The Shield of Miracles

by Sakon Kaidou

  Though the few of us here were the only ones who’d risen to the sky, someone left on the surface was trying to do something, as well.

  “The missiles aren’t the only attacks coming from there, mind you,” she added. “But all the others, too, are being shot down by the beams.”

  “All of them, huh?”

  And yet, despite that, the remaining four of us flying riders were in peak condition. It was probably because we could dodge the beams, but I still found it pretty odd.

  It felt like the monster was prioritizing stopping the attacks from the surface, as if there was no need to take care of us.

  “Geez... Just how far is the damn thing?!” complained the gryphon Master, and I shared his sentiment.

  Monochrome had started out at about 10,000 meters up in the sky, and though we were nearing that altitude right now, the distance between us still seemed about the same. The thing was actually rising even higher.

  “Keh! What’s with its range?! It’s insane!” the mohawk guy complained, but he was probably reading the situation wrong.

  “Indeed,” Nemesis agreed with my thought. “Its original altitude appears to have been the limit of its range. The beams have stopped reaching the surface.”

  Exactly. 10,000 meters was more or less the maximum distance those beams could reach before losing all their power and dispersing. But that had nothing to do with Monochrome’s own maximum altitude. It could rise above that limit, and it wasn’t hesitating to do so in order to avoid us.

  There probably was a maximum height it could reach. At the very least, I hoped it couldn’t leave into outer space, but even if it could, we had bigger problems.

  “Ah...! Cra...p!” exclaimed the gryphon Master. His voice was starting to sound distant and meek.

  Of course it did. We were 12,000 meters above the ground. The air here was many times thinner than on the surface.

  “He...y, this is ba...d! My bod...y ca...n’t hand...le this...”

  This wasn’t an environment that could support life. Even the jumbo jets in reality didn’t go above 10,000 meters. The air beyond that point was way too sparse to allow long-term flight. The air density, temperature, and pressure here were far too low to allow the survival of any living thing, and even majestic flying monsters like gryphons and wyverns weren’t welcome here. Unless we were supported by high stats, we Masters would either faint or freeze to death.

  Monochrome, however, was still 10,000 meters above us, and it was only going higher.

  Again, there might be a limit to how far it could rise. But even if it couldn’t leave the atmosphere and escape to outer space, the limit for living creatures came far earlier.

  That was the reason why it had focused on the attacks from the surface — it had known that none of us could reach it.

  “Khh...! Sorr...y, I’m backi...ng o...ut...!”

  “Shi...t...!”

  The gryphon Master and the wyvern-riding mohawk had no choice but to give up. The Pure-Dragon was still holding out, but its movements had become too dull to be able to dodge the beam storm. It roared in pain as they burned its body, eventually piercing its wings and making it fall.

  “Khh! Reca...ll!”

  The Pure-Dragon’s Master prioritized the mount’s survival and returned it back to the jewel. Without anything to keep him in the air, the Master began to fall.

  Crashing from this height would definitely give him the death penalty, but he was probably more than aware of that. After all, the look in his eyes was basically saying, “I’m leaving it all to you.”

  “So we are the last ones,” sighed Nemesis.

  “...Yeah.”

  Silver was a Prism Steed, not a living being, so he could fly higher than the other mounts. Even I could survive thanks to his Wind Hoof. The skill created a faint membrane of compressed air that shielded me from the cold, oxygen-less atmosphere. But alas, our limit wasn’t far away, regardless of those facts.

  “Ah!” I gasped as Silver suddenly stumbled.

  Or, rather, the compressed air beneath his hoof collapsed under our weight.

  I’d known it was gonna happen eventually. After all, Silver’s “flying” was actually “walking on hardened air.”

  Here in the stratosphere, 15,000 meters above the surface, the air was far too thin for his Wind Hoof to form footing strong enough to support us, and giving him extra magic wouldn’t be enough to help.

  Even the barrier that protected my life was on the verge of being broken by the beams grazing it. The surrounding air had less and less oxygen and more and more hazardous ozone. Going any higher would put me in danger of instant death the moment the barrier broke.

