Chapter 130

The reason the Seer, a high priest of the cultists, could reign as a mid-boss in Candela of Judgment was thanks to three troublesome patterns.

The first was mental attacks.

Its constant, incoherent babbling would corrupt the listener’s mind with madness.

When I was a player in the original game, you could counter it by wearing earplugs. But now, I just shut it up by occasionally blasting its mouth with lightning.

The second was long-range attacks using demonic magic.

The demon of the Abyss lends powers related to water.

Those who borrow that power can unleash attacks like spraying ultra-high temperature, high-pressure jets of water or raining down highly acidic liquid to melt enemies in a wide area. But that only applies at a distance, so it’s not relevant right now.

The third is close-range attacks using its tentacles.

The tentacles of Tenebra Maledicta have the strength to crush even plate armor like cardboard, so getting caught even once would be the end.

However, they instinctively avoid fire. Just holding a single torch is enough to keep them away, making fire their clear weakness.

Which is exactly why I decided to roast it.

[Casting Pillar of Fire spell.]

The ground where the Seer stood began to swell, then cracked apart as if a drought had struck.

What followed was an explosion.

Boooooom!

The fierce pillar of flame that shot straight up through the ground resembled an inverted waterfall.

Uwooooooooooo!

The Seer roared.

The creature tried to keep attacking somehow.

It stretched its bundle of charred tentacles toward me.

But while its main body had barely endured the baptism of flames, the tentacles hadn’t.

Roasted by the pillar of fire, the tentacles curled up like squid legs.

They missed their target by a wide margin, unable to strike where intended.

It kept flailing them in a final attempt to land a hit, but the scorched, coagulated flesh simply snapped off in chunks.

The creature raged.

“I know! Trample it! Into eternal silence!”

“Stop spewing nonsense and just shut up already.”

[Casting Percival’s Radiant Spear spell.]

At some point it had regained its ability to launch mental attacks. I jammed lightning into its mouth again and prepared my next move.

The most textbook way to deal with a Seer as a mage is to bomb it from a safe distance, just like I’d used the Starfall spell earlier on a regular priest.

Under normal circumstances, retreating would be the correct move.

But here, I had students and homeless people to protect.

So I decided to push it back and gain distance that way.

In situations like this, my go-to combo is the Frost Carpet spell followed by Wind Tearing the Sails.

Freeze the floor and make the enemy slip.

However, the Seer wasn’t touching the ground. It was floating slightly, with only the black sludge dripping from its body making contact. So making it slip was useless.

In the original Candela of Judgment, you lured it into a trap using the cannons mounted on the city gates.

But Winter Winslet doesn’t need cannons.

There’s plenty of magic that can replace the kinetic energy of a cannonball.

[Casting Giant’s Fist spell.]

Crackkkk—

The ground rose up on its own and surged toward the Seer.

A huge rocky fist slammed into the creature.

Kuoooooo!

The Seer retaliated with one of its tentacles, already regenerated.

Shhrik, shhk!

With every movement, its tentacles sliced through chunks of stone like a knife through butter.

But my goal was only to push it back, and after casting the same spell three or four times in succession, the creature had no choice but to be driven away.

Once I’d secured about 30 meters of distance, I finally felt my mana field regain full maneuverability.

But everything has its pros and cons.

Fwoooosh!

Suddenly, my field of vision opened up completely.

The fog in the vicinity had vanished as if it had been wiped clean by an eraser.

Sensing the anomaly instantly, I activated a defensive spell I had prepared in advance.

[Casting Ice Wall spell.]

Crack!

I erected an ice barrier between myself and the Seer, one strong enough to have blocked a siege weapon’s bolt in the past.

This time, I doubled the number.

Twelve thick ice walls stretched out like dominoes.

And then—

Crashh!

The ice walls shattered and scattered like snow.

At the same time, an enormous cloud of steam burst into the air!

The Seer’s ranged attack pattern activated: it condensed the surrounding fog into a superheated, high-pressure jet of water and fired it.

A split second later…or rather 0.1 seconds to be exact, a loud boom echoed from that direction.

Proof that the insane water jet had traveled faster than sound.

If it had been ordinary water, it would’ve instantly evaporated upon contact with atmospheric pressure, losing both power and range in a cloud of steam.

But thanks to the intervention of the Abyssal demon’s power, that kind of attack had become possible.

Out of twelve ice walls, eleven had been pierced.

The result lined up roughly with my calculations. But had a regular human been hit, even grazing it would’ve shredded them into pieces.

Some might question the fairness of the game balance in Candela of Judgment, given that a mid-boss can unleash an attack like this.

Fortunately, it’s a one-time move.

Because it requires a huge amount of water.

The creature had already consumed a significant portion of the local fog, so it wouldn’t be able to pull that attack off again for a while.

Thank goodness this wasn’t taking place over a sea or river.

