It was a clear attack unleashed by Prometeor.
An attack is the manifestation of hostility toward a target. At the root of such hostility, there is often fear. When one feels their existence or safety is threatened, their instincts try to remove the source of danger. In other words, aggression is chosen as a way to ease fear or anxiety and protect oneself.
If that is true, then it was strange for Prometeor to attack mere food.
Would a human feel fear toward a steak on the table and stab it repeatedly with a knife. Would they feel threatened by a school of fish in a tank and throw in a bomb. Of course not. Such force would be absurd within the predator and prey relationship.
To Prometeor, the creatures of this planet had always been food and sources of energy. At least, until now. Even when it ate the Frost Wyvern, it was nothing more than a leisurely act, like trying a local delicacy during a trip.
Why Prometeor now showed such blatant hostility was something only that mock-dragon itself knew. For the Norn forces caught in its sights, it was nothing but misfortune.
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The moment Grunveld looked up at the sky, the heavy leaden clouds seemed to split apart. Or rather, they only appeared to split. In truth, a single beam of light broke through the clouds.
It was clearly different from sunlight. It was pale, bluish and almost ominous in its glow.
The beam descended in silence. It was only a few meters wide, yet its power was beyond imagining.
The first to be swallowed by it was a squad of knights at the front of the formation.
「Wha──」
The captain noticed the anomaly and tried to shout, but he vanished into the light along with his warhorse. He did not burn away. He simply ceased to exist.
All that remained in the beam’s wake was melted ice and a few scraps of metal.
A moment of silence. Then screams erupted.
「Uwaaaaahhh!」
「What is that!? What just happened!?」
Panic surged through the army. But Prometeor showed no mercy.
One beam after another rained down from the heavens. It looked like lightning sent by a god to purge the land.
The beams struck the soldiers with unerring precision, erasing their existence one after another. Some vanished with their swords still raised, some with fear twisting their faces, and some without even understanding what had happened.
「Do not falter! Maintain formation!」
Grunveld roared. Yet his command was drowned out by the death cries and the spreading panic.
Even the king known as the Ice Wolf was powerless before this force beyond human understanding. His tactics and valor held no meaning here.
「Your Majesty! You must flee! It is too dangerous!」
War Minister Barant shouted, his face drained of blood. A heartbeat later, the soldier standing beside him was swallowed by the light and vanished.
「Damn it!」
Grunveld ground his teeth. His pride would not allow the thought of retreat. But reality offered no choice. His army and his strength were being trampled like insects.
「Aviana!」
He barked her name, almost as if accusing her.
「Is there any way to stop it! Can your magic block that!」
Aviana shook her head, her face pale. She was desperately trying to analyze the phenomenon before her, drawing on every scrap of knowledge she possessed. But she could not understand it. She could not sense even the faintest trace of magic power from the beams.
It was as if they were produced by laws entirely different from the principles of this world.
「Then what do you expect me to do! Are we to sit here and be wiped out!」
Grunveld’s furious shout echoed. At that moment, a massive beam fell near them.
A violent shockwave tore across the ice field, and shards of ice rained down like hail. Grunveld instinctively threw himself over Aviana to shield her.
「Gah…!」
Ice smashed against his armor. Had it been a direct hit, even he would not have survived.
Realizing this broke Grunveld completely.
「…All forces, retreat.」
His voice was weak and trembling.
「We return to Frostheim! Those still alive, follow me!」
At the king’s command, the surviving soldiers turned and ran. The army was no longer an army. It was only a frightened herd of humans fleeing from death.
Grunveld lifted Aviana onto a horse and climbed up behind her. He cast a single glare at the sky, then spurred the mount forward, racing across the ice without looking back.
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「Young Master… what is that…」
Feri’s voice pulled my thoughts back to reality. Below us, the inferior beings who had stood in neat formation only moments ago were being burned away by the beams falling from the sky.
Yes, they were being burned. But that was not fire. It was most likely condensed light.
When I was young, I played with something similar. I gathered the nearby water particles and shaped them into a mirror, then concentrated light to burn various things for fun. Mother scolded me and Graman hit me on the head. Only Mother and Graman were capable of laying a hand on me. I was still inexperienced back then.
Leaving that aside, I could not respond to Feri immediately. Common sense suggested it was magic, yet I felt no magic power. Magic on that scale should be perceptible even to a stray dog. It was not magic, but some other kind of force.
「Forgive my rudeness, but I feel it resembles Young Master’s magic」
Feri’s remark was sharp, as if she had read my thoughts. She really was useful.
「Explain」
「Yes… how should I put it… Young Master’s magic does not radiate much magic power. Of course, it contains immense amounts of magic power, but compared to the scale of the phenomena, the efficiency is too great… or perhaps unnaturally great」
I wanted to say it was simply because I used magic efficiently. Yet Feri had a point. Even I could not fully explain my own power. No, I could not explain the star magic itself.
