by Aneko Yusagi
Chapter Fourteen: Fighting the Phoenix
“This is the place?” I asked. Before the revival of the Phoenix, I’d brought my allies to the midpoint on the mountain where the birds were sealed, based on the information obtained from Ren and the others. Our intent was to investigate a certain object in the shrine here . . . the sealed Phoenix itself.
The shrine was very well-maintained.
“This is the shrine with the seal,” I confirmed.
“Yeah, this is the place,” Ren replied. Both he and Itsuki pointed at something inside . . . a statue. It was like one of those Buddhist thousand-armed Kannon statues I’d seen in temples in Japan seated on a carved flower.
“That statue can be moved around. Using the mechanism at the base will open a path forward,” Itsuki explained.
“Although you need to complete a quest and get permission from those in the shrine first,” Ren added.
“Fair enough. I’d say we’ve already done that part,” I quipped. Prior to when we set out, someone who apparently tended to this shrine had indeed given us his permission. We were dealing with the kind of secrets that were passed down from monk to monk now.
Ren and Itsuki started to manhandle the carved petals, tugging them up and down. It was like some kind of puzzle box.
Eventually there was a clicking sound. Ren and Itsuki gave the statue a push and it finally moved.
Motoyasu? Oh, I’d ordered him to just play with his filolials.
“This is the way,” Itsuki said.
“Waaaah!” Ignoring Rishia’s fear, Ren and Itsuki proceeded to lead us down the stairs that had appeared beneath the moved statue.
At the bottom of them we found a stone monument. It was bright red from heat.
“So this is the seal of the Phoenix,” I stated.
“It’s incredible. A lot like the one that sealed the Tyrant Dragon Rex, don’t you think?” Raphtalia said. I agreed with her.
“I sense an incredible vitality here. We cannot underestimate this foe, brother,” Atla contributed.
“Indeed,” Fohl confirmed. Even though it was still sleeping, Atla and Fohl were clearly already feeling pressure from the presence of our upcoming adversary.
“Don’t do anything to set it off,” I cautioned. Taking all due care not to do anything that might break it, we examined the seal carefully and determined that it was going to break in accordance with the time displayed by the sand timer.
“Think we could get it to revive sooner if we wanted, Ren?” I asked. We needed as much time to prepare as we could get, so I certainly wasn’t going to do anything so stupid.
However, Ren was staring at the stone in shock, my words falling on deaf ears. The same for Itsuki. There was no expression on his face, but his hands were shaking.
“What’s up?” I asked, maybe not wanting to know.
“This is impossible, surely. Why’s it already broken?!” Ren exclaimed.
“Huh?” I asked, tilting my head. In response, Ren and Itsuki both pointed slowly at a pile of rubble next to the stone seal. Having had it pointed out to me, I looked more closely. It appeared to have been a statue of the Phoenix.
Then, taking a look at the pieces, it appeared to have been busted up pretty recently.
“This isn’t going to weaken the seal, is it?” I asked. It would be a real problem if the time until the seal broke had been shortened, or anything like that.
“That’s fine. Or it should be. That’s also not the problem though,” Ren replied. What else could it be, then? I had a nasty feeling twisting in my gut.
According to Ren and the others, no one like Kyo was present, who had taken control of the Spirit Tortoise. So that wasn’t a real possibility. But if it was something Ren and Itsuki did know about, and wasn’t related to the breaking of the seal, then I could think a few things. None were good.
“The problem is when the seal breaks and the statue nearby has been destroyed!” Ren exclaimed, pointing again at the broken Phoenix statue.
“The kind of problem I’m thinking of . . . would be in game terms—it’d mean a harder boss fight,” I guessed. I really didn’t want this to be true, but I asked them the most likely thing that came to mind.
The bosses that fought in special quests during certain video games could sometimes be enhanced depending on the approach taken in fighting them. Depending on the game, there might be rare items that could only be obtained from those kinds of enhanced bosses, but of course, it also made defeating the boss more difficult.
If such an element was in play here, who the hell would ever risk it? If the results were the same between normal and hard, wouldn’t you play on normal?
I certainly didn’t want to have to try my hand at a boss on steroids just for the chance of rare items when getting killed would mean I was actually dead.
Ren and Itsuki both nodded at my guess.
“That’s right. If you come to the place where the Phoenix is sealed with the flag triggered for having defeated it once and one of the statues is destroyed, you can challenge the hard-mode Phoenix. It drops some powerful gear, so it’s endgame content,” Ren explained.
“Same kind of thing for me,” Itsuki added. “There was an event to fight a stronger version of the Phoenix.” Man, this was giving me a headache. I’d hoped to fight the normal Phoenix, win, and get past this problem. But now we had to fight a more powerful version for no good reason?
This wasn’t like the story quests in an Internet game. It was a battle with a boss far harder than the story version.
“Maybe it broke due to the passage of time, or maybe . . . In any case, this isn’t a game. This is reality, so I’m really hoping I’m wrong.” Ren said. There was weight to his words.