If it were, even I might’ve gotten chills.

I’d rather fight in melee with Winter Winslet’s body which can’t even run than face repeated barrages of that kind of superheated, high-pressure firepower.

Anyway, now it was my turn to strike.

Players of the original game often overlooked this, but the Seer is actually one of the most defensively durable monsters in Candela of Judgment.

As a servant of an Abyssal demon with infinite life force and immortality, it had incredible resilience, and even serious wounds would regenerate quickly.

There’s a reason I slammed the ultimate spell Starfall into that lowly priest earlier, even though he was basically a grunt.

And now, look at this Seer….it’s taken multiple direct hits from powerful spells and still standing as if nothing happened.

To defeat this thing, I had to go for its weakness.

If I could directly strike the heart beneath its fluttering skin, the core hidden inside the black mud that made up its main body, it would enter a groggy state for a while, and its regenerative ability would be significantly weakened.

The problem was that the black mud surrounding the core boasted an absurd level of defense against magical attacks.

This hadn’t been much of an issue in the original game.

That’s because the default class of the player character was a swordsman.

A so-called “mechanic-based boss”.

The Seer was a boss monster designed to cater to the player.

But I was a mage, and Winter Winslet was even worse. He was a mage who had even lost basic brain function.

It would’ve been easier if I had a swordsman ally who specialized in close combat…

Unfortunately, the only person who could’ve helped me, Josephine, was currently stuck escorting the princess in a border city.

So then, how do you take down the Seer in an environment where there’s no such thing as a “player-friendly” setup?

I’d already worked out the answer to that long ago.

[Casting Bendigate’s Secret Art – Shadow Chain.]

It was a technique I’d used back at the Academy when hunting the familiars of vampires.

Back then, I’d prioritized speed to catch a single bird, but this time I just poured out raw mana to multiply the number of chains.

Shadow-colored, semi-transparent tendrils bloomed around me.

At this point, it was hard to tell who the real servant of an abyssal demon was.

And that was exactly what I was going for.

Chwarrrr!

At my gesture, the pitch-black chains shot up all at once, arcing through the sky.

They flew straight toward the Seer’s huge body and wrapped tightly around it.

The Seer didn’t show much of a reaction.

Shadow Chain was a dark-element spell.

The thing probably knew it wasn’t a serious threat.

Instead, the Shadow Chains were absorbed into the creature’s true body, the black mud, and even became part of it.

I watched calmly as it happened.

And once the chains had fully seeped in, I activated the spell I had prepared.

[Casting Palette Swap.]

It was the elemental conversion spell I’d once used in a duel against Shannon.

I transformed the Shadow Chains originally a dark-element spell into the opposite element: light.

What happened next was obvious.

Flash!

With a blinding light, the Seer’s huge body jerked.

Its main body began to boil furiously, and then, beams of brilliant white light burst from within the black mud, shooting upward like they were slicing through the night sky.

No matter how tough its defenses were, it couldn’t withstand an attack of its elemental weakness exploding from the inside out.

Giiiooooo!

By the time the long, drawn-out scream ended,

The creature could no longer move from where it stood.

The skin-like shell that had mimicked human flesh hardened like stone, then shattered and crumbled away.

The black mud that made up its core hissed like a deflating balloon as it evaporated.

And then, the heart that had been hidden inside was revealed.

That marked the end of the battle.

It had put up quite a fight, but in the end, a mere mid-boss was no match for me.

To finish it off, I summoned an ice-made spike to my hand and approached its heart.

After all, the heart of a demon sorcerer was a rare and valuable material for dark magic, so I intended to harvest it.

Thump. Thump.

A dark red lump of flesh, pulsing with black mud oozing out instead of blood.

Just as I used the tip of the ice spike to snip one of the veins attached to the heart—

Sensing a murderous intent, I deployed a barrier.

[Casting Ice Wall.]

Crash!

The incoming attack from the 11 o’clock direction was a stream of ultra-high-pressure, superheated water.

When I identified the new enemy, I let out a hollow laugh.

“Ha.”

More Seers.

And not just one…four of them.

“Keith D’Alembert, that bastard.”

He never said five high-ranking cultist priests would be showing up here tonight.

Of course, he also never said there’d only be one.

I could already hear the excuse he’d give when I confront him later:

“I didn’t lie, did I?”

Ugh.

Still, I wasn’t too worried.

Because our secret weapon had finally arrived.

The ace we summoned from the Academy.

The most reliable ally of all.

Fwhiiiiish… Booom!

Something came flying from far off, with the sound of a cannonball, piercing through the chest of one of the Seers and splitting the darkness.

Splaaash!

Black mud splattered everywhere.

In an instant, the number of Seers I had to deal with dropped from four to three.

A smile crept across my lips as I watched.

“Not late at all, Professor Sophia.”