nio’s Mana that its size quickly covers the entire surface of the lake as it launches forward.

Typhon, who didn’t expect Nio to pull off such insanity, tries to climb higher to escape the blast radius—but the moment Typhon’s attack touches Nio’s, the resulting explosion is so extreme and unstable that it reaches even Typhon in the sky.

The black and silver glow of the explosion literally creates a white flash of light that completely covers the planetary system. The light itself has no power—it just visually turned everything white for a few seconds.

However, the super-concentrated explosion at the point of impact resulted in the extinction of the planet’s own atmosphere in the area of the attack, while the temperature of the entire planet permanently rose by 2 full degrees.

And a giant hole was torn through every layer of the sky all the way into space. Since the attack was directed upward, the explosion also went upward. This attack would have had enough force to turn the empire into a crater, erasing it completely.

A clear indication of how much Mana Nio has—to the point that her total mana as a mage is double Typhon’s mana, and because it’s an attack made purely of Mana, personal, elemental, or racial resistances are useless against it.

Typhon’s armor was completely obliterated by the attack, reduced to ash. The melting point at the center of the explosion was like a miniature star being born and dying. Even if such a destructive feat doesn’t have a very large range, its destructive capacity is unmatched compared to any magic Nio used before.

"...Haaa..." Nio gasps in immense pain as all the energy dissipates and the sunlight beats hard against her body. Her HP was practically zeroed out, only 5% remaining. Her MP also dropped to a measly 10% due to all the expenditure during the fight—after all, she used several high-level spells almost in sequence throughout the entire battle.

Aside from another extremely important aspect, Nio has almost no real combat experience. Everything was instinct, quick thinking, and years of gaming. If Nio had experience, her magical expenditure would have been far lower. There’s also the fact that Typhon had exactly the same strength as her in several aspects, standing on equal footing with Nio.

"S-She survived that?" Nio looks at Typhon in the sky, who survived something far beyond a nuclear explosion. Nio can only consider her a true aberration that shouldn’t exist.