70 – Cleaning Up

Frustration and worry had been mounting in Vivi since her meeting with the Duke, and especially since Saffra had banged on her door in the middle of the night. Having something physical to vent on, especially a monster rather than a sapient being, was, honestly, a blessing. She might not know how to navigate sensitive discussions with a potentially insane Duke, but when it came to putting down city-erasing monstrosities from beyond the dimensional veil—well, that happened to be her specialty.

She had learned a lot during her fight with the Red Tithe. Combining that practical experience with an understanding of where exactly the material was sourced from, she thought she had a grasp on the big picture. These ‘voidlings’ and ‘voidbeasts’ were otherworldly fauna, and their bodies had evolved to be not only extremely tough and sharp physically, but also resistant to magic. All forms of it, including the effects the System bestowed on this world’s denizens—skills, stats, and all others.

Attack and defense in organisms had always been a game of escalating cat and mouse. She didn’t fully understand how these void-monsters’ glassy black armor resisted magic of all forms, but where they had evolved, she could too. They were deep-sea creatures with slick aerodynamic bodies, parting water with ease—but Vivi could make the water thicker, introduce obstacles within. She had made strides even during her fight against the Red Tithe, and his dagger had been more refined—modified somehow, undoubtedly—than even this Greater Voidbeast’s armor.

Still, that had been a tiny dagger, not three hundred feet of building-thick alien-worm-dragon.

It would be a challenge.

She looked forward to it.

Her staff fell casually toward the gigantic creature that easily rivaled the middle-rank Cataclysms. Red eyes sharpened on their target. She didn’t register it mentally, but her lips pulled back in excitement, or maybe vicious anticipation.

“[Greater Telekinesis].”

The core of the spell had remained mostly the same. Before, the means of actually grabbing an object involved a uniform distribution of force suffusing the entire target. Vivi had made changes. She clamped down, stabbing hooks and barbs all across the huge beast.

The magic almost slid off despite all her efforts. She poured more mana in. Opened her channels fully. Sometimes, there was a quality in quantity. Not all problems could be solved by drowning them in mana, but the best ones could.

[Greater Telekinesis] settled across the beast, her slipping fingers catching hold. The corners of her lips pulled even further up—for her, it was nothing short of a grin.

She knew this wasn’t the most efficient use of her mana, and perhaps she was letting herself get carried away. But she was stressed and angry, and needed to vent. Moreover, she hadn’t been allowed to cut loose, magically speaking, since arriving in this world. Everything broke too easily.

An inefficient method of killing, a highly resistant, nearly immune-to-magic Cataclysm-level monster. The two combined were enough to actually strain her muscles. She felt like a caged lion released into the wild. She tore forward with glee, ripping through the open plains.

Or rather, she pulled.

The entire three-hundred-foot length of the Voidbeast shuddered, then locked in place as its flight was suddenly halted. Vivi began at its skull, prying its jaw open to reveal huge circular rows of jagged glass-like teeth. Pulling—leveraging her full power, leaning with all her weight—she forced its mouth as wide as it could go.

Then more.

She wrenched.

The sound was indescribable. Gruesome, yet satisfying, even to her squeamish sensibilities. Incredibly durable material cracked and splintered and shattered all down its body, showering onto the streets below in huge chunks.

Segment by segment, she tore the creature in half. She savored each second, and the oceans of mana coursing through her to make it happen. It was ecstasy in two parts: satisfaction in how she’d successfully adapted a spell to work against even one of the strongest of these monsters, and the more pure joy of having liquid power channeling through her veins in quantities she had yet to experience.

When she finished, sagging in place, the huge corpse crashed down from the sky. She realized how deeply she was breathing, and how thunderous her pulse had become. It had been viscerally satisfying to exert herself. She’d gotten a taste of something similar back at the manor, when she’d rewound time, but even that hadn’t compared.

Truthfully, she wished the monster had been more durable.

Coming back to herself, she realized Rafael—and the others—were watching her. The whole process had taken ten seconds at most. Vivi reined in her expression, smoothing her face out.

Rafael’s eyes were coldly calculating. She couldn’t say what he’d made of that…display…but he’d certainly come to a conclusion or two.

Duke Caldimore was finally stirring to wakefulness. She grimaced at him, then repeated to Rafael, “See what you can find out.”

She [Blinked] away.

With the worst, most immediate threat cleared—she didn’t want to know what that level 1950 could have done to Meridian, and she was glad she never would—the monumental task of dealing with the invasion as a whole remained.

Even with massive perception dilation, Vivi struggled to take everything in and make a plan. The good news was that the outbreak had occurred in the center of the Adventurer’s District, and nearest the most powerful guilds.

The bad news was that adventurers tended to be foolhardy and heroic sorts. A subset of them, in any case. With deafening alarm bells ringing across the city—which had begun nearly immediately—the streets of the Adventurer’s District were filling with adventurers. Some weren’t even geared, rushing to see what was happening without so much as donning their equipment.

A majority of the monsters, the voidlings, were approximated as weaker than Titled-rank. Thus, they should be containable by proper numbers of mithril and orichalcum-ranks working in concert. Vivi could wipe through quite a lot of those weaker monsters in an instant, even without specially-adapted skills, but there were dozens or hundreds of beasts that even Titled adventurers couldn’t handle. That even teams of them couldn’t. Some were above seventeen hundred—Greater Voidbeasts, as the System called them. Those were the ones Vivi needed to focus on: the threats that could rip open guildhalls and kill even the strongest Titled with a slash of their claws.

There were going to be casualties, she knew, looking down at the chaos from high in the air. There had been many already, simply while her attention had been occupied with the Cataclysm-rank Greater Voidbeast. This wasn’t like the assault on the Convoy, where she could cast a spell and erase the horde on a whim. Only [Greater Telekinesis] had been adapted so far, and while she could use what she’d learned as a template to more rapidly adjust the rest of her grimoire, that would take time, no matter how little, and people were dying every second.

Without further ado, she began her own slaughter.

“[Animus of Gaia].”

A 20th tier earth elemental ripped itself out of the ground hands first, emerging with a roar to shake the entire district. Wasting no time, it slammed into the nearest of the Lesser Voidbeasts—the name given to void-creatures above 1000, but below 1400. The enormous power difference proved sufficient; the golem pummeled repeated blows into the monster, breaking through highly-resistant carapace and flattening its opponent in seconds. It charged for the next.

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Summoning magic, she noted, was just as effective as other types. Good to know.

“[Disintegration Ray].”

A beam a finger’s width in diameter sliced through a Voidbeast, the monster’s insides glowing bright red before collapsing in halves.

Promising.

“[Implode].”

The spell struggled at first, but she poured mana in, and a glassy black wolf-like monster the size of a house went from blurring down the street toward a group of adventurers to collapsing, with a crunch, into a ball no larger than a cannonball. The condensed black material dropped onto cobblestone and shattered the road for meters in every direction.