“Think we could piece it back together? Like a jigsaw puzzle?” I offered, a little optimistically. Both Ren and Itsuki remained silent, perhaps unsure of exactly how to answer.
Yeah, that probably wasn’t a thing. Whatever technique had been used to create the seal, it wouldn’t be so easy to just glue it back together.
“Anyway, I’m just glad we didn’t end up having to suddenly fight this enhanced Phoenix without any warning. That takeaway is enough from this. Maybe we’ll try to weaken it again by repairing the statue . . .” As I spoke, I happened to notice something. On the wall of the room, there was a picture very much like that from the scrolls about the Phoenix that we saw stored in the castle.
This one, though, looked more . . . sinister than the pictures back in the town, perhaps. It looked like it had a blazing circle of light behind it.
It even showed the Phoenix statue being destroyed. Thanks for the tip, hah!
“. . . and also look into whether the statue crumbled naturally or someone broke it while also preparing to fight the enhanced Phoenix!” I regained my train of thought and finished.
“Okay!” Ren agreed.
“Understood,” Itsuki said with understandably less enthusiasm.
“This is all turning into quite the big deal,” Raphtalia said. I could only agree with her. At least the seal had been protected. That was something, but still . . .
This hidden content was utter bullshit!
“Whatever comes, we just have to deal with it!” Atla added. I mean, she wasn’t wrong.
The temple monks later explained that one day they had gone to check on the sealing stone and the statue had already been destroyed. We brought in a specialist in these things and their investigation revealed that it had been broken quite recently. However, in this instance, “recently” was quite a broad term. It could have been anything between a few days to a few months, making the whole analysis pretty unreliable.
Was it the work of man or just a natural disaster? It was a pain in my ass either way.
And so the days passed until the appointed time for the battle with the Phoenix.
The day of the Phoenix battle.
I expanded the blue timer icon located in one corner of my vision.
00:12
This wasn’t my first time in this kind of situation, but my heart was pounding nonetheless. I knew I just had to fight as normal . . . even better than normal, but still I couldn’t get used to this feeling.
The surrounding area had all been evacuated of residents, meaning only the heroes, their respective retinues, and the coalition army now remained here.
This wasn’t a sudden occurrence, like it had been with the Spirit Tortoise. The evacuation had been completed without any particular problems. I’d also made sure they weren’t going to let anyone in who might get in the way.
The queen and the coalition army leaders were taking command at the back. The heroes, including me, were on the front lines. S’yne was on high alert too. She apparently hadn’t seen anything suspicious yet.
I just had to pray that nothing untoward was going to happen.
“We’ve done all we can to prepare to fight the Phoenix. Everyone fight as hard as you can in order to return from this alive,” I commanded from the head of the army. My simple order was met with cheers of agreement from the slaves and the coalition army as one.
This had been a long time coming. Reflecting back on everything that had happened, I looked up at the place where the Phoenix was sealed.
We should be tackling the waves, really, and yet here we were, spending so much time on this.
We’d chosen a barren area just down the mountain on the path to the town, thinking it would be easiest to fight it there.
We’d also looked at all sorts of other ways to fight it, like maybe using the gravity field from the Spirit Tortoise gear to drag the high-altitude one down. All sorts of ideas had been kicked about.
The issue with that one was the range. It was unexpectedly short, so we’d only know if it worked on the Phoenix once we actually got to test it. The difficulty there was that I’d have to ride up to the high-altitude Phoenix and jump onto it before I could use it. I wouldn’t be able to fly on Gaelion if I used the gravity field on my shield while on his back. And if I changed to it during flight, we would drop to the ground.
Ren, Motoyasu, and Itsuki had similar weapons, but we just didn’t know how effective they would be. In terms of the accessories prepared for the final battle, we’d gone with a unified approach across the board to increase the power of the skill each person was most adept with.
I’d just wanted a simple increase in firepower.
Something a bit trickier might have worked too, but something simple seemed easier to handle and would also keep the loss of accessories themselves low.
“Mr. Naofumi,” Raphtalia said.
“What?” I was on edge.
“Let’s do our best,” she affirmed.
“You said it,” I agreed with a nod. Then Atla spoke up.
“Life force imbued with heat is starting to gather in the surrounding area. Master Naofumi, please be careful.”
“I will,” I replied. The sand timer now had less than three minutes left.
“This time, we’ll settle things,” Ren said.
“I’m with you,” Itsuki managed.
“We shall do this, I say!” Motoyasu added. All of them gripped their weapons as they spoke.
They weren’t wrong. Enhanced Phoenix or not, if we couldn’t follow the plan and defeat it without too much hassle, then our future battles looked like bleak affairs indeed.
We had the power of four heroes on the field. We should be able to finish this, no problem.
0:01
With one minute left, I focused my awareness and incanted some magic: “All Liberation Aura!”
I poured in magic and life force, converted it into the widest possible area, and gave the entire front line the increase to all the stats I had used on Filo during the race.
00:00
A sound like breaking glass, exactly like the one we heard before, rang out. A violent shockwave shook my vision, also just like before. Then a fire pillar rose from the middle of the mountain and the twin Phoenixes rose up into the air. They looked exactly like the images on the wall.
