Editing Sorcery Hacker:Volume1 Phase4 (section)

===Part 10===

You may have forgotten, but the armor used by the knights was a collection of protectors made from oxidized mana-conducting silver and large monster tendons and leather, so it was designed to provide magical defense and increase physical abilities. Since it ran on sorcery, it could be hacked and hijacked with a sufficiently high level.

Specifically, the rotating wing craft was Level 7 and the knight’s armor was Level 14.

Ayato had reached above 20, so they were the perfect target for him.

This might not have worked on someone as skilled in martial arts as Henrietta, but things changed when someone was stuck in an open-air cockpit and reliant on their flight device. He only had to stab his blade into the armor of the person seated in that cockpit.

Ayato did not have the physical ability needed to hop around on the footholds pinned in midair like stepping stones, but once he had the power to fly, he could shatter Nirvelphany’s dominance. He had the ability to hit her with a surprise attack.

“Owwwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!”

With a roar to shake off his own fear, he dropkicked the ancient Demon Lord in the face. He had finally landed a clean hit…or so he thought, but he may have taken more damage from the force of the blow. His hands slipped from the bottom of the rotating wing craft and he was thrown out into empty air.

“Not again, you bad idea factory!!”

He received an absolutely wonderful compliment from his lovely partner and then an ice platform spread out in midair thanks to the shots from two handguns. Just like when she had saved Henrietta, the makeshift footing caught Ayato.

“!!”

Meanwhile, Demon Lord Nirvelphany was leaning back from the force of a human’s full body weight to her face, but she did not fall. With her spine still lithely bent, she held her giant anti-dragon rifle at the hip and aimed for the ice foothold below Ayato rather than the boy himself.

But she had forgotten something.

Why had she forgotten about Ayato before? Hadn’t she been faced with the more direct threat of Henrietta Split Destrius directly behind her?

A collapsible stock dropped straight down like a guillotine.

She had just barely avoided falling by bending back, but when this blunt weapon dropped on her face, she was finally slammed back-first into their narrow footing.

“Ohhh!!”

But the roaring Demon Lord still used one hand to aim Critical Disaster skyward while lying on her back. The weapon was longer than the average person was tall and she stuck it right in front of Henrietta’s face and fired despite the imagined sensation of the old wound on her shoulder splitting open and blood and pus bursting out.

The beautiful Striker’s only response to the fearsome beam was to swing her head to the side.

“I have seen that already.”

Before the Demon Lord could get up, Henrietta stepped on the wrist of the right hand holding the anti-dragon rifle and raised her bolt-action rifle with axe-like bayonet in preparation to swing it down.

“Enough of this.”

“…”

Nirvelphany was smiling.

Ayato moved next to Henrietta after getting up using his short sword like a staff.

“Is it over?”

“Hmph. So even a dangerous individual feels a desire to settle things himself? But only those of us given authority by the king are permitted to use this kind of firepower in the sky city.”

“Is it really over!? This was really the extent of her obsession!?”

“?”

Henrietta thought this was checkmate, so she looked puzzled.

Just then, they all heard a deep rumbling from the heavens.

The ancient Demon Lord spoke from the narrow foothold.

“I was waiting atop that tower because I had a plan for faking a blizzard. However, that would not deceive the foolish masses unless I did something about that shield first. It could still be interpreted as abnormal weather, but it would seem unnatural.”

“You can’t mean that.” Henrietta was dumbfounded. “You couldn’t! You couldn’t possibly!! Maybe you are the ancient Demon Lord, but you would need some kind of largescale sorcery temple to break through the shield protecting the entire sky city!!”

“Sorcery…temple? Quite the oxymoron there. And I do not need any fancy preparations. I am the Demon Lord at the top, so I am even more powerful than that dragon attacking the fire castle town. I possessed everything from the beginning.”

They heard a quiet clattering as something danced in the collapsed Demon Lord’s hand. They were small dice made of crystal. Dice had originally been fortunetelling tools just like tarot cards and three of them were moving on their own here.

They were a Linkage Monitor.

It was obvious what this meant.

“Sorcery…Hacking?”

“Oh? Had you not heard that drugged-up Dagregor Bull Gerlos had gone missing? Isn’t he a colleague of that young lady there? He told me everything I wanted to know. Including how his special technique works.”

“But what did you hack!?”

“I am Nirvelphany. I was feared in ancient times as the Zodiac Bright Eater. …But why was that?”

She grinned and gave the answer.

“I have regained access to the true source of my power waiting up in satellite orbit: a sorcery cannon massive enough to obscure the heavens.”

There was movement overhead.

Something was wrong with the sunny and starry sky.

No, the red aurora rushed in from all directions while its brightness grew.

That light was known as the Demon Lord’s Bite.

They were just a step away from the heavens. Celedileka had transformed the scenery so the blue planet was directly below and the twinkling stars were directly above. Yet that starry sky was now being devoured by an unbelievably massive silhouette.

As Ayato looked up, that red something burst and an enormous object emerged.

The scale made it hard to tell, but that ridiculous collection of firepower had to be more than ten times the size of the sky city.

“My attack doesn’t have to reach it. It can even be deflected by the Guardian Umbrella atmospheric shield. But by firing up into the heavens, I directed its attention this way.”

The Demon Lord sneered.

She had chosen brute force from the very beginning. She was simply going to blast through the Guardian Umbrella protecting the city and allow the massive cold wave of their extreme altitude to freeze the entire sky city.

“And by hacking the antenna embedded in my own body, I have regained the connection that was severed by that eternal seal. I will admit it was pure luck that it had not shorted out. I am…no, the safety for the entire Demon Lord system including the sorcery cannon is equivalent to Level 9999. In other words, this contains enough power that such a powerful restraint was necessary.”

“…”

“It has been abandoned in orbit for the entire time my physical body was sealed. And it has been storing up power for a single attack all the while. Now, can this human fortress really defend against that?”

She had never expected an answer.

A fearsome red beam of heat immediately dropped from the heavens.