  “Tch!” I looked up and saw that the distance between me and Monochrome was still as great as before.

  “Ｋ ｙ Ａ Ｈ ａ ｈ Ａ ｈ ａ Ｈ ａ Ｈ!” It laughed raucously, and I couldn’t help but feel it was directed at us. Despite the overwhelming distance and the air around us being nearly nonexistent, I could hear its cackling all too clearly.

  “That is most likely a skill,” said Nemesis. “One developed for the sole purpose of ridicule.”

  “...”

  Beams that could reach a whole 10,000 meters away, an ability to ascend into the stratosphere, a skill to mock its victims... All of its powers were focused on looking down on other creatures and completely extinguishing them.

  “Ray! This is the limit!” Nemesis shouted. “We can’t go any higher!”

  Silver began to slow down. He could no longer create enough compressed air to keep up with his galloping.

  Not only that, but Monochrome now focused all its beams exclusively on us, and my steed just couldn’t evade them all.

  We simply had no means of going higher and reaching the monster.

  “Gh! We’re backing out!” I growled, trying not to give in to the rage storming within me, and ordered Silver to travel back to the surface.

  He quickly turned around and began half-falling, half-galloping downwards.

  Of course, that wasn’t enough for Monochrome to stop its attacks.

  “Ｋ ｙ Ａ Ｈ ａ Ａ ａ ａ Ａ ａ!” it laughed, making me turn to look at it.

  I saw all four of its tentacles flash and release the beams directly towards us. It clearly didn’t intend to let us retreat.

  I gasped slightly, then took to action and roared, “Third form!”

  “As you wish!” Nemesis instantly turned into the circular shield, and I used her to block the beams.

  Upon hitting her surface, the deadly rays were dispersed to the sides.

  The residual heat grazed both me and Silver, but there was little damage to speak of.

  As expected, the shield’s defensive ability was on a whole different level than the greatsword’s and halberd’s. Though these beams were weakened by the nearly-10,000 meter distance they traveled, stopping them all without using Counter Absorption was no doubt an impressive feat.

  “...What? It’s charging? Because of something other than standard damage...?” Nemesis muttered, but I was obviously too busy to listen.

  Our resolute descent was almost perfectly vertical, so I fervently held the reins and tightened my legs around Silver to keep me from falling off.

  Soon enough, we were over 10,000 meters away from Monochrome and escaped the range of its beams.

  A few minutes later, we were back on solid ground.

  “...Gh,” I vocalized my frustration. Sure, it was good that we returned alive and all, but that was synonymous with running away from that damn thing. It made me feel bitter, to say the least.

  “The sheltering is... going well, it seems,” I muttered.

  There were no people in our landing spot, but at the village, I saw a bunch of Masters protecting tons of tourists, helping them find a place to hide. Other Masters were looking up at the sky, thoroughly alert and ready for more beams.

  There was no point in that right now, though, since the surface was still outside Monochrome’s range.
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  “Ｋ ｙ Ａ Ｈ ａ ｋ Ｙ ａ ｈ ａ Ｋ ｙ ａ Ｈ ａ Ｈ!” Its laughter resounded despite the distance, bringing fear into the people’s hearts.

  I knew that better than most, since my Grudge-Soaked Greaves were absorbing the surrounding negative emotions and turning them into magic.

  The monster laughed again to induce terror while preparing to attack the moment the village was in its range again.

  “At least it’s descending pretty slowly,” I said.

  On our way down to the surface, I’d realized that it couldn’t go down as fast as it went up. Its descent was nothing compared to its rocket-like ascent. In fact, it was actually slower than free fall.

  From what I could see, it would take about 30 minutes for it to return back to a range from which it could attack.

  That was good. Considering that we now had more time to help people find shelter, our charge hadn’t been in vain.

  “It’s grace, indeed, but we still have no means of shattering the crystal itself,” said Nemesis upon returning to her human form.

  In her tone, I heard both vexation... and an unyielding fighting spirit.

  We couldn’t even reach Monochrome, much less harm it, and yet she hadn’t given up. I was with her in that regard, of course.