Not those from the town, of course. They looked like those from the mountain temple . . . the ones with the halo behind them.
Two powerful screeches rang out across the vicinity. And so the fight between our forces and the blazing Phoenixes began.
Just as we had expected. After having appeared, both Phoenixes flew straight toward the closest source of lives gathered together—us. It was just like with the Spirit Tortoise.
A number “8” hovered in my field of vision.
“Everyone, don’t mess up the timing of the final blow, whatever you do!” I shouted.
“I know!” Ren returned, leading the attack on the low-altitude Phoenix, which was already closing in. Another screech rang out. The high-altitude Phoenix flapped its wings in our direction, causing a rain that mixed feathers with fireballs to pelt down around us.
“Shooting Star Shield!” I yelled. Adding some life force considerably increased the range and defense boost of the skill. Not to mention, the sharing of the power-up method acquired in Q’ten Lo meant that my own defense had been considerably increased. That was enough to protect the very front line, but not enough for the rest.
We’d taken all of this into account, of course.
“Just like we planned!” I ordered. I turned around to see not only the slaves, but also the coalition army agreeing with me.
It went without saying, I didn’t think I could protect all of these people. But I’d done everything I could think of to make that a possibility.
I proceeded to deploy Gather toward the incoming rain of fire. It was a technique that wasn’t a skill, as it was created through cooperation between Atla and me.
Like a huge funnel, it started to collect all of the blazing missiles in front of me. I could change my response based on the severity of the attack. Meanwhile, everyone else would focus their attacks on the Phoenix coming in at low altitude.
I took the incoming fire on my shield. The sensation imparted to me was like heavy rain hitting an umbrella. I had the enhanced Spirit Tortoise Shell equipped.
Spirit Tortoise Shell (awakened) 80/80 AT
special effect: gravity shield, C soul recovery, C magic snatch, C gravity shot, vitality boost, magic defense (large), lightning resistance, nullify SP drain, magic assistance, spell support, growth power
special equip effect: comet shield (Spirit Tortoise)
mastery level: 100
item enchant level 8, defense 10% up
dragon spirit defense 50, fire resistance up
status enchant magic +30
It had been enchanted with the attacks of the Phoenix in mind. It should allow me to now considerably reduce all fire-based attacks. Indeed, in regard to the current stream of burning death from above, I was neither burning nor anything close to death.
It might be an attack from the enhanced Phoenix, but it looked like I could still hack it.
That said, it also covered far too wide a range for me to protect the entire coalition army. That, of course, had been accounted for.
Upon examining what the effects of Shooting Star Shield (Spirit Tortoise) were, I had discovered that it turned the shape of the protective shield into a tortoise’s shell and caused defense to really leap upward. So both aspects had really been enhanced.
“All Zweite Resist Fire!” came the shout from the support troops at the back of the coalition army as they maintained magic to increase fire resistance at all times.
This should somewhat reduce the impact of the Phoenixes’ attacks and allow us to also concentrate on attacking.
“Itsuki!” I commanded.
“I know what to do. All Liberation Down!” Itsuki incanted his magic and debuffed the Phoenixes. Now we had all our buffs and debuffs in place.
Huh?
When the feathers dropped by th
e high-altitude Phoenix landed on the ground, monsters started appearing from those spots. They had the name “Phoenix familiar (vassal type)” and looked like a suit of armor. Just like the mural had shown. However, they also looked a bit tougher than the ones on the wall. There were wings sprouting from their armor and their entire bodies blazed with fire. The frontline, close-combat unit dashed forward to take out Phoenix familiars that had appeared.
Right!
“Raph!” I shouted, and Raph-chan and the other members of the Raph species started to knock away any Phoenix feathers that I was unable to stop on my own. Great. That was a big help!
“Kwaa!” Gaelion and Wyndia flew toward the high-altitude Phoenix.
“We’ve got this, Gaelion!” Wyndia shouted.
“Kwaa!” the dragon replied.
“I hereby draw out the power of Gaelion, desirous of it taking physical form. Dragon Vein, grant me your power!” Wyndia intoned.
“Kwaa, kwaa, kwaa!” was Gaelion’s addition.
“High Wing Slash!” At Wyndia’s shout, Gaelion’s wings started to glitter with light, and each flap of them caused blades of wind to slash forward.
Those blades jammed into the high-altitude Phoenix. It didn’t like that, giving an annoyed—maybe even surprised—shriek.
I needed to focus on the Phoenix right in front of me.
“Haaah!” I grabbed the Phoenix’s legs to create an opening, which Raphtalia, Fohl, and Atla made sure to exploit to the fullest.
“I’ve been training hard all for today! Now I’ll show you my improved, stronger technique!” Raphtalia sounded pleasingly confident. Her tail started to glow, just like the past Heavenly Emperor, and then she swept her sword down.
“Eight Trigrams Blade of Destiny Formation Two!” Her weapon sliced into the shoulder of the Phoenix.