I had wondered whether it should even be called magic. I still wondered.
There are many forms of power. Physical strength, authority, charm, magic power. Countless varieties if you list them all. Magic is a phenomenon resulting from the use of magic power. In that case, there might also be phenomena born from forces I did not yet know.
「Whatever that force is, it is extremely dangerous…」
Feri voiced her concern.
「That may be true. And? You want me to stop whatever is using that force?」
If she thought that, the conversation would go nowhere. Why would I expend effort to save inferior beings? As I considered that possibility,
「No! That is not what I meant! It is the opposite!」
Feri denied it with an unusually firm tone.
「The opposite?」
「I understand very well through my own body that Young Master is a compassionate person……. But I foolishly believe that your kindness can sometimes turn against you.」
Feri’s eyes were wet. It seemed she was truly worried about me.
「I see, and?」
「I do not wish for you to face a being that wields such an unnatural power and risk yourself just to save them……」
Well, that was true. I had no reason to use my power to save those inferior beings. Look, even now pillars of light were burning them away. What a wonderful sight. The pests were disappearing from Mother’s world. My favorite expression is first Mother’s smile, and second the crying faces of inferior beings. So, I do not feel any desire to save them. I do not, but──
A single word caught in my ear.
「Dangerous～???」
My voice echoed low, crawling across the ground.
「Y-Young Master?」
Feri flinched.
Dangerous? Dangerous means something is unsafe. Unsafe? Me? Fighting that incomprehensible thing is dangerous? The one in danger should be the one who fights me, shouldn’t it?
「Ah……! Th, the, my butt……」
Feri showed a pained expression. I was holding her in my arms and the hand supporting her rear was squeezing her flesh. If we were not flying, I would have smacked her.
A strike to the rear is the greatest punishment. I knew that well because Mother had smacked me several times when I was young. It hurt and above all was humiliating. When Feri was new to her work and made mistakes, I smacked her several times too, yet it seemed my education had still not fully reached her heart and body.
Feri, you…. you treated me as inferior being, didn’t you? You worried about me, didn’t you? Do you truly think I would fall behind someone of that level?
I squeezed her rear even harder.
「Young Master, I am deeply…… sorry……!」
Feri apologized, but my anger did not fade. Was she really sorry? She was sweating and rubbing her body against me.
「……You go down to the ground. Do not get caught in this.」
I said that and released the arm holding her.
「Y-Young Master!?!?」
I threw Feri downward as if casting her aside. Of course I placed a fall-control spell on her. I had no interest in breaking my own property.
Now then, the obstacle was gone.
I slowly turned my gaze toward the direction where the beams of light were falling.
「I will teach you how to use power」
I pressed my palms together in prayer.
── Goddamn! Fuck Suck Bitch! Cock! Moisture that fills the endless skies, gather, condense and become a shattering mirror
TN: Yeah, that part was written in English. I guess the author has seen result from reddit when he searched ‘english prayer’ on google.
Burning that trash by focusing light? Feri, I have been doing that since the days I was still spilling my own piss. Ten years have passed since then and I reworked that childish game into a long-range bombardment spell. Look at my magic. This is my love, created to protect Mother’s world and burn every filthy inferior being creature from the ground.
A massive amount of water vapor gathered around me. It formed an enormous lens.
『Let scorching might be! Omega Ray!!』
I released the completed spell toward the source of that hateful presence.
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If the beams of light raining from the heavens were arrows, that was a battering ram.
The technique Hein called the Omega Ray operated on a simple principle. It was the concentration of sunlight.
Hein first controlled the water vapor in the air with magic and created a giant lens about five kilometers in diameter. It was not a mere block of ice. It was a crystal structure with perfect transparency, its arrangement controlled down to the atomic level.
Its design was a multilayer Fresnel lens optimized to maximize light convergence.
The sunlight this enormous lens captured reached an immense amount. Assuming this planet’s solar constant was similar to Earth’s 1.37kW/m², a lens of that size would receive roughly 26.8 gigawatts of energy. That was more than twenty large nuclear power plants combined.
The true horror of Hein’s magic lay in directing that massive energy into a point only a few meters wide. The concentration magnified the energy density exponentially and the output easily reached the terawatt range, possibly even petawatt levels at its peak.
This ultra-high-output beam tore through the air and reached its target faster than sound. The air along its path turned into plasma and unleashed a devastating shockwave. It was less like magic and more like a strategic-class directed-energy weapon.
Had that blast been aimed at the ground, an entire city would have evaporated in an instant, leaving only a massive crater behind.
One might question whether such overwhelming magic was necessary.
But Hein’s battle instinct whispered to him that it ‘was’.
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