  “There’s another thing I noticed about it,” I said. “The thing’s probably not that tough.”

  It had been shooting down all the anti-air attacks heading towards it. That might’ve been its way of showing its superiority, but what if it actually couldn’t allow a single attack to hit it?

  “What’s your basis for that?” asked Nemesis.

  “There’s a wound on the crystal ball making up its body.”

  Looking at it through B3’s binoculars, I’d seen a pretty large crack, and since not one Master here had landed a single hit on it since it appeared...

  “That has to be an old wound,” I said. “It’s probably the damage it got when it was hit by the meteor.”

  According to the play, it’d been shot down from the sky and buried deep within the earth for several centuries. However, the venerated meteor probably hadn’t been all that large or powerful.

  If it had been huge, it would’ve had obliterated both Monochrome and the surrounding villages, leaving no one to tell the tale. Therefore, it had to have been small enough to do next to no damage to the landscape.

  Gouz-Maise or any of the tough UBMs Shu’d told me about could either bear such a meteor with their stats alone or easily regenerate from the wound it caused. Monochrome, on the other hand, had suffered great damage and hadn’t even recovered from it yet.

  From what I could tell, its fast ascent power, extreme range, and the ability to absorb light came at a cost of HP, END, and regenerative ability.

  “This is just my intuition speaking, but I feel that a Vengeance with about as much charge as we used on Gouz-Maise would be enough to break it. Hell, even half of that might work.”

  And it was perfectly possible to charge that much by just letting the beams hit me and healing with consumables and my BR Armor.

  “The problem is that we have no way to hit it,” she said.

  That was still the biggest issue with this monster. Even if it was one of the most physically weak UBMs, that wouldn’t mean anything if we couldn’t land a single attack on it.

  “Living creatures can’t get to it because it’s up in the stratosphere, while attacks from the surface get intercepted. With that in mind, I can think of only two ways of dealing with it.”

  “Which would be?” asked Nemesis.

  “Either we use an attack that ignores distance, like Xunyu’s ultimate skill... or we use an anti-air attack that can’t be stopped by its beams.”

  We didn’t have Xunyu with us, so the former wasn’t an option, and based on the fact that all the anti-air attacks had been shot down, no one here had any skills that fit the latter requirement. And of course, we were no exception to that.

  Because of that, I thought the latter method just couldn’t be put into practice, but...

  Nemesis was silent. She seemed to have something else on her mind. At last, she said, “Ray, may I return to the crest for a moment?”

  “What?”

  Why now, of all times? I wondered.

  “I am about halfway through the analysis of the third form.”

  Wait, do you mean that... “...the third form’s skill can work on that thing?”

  “It’s not impossible. Although I must admit that what I’ve analyzed so far has more holes in it than swiss cheese. But I made progress when we shielded against its attacks.”

  When we shielded? B3 told us that the skill analysis speeds up when doing actions related to the skill. Is that what happened?

  “The third form’s skill is most likely similar to both Vengeance is Mine and Counter Absorption,” she added.

  “Wait, so...”

  “What I know for certain at this point is that it’s an offensive skill that accumulates damage from enemies and can only be used once per day.”

  So it basically combined the limitations of both Vengeance and Counter Absorption, which made it safe to assume it was more powerful than Vengeance. We still didn’t know if the skill could reach Monochrome, though.

  “This will be a double gamble,” Nemesis continued. “We need to pray that the analyzed skill can harm the fiend... and hope we can use it well. If either of those don’t come to fruition, we will be left helpless.”

  “But the possibility is there, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Certainly.”

  Her answer made me form a faint smile. “Then...”

  “...Your answer is already decided, correct?” She returned a smirk of her own.

  Man, it’s always the same with us, huh? I thought, drawing parallels between the current situation and our fights against Gardranda and Gouz-Maise.

  In spite of everything at stake, the moments when Nemesis and I gambled on the future we believed in heartened and assured me like nothing else could.

  “Get on that analysis, then,” I said. “I’m counting on you.”

  “As you should. Expect only the best, Ray,