5
Taliktan, the Genius of Summoning, had broken a huge hole in the wall and leapt through. Golden hair swinging, Riezé intercepted him: Frost Spear, a spear of ice that gushed cold air.
Of the three elements that Sorcerers controlled, cold air was less popular than the others. This was because the attack classes were meant to kill enemies, and the direct damage dealt by ice spells was relatively low. For instance, the electric spell Lightning Chamber and the fire spell Burned Stake did far more damage, but Riezé still placed her focus on ice spells. In her opinion, the balance between firepower and MP consumption was good, as were the length of the cast times and the force per strike.
In general, long cast times were considered a drawback, but if you were able to predict the enemy’s movements, they turned into an advantage. That was true this time, too. A spell that used up the time the enemy spent moving on a long chant held destructive power commensurate to its cast time. When the white-haired Genius appeared in the hall, she sent it right at his nose. Another advantage was that, of the spells Sorcerers used, this one was excellent at hampering the enemy’s movements.
As Taliktan tottered, Koen and Yuzuko launched full-power attacks.
“Still…,” Riezé murmured.
That had been very rough.
When she’d heard about the maneuver, she’d doubted Shiroe’s sanity, and even now, she thought it was preposterous. She didn’t know the actual number of stories, but that broadcasting tower couldn’t have been less than thirty meters off the ground. Shiroe’s plan had involved not only leaping from the open rooftop, but linking that act to kiting.
The outcome had been successful, but it still struck Riezé as far too absurd. Although, truthfully, it was possible she was merely bound by fixed ideas. The maneuver actually had succeeded, and they’d managed to drag Taliktan into the melee in this music hall.
“This isn’t like Master Shiroe…I don’t think…”
“Nah, that’s not true.”
Nazuna leapt lightly backward in a move as if she had eyes in her back, coming to stand beside Riezé, and answered her.
“Shiro did the same thing, this counselor stuff, on the Tea Party. I dunno what the world thought about us, but we were a rough, random bunch. Today, he’s just like he was back then, that’s all. This is normal.”
Nazuna, who’d leveled her katana alertly and was glaring at the enemy, smiled faintly as she boasted.
She was probably telling the truth.
Riezé had misread Shiroe. He was the driving force behind the Round Table Council. Someone who had contributed to the alliance with Eastal, the League of Free Cities. A hardworking man of the world who undertook the task of arranging things among the guilds and organizing information. An able official, a competent administrator, a worker with political abilities, a strategist—those were the concepts through which she’d seen him. Yet, they were only a part of him.
Her staff moved automatically, rapidly spinning one spell after another.
A Sorcerer’s role was to concentrate firepower. Each spell had a cast time, a bind time, and a recast time. This meant it wasn’t possible to use the same spell several times in a row, so they ended up using the recast time as the chant time for another spell. Sorcerers fought by combining anywhere from five to ten types of spells to create a cycle, and then repeating that cycle.
It was easy to say, but it was actually pretty difficult. Even if a spell was standardized, its performance differed slightly from Sorcerer to Sorcerer. Furthermore, the special skills, style, and equipment a player had changed recast times, so the spells that could be linked together in a play cycle changed as well.
For instance, there were some enemy monsters that had resistance to fire damage. When dealing with those monsters, the flame spells in a cycle got in the way, but naturally, when taking those spells out, the whole cycle broke down. In other words, did the Sorcerer have several types of cycles custom-made? Could they maintain the spells at the unconscious level and choose them to suit the circumstances? These were the abilities that were required from Sorcerers on raids.
As a member of D.D.D., Riezé had sufficiently mastered eight cycles. Four of those were the type that could be connected to different cycles by adding internal branch points, to cope with abrupt accidents. There weren’t many Sorcerers that well trained. Among Elder Tales magic classes, it was one of the pinnacles of sophistication.
However, even to Riezé, Shiroe’s spell cycles seemed unique.
For most spells, chant times were between two and ten seconds. That meant it took anywhere from a minute and a half to two minutes for one cycle to complete. With a simple observation, anyone could tell which spells were being used and how they were linked together. Nonetheless, she wasn’t able to read the scale of Shiroe’s cycles.
Even so, he wasn’t simply chanting spells as he thought of them. That would have resulted in weak connections and lost time, which would have reduced the final damage output.
No such loss was visible in Shiroe’s spell chants. She could see the traces of some sort of diligent study. Yet even still, she didn’t understand how the cycles were structured. Had he learned such an abundance of cycles that it wasn’t possible to read them entirely in a day or so of fighting together, or was this some other, different technique?
His MP isn’t going down. It’s falling, but the recovery is balancing it. He’s maintaining the combat skills, even as he circulates the ranks and controls them. That’s what the frequent instructions to break through the front line are for.
Shiroe was giving shape to an idea that would have been laughed down as a joke, even if someone had managed to come up with it. There were errors, of course. They were there, but the sort of precautionary measures that would cover for them had already been taken.
He hadn’t instructed Nazuna to fall back a moment ago just to keep her MP in reserve. It had been in order to recover the recast time from the big technique Great Purification Prayer—
Actually, no, that wasn’t it: It was intended to block Taliktan’s gaze and line of fire, which he’d turned on Isuzu and Rundelhaus. Or rather, Shiroe had made it look that way, when it was really so that she could act as an observer and give Soujirou advice from the rear, as someone who was very skilled at executing team plays with him.
The true intent behind Shiroe’s instructions stayed vague while only the group’s effects accumulated, light racing along countless paths toward victory. Riezé was also a raid commander, and she had a Tactician subclass. It was her job to see an encounter with the enemy as a story and read it carefully. However, even for Riezé, the story Shiroe was reading now was too wild, and her comprehension couldn’t keep up.
Shiroe probably hadn’t chosen a protagonist for his story.
Anyone could corner Taliktan, using any method.
That was no doubt what he was thinking.
Under Shiroe’s command, there was no clear casting even for the attackers and the supporters. Even Kushiyatama—the close-combat Kannagi and “rampaging miko”—was brandishing her blade as if it felt good.
“Count ten seconds. Requesting Barriers on Naotsugu, Nyanta, Koen, Akatsuki, and Soujirou!”
“Aye-aye, sir!”
Nazuna responded to Shiroe’s directions in a teasing voice, then chanted Purification Barrier. In an instant, translucent walls that shone madder red appeared and were applied to her allies. It was a preemptive defense spell, cast when an attack was anticipated. At that command, Riezé instinctively knew that a large attack from Taliktan was on its way.
“Hurry… Four, three, two… Now!”
As Riezé glared at him, Taliktan raised his twisted staff high, unleashing purple lightning. The bolts burst at close range, and Riezé averted her face from the light, but her Mystery, Chiron Tablet, kept tracking the battle log.
The barriers had definitely obstructed the lightning attack, but even then, Naotsugu and its other targets had taken enough damage to lose more than half their HP. It had been Taliktan’s most powerful attack. If the barriers hadn’t made it in time, and if they hadn’t defended with pinpoint accuracy, there was no question that the front line would have collapsed.
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