Editing Sorcery Hacker:Volume3 Phase05 (section)

===Part 1===

There was no final battlefield.

Wind Lord Escalrain did not need to restrict himself to any one location.

With a thunderous neigh, his 200 esoule<ref>Approximately 240 meters.</ref> body charged toward the school tower.

“Ayato!?”

“Don’t fall off, everyone!!”

Ayato stabbed his Linkage Plug sword into the wall and switched the state of the lights on each floor right when Escalrain blinked.

That led the Four Lord to mistake which floor Ayato’s group was on.

He ended up crashing into a floor below theirs.

However, that broke the entire gem tower from its foundation.

The Theatre Club was rumored to have nearly made a live sacrifice in an attempt at the old ceremonial magic that predated sorcery guns, but not even they could have predicted a performance on this scale.

Ayato left gravity’s grasp and slammed into the wall. It took all his efforts to simply avoid being thrown out the window.

“Gahhh!!”

They may have fared better if he had guided Escalrain to a floor higher up than them, but the Student Council office was unfortunately on the top floor.

The entire tower tilted and picked up speed as it fell over.

Once it hit the ground, anyone on the top floors would be killed instantly.

But that never happened.

The gem tower collided with the side of the neighboring mana tower. It stopped at a slant.

Ayato stabbed a Linkage Plug into a window-washing scarab.

“We’re moving to the other tower. Grab on!!”

“Dammit, not this again!”

Henrietta tearfully complained since she did not like heights without public infrastructure built around them, but she knew they had little choice.

Some kind of limit was reached as soon as the scarab’s legs reached the intact mana tower’s wall. The slanted gem tower sank straight down. It dropped like a waterfall and a great cloud of dust swelled out at the ground. There went the tower that symbolized Ayato’s sins and the death of a friend.

“…”

Escalrain was unconcerned.

After knocking down the gem tower, he kept moving and flew up into the night sky. Now he stopped in midair and made complex movements of his four wings.

Thick clouds dulled and finally covered up the bright moon.

Henrietta gulped.

“Something’s…coming.”

“Jump in, everyone!!”

They broke a window and dived from the giant scarab and through a broken window into the mana tower in the nick of time.

It was like a horizontal impact.

A gust of wind blew in and the outside world was filled with hailstones the size of fists.

The individual sounds couldn’t be made out. A constant sound reminiscent of a crashing wave pounded on Ayato’s eardrums. This was a storm of weapons falling from high in the sky. The tower’s walls themselves were being torn away by the barrage. If they had delayed a moment longer, they would have been pummeled and thrown out into the air still clinging to the window washing scarab. The density was too great to dodge.

“Wh-what about the others?” Teleria was pale and trembling. “Are the other students and teachers alright!? I mean, um, the gem tower fell over!”

“It’s pretty late at night, so everyone should have been back in the trailer dorms. Unlike when we attended, it sounds like the school has banned spending the night in labs and special classrooms. Now, you need to start worrying about yourself, Miss Teleria. The next attack is coming!!”

An eerie boom of thunder split the night’s silence.

Something towered higher even than the towers. It was a tornado.

Escalrain controlled all meteorological conditions, so natural disasters were no more than another card in his deck. He could choose whichever one he liked and play it against his target.

Close-quarters combat was the only card in Henrietta’s deck, so her eyes widened.

“What are we supposed to do now!? We can’t fight back against Escalrain without getting close to him!!”

“Coach, there are only so many towers here. If this keeps up, he’ll bring them all down, leaving us nowhere left to hide.”

More than that, the Academy Towers had already lost if all of its towers came down. One of the Four Lords would have brought down the symbol of human sorcery. That would encourage the demons living in hiding to gather around Escalrain out of misguided hope. They might be able to win some localized battles, but they could not avoid defeat in the overall war. A doomed war of independence would begin.

So Ayato’s group had to end this before that happened.

They needed something they could use against Escalrain.

“…”

The Sorcery Hacker boy thought for a moment.

“Miss Henrietta, you say we cannot fight back without getting close?”

“Of course! What about it!?”

All magic was made from a combination of the four elements: fire, water, wind, and earth.

It was the Four Lords who gave color to the colorless mana. A clash between Lords would be one thing, but ordinary human magic could not possibly damage Escalrain. That was like trying to stop a tornado by blowing on it.

Furthermore, sorcery gun magic’s effective range was defined by the audible range of its gunshot. So.

Ayato brought a hand to his forehead.

“This could hardly be worse. With Escalrain’s control of the air, he can ''create a vacuum''. So no matter how loud the gunshot of our magic, he can block it all with just a paper-thin barrier between us.”

That meant there was nothing Teleria or Mamilis could do. The vacuum barrier could not be breached without Demon Lord Nirvelphany’s orbital sorcery cannon designed for use in space.

But…

“I can do it,” said Henrietta. Her earlier “of course” must not have been as definite as she made it sound. “Launching magic at Escalrain won’t work, but I can boost myself with magic. He might control the winds, but he can’t block the magic I direct at myself with my own sorcery gun.”

“And then what? You jump onto his back and attack him directly? He’s one of the Four Lords. He’s extraordinarily powerful.”

“It’s possible, though, isn’t it?” Henrietta pointed her thumb back at her chest. “Magic won’t work on Escalrain, but a boosted blow from a bayonet axe is ''a purely physical attack''. That doesn’t require the Four Lords’ permission, so it should be able to harm him.”

“The secret to survival really is a diverse party, isn’t it? We may have been completely out of options without you here, Miss Henrietta. Listen. This is something I can only ask of you since you are the most destructive when restricted to purely physical attacks.”

Henrietta blinked a few times.

After a short delay, she gave a snort.

“The first person that comes to mind when you need help, hm?”

“Still, I must remind you that this is an extremely risky gambit.”

“So what? He needed a count to three in order to fully knock down the gem tower with his tackle. That was to avoid damaging his own body with his weight and speed. The thickness of the tower walls doesn’t matter to him. It’s an unpleasant comparison, but when people fall from high enough heights, they can be killed by the shock of hitting the water’s surface. So we can use that to calculate out the limits of Escalrain’s defense. With my armor and five or more casts of Primary Ex Massive, ''I can break through his thick skin.''”

Ayato belatedly realized just how much danger he had been in when this monster had been pursuing him.

There was nothing like a reliable friend.

Ayato couldn’t help but smile bitterly as he spoke to that Striker with exasperating levels of brute strength.

“Then I will find some clever trick to give you the opportunity.”