LET’S BRING THE PAIN
Hey, it’s me. The person who just showed up out of nowhere and punched Potimas in the face.
Cowardly?
I’ll take that as a compliment, thanks!
Talk about playing dirty. Good job, me.
“Lord Potimas?!”
Whoops, guess I don’t have time to stand around feeling good about myself.
There’s a bunch of sketchy-looking people in hoods gathered around where Potimas just hit the floor.
Several of them seem to be in a panic.
I would be, too, if my boss suddenly got punched in the face.
If anything, what’s weird is that the rest of the hooded guys haven’t moved an inch.
They seem kinda…I dunno, not very human…ooor alive for that matter.
But they don’t seem totally lifeless, which is important.
Actually, I have a pretty good guess as to what these things are. They’re not normal elves, that’s for sure.
Most likely, they’re people who have been turned into cyborg weapons, just like Potimas here.
Seeing a whole bunch of them in one place like this is pretty creepy, though.
Uh, ’scuse me, Mr. Potimas?
Does this little scene mean that you were rather serious about trying to crush us this time?
If he had already gathered this much firepower before the rebel army even finished assembling, that means there would’ve been even more crazy weapons in that northern town if they had been able to complete their preparations.
Yikes. That was close.
Judging by what Potimas was saying earlier, I’m guessing he wasn’t planning on sending this bunch over to help the rebel army.
This is just a guess, but maybe he was planning to go collect the reinforcements he’d sent to the northern town because he found out that we were unexpectedly on the move.
Come to think of it, there was that group of hooded guys at the fortifications who were putting up more of a fight than the rest of the rebels.
I guess those were elves, then.
If there were some cyborgs mixed in among them, like there are in the group here, I can see why Potimas would want to swipe those back before anyone noticed.
Based on the way they were fighting, I’m pretty sure most of them were regular elves, not cyborgs. And a small handful of cyborgs wouldn’t be much help once the Demon Lord and I arrived on the scene.
So Potimas probably decided to write this plan off as a failure and recover his troops before he incurred any losses.
In that case, how about I cause waaay more damage than you were hoping to prevent?
The early bird gets the worm!
Or in this case, the early spider.
Now, time to activate Warped Evil Eye!
Warped Evil Eye is a nasty move that twists a targeted space and, in the process, messes up whatever happens to be there.
When I used it as a skill, it took more power to manipulate space depending on the strength of the materials in the targeted area.
In other words, the tougher the object, the harder it was to warp.
But wait!
My new Warped Evil Eye doesn’t have any such limitations!
It’s twisting the very fabric of space itself, so the makeup of whatever’s in the way has nothing to do with it!
In a sense, this attack is one that totally ignores defensive ability.
Once you’re caught in my Warped Evil Eye, you’re screwed no matter what.
The only negative is that it doesn’t have a very wide range.
Anyway, I guess the first order of business is to wipe out the elves who have wills of their own, namely the ones who are panicking over Potimas getting his lights knocked out.
I target the three of them, and next thing you know, they’re twisted and crushed into blobs of who-knows-what.
Sweet.
Now let’s mess up the rest of these cyborgs before Potimas recovers.
“Anti-Technique Barrier, activate.”
Oh shoot. He moved before I had the chance.
Still lying facedown, Potimas activates his barrier, rewriting the rules of the world around us.
Immediately, my vision goes black.
My x-ray vision has been canceled, so since my eyes are closed, I can’t see anything.
As soon as I open my eyes, I see the cyborg soldiers turning to face me, their arms transforming into guns.
Oh crap!
I’d better use a body-enhancement conjuring on my feet and JUMP!
Seconds later, a barrage of bullets shoots through the space I was in just a moment ago.
I launch a thread toward the ceiling and swing like a pendulum to put more distance between us.
I assume we’re in some kind of building.
The cyborgs chase after me, shooting up the walls and ceiling.
If I get hit by one of those bullets inside Potimas’s barrier, even I won’t escape without a scratch.
Luckily, maybe because I’m a god now, I can make thread even inside the barrier, and my body-enhancement conjuring works, too.
But as I sort of suspected, that’s about all I can do.
None of the conjuring techniques I could use to escape seem to be working.
Grrr! I guess I should have thought things through a little more before I charged in headfirst.
This is a bit of a pickle.
Looking around, I see Potimas standing up and preparing a gun arm of his own.
I shoot a mesh of thread toward him.
Take this! Spider net!
Potimas shoves a nearby cyborg soldier into the flying web to protect himself.
Using your people as shields? Now, that’s dirty!
But that whole stunt did buy me the time I needed.
While he’s distracted, I run up close to the wall, then use that momentum to deliver a flying kick!
My aim was to bust right through the wall and escape outside!
I call this strategy Operation: Get Out of the Barrier’s Evil Range (Operation: GOOBER for short)!
With my body enhancement, my powerful kick sticks fast into the wall.
Wait, what? Sticks?
Okay, the wall was a little harder than I expected and now my leg sorta stings, but that’s no big deal.
But…sticks?
I’m STUCK?!
I was trying to break through the wall to get outside, and instead I pinned myself perfectly to the damn wall.
Well, this is unexpected!
Then I realize why my foot got stuck and start freaking out a little.
We’re UNDERGROUND!
There’s no outside beyond this wall! It’s just hard-packed earth.
No wonder I couldn’t bust out, ha-ha-ha.
Um, this isn’t funny!!
I hurry up and yank my foot out, but it’s too late.
I feel several bullets sink into my body.
Uh-oh. This ain’t looking great.
“Keep at it. Don’t stop shooting until she stops breathing.”
Ohhh boy, I don’t like this one bit.
Nope, nope, nope.
Guess I should’ve just popped in, punched him, and popped right back out.
Things were going a little too well, so I kinda got ahead of myself.
Well, next time I’ll know to quit while I’m ahead.
For now, I guess it’s time to give up on this body.
I open up my spatial conjuring to the max and push the barrier back just a little.
Then I connect to another dimension through that little gap.
There’s no visible change to my surroundings, so Potimas shouldn’t notice.
And even if he did, I doubt he’d be able to chase after me in the ensuing chaos.
As soon as my body gets reduced to Swiss cheese and drops to the ground, the little trap I set up earlier activates.
“What?!”
If you asked a bunch of RPG fans what the strongest attack magic is, I bet at least a few of them would answer: Meteor.
An attack where a massive object comes crashing down from outer space is both simple and super-destructive.
That said, it’s a little tough to aim at a precise spot when the starting point is literally space, so I didn’t actually start from all that high.
What did I do exactly? Well, I just used spatial conjuring to make a giant rock appear in the air above us, that’s all.
From there, I just have to let gravity take over, and the rock’ll come crashing down and destroy everything.
If I really wanted to, I could make an even bigger object fall from even farther out in space, but that’d cause an awful lot of damage, so I decided to rein it in.
Like, it’s generally accepted that a meteor wiped out the dinosaurs, y’know?
I’m not really looking to finish this planet off here.
I’m not like a certain someone who designed a Meteor weapon that could have literally destroyed the planet during that UFO incident a while back. Not naming any names…Potimas!
But yeah, you can take care of most things if you drop a big enough rock from a high enough place. No need to do anything too crazy.
Thus, the giant rock crashes down and crushes everything, including my Swiss-cheese remains.
What a stolen barrier my god nullifies almost everything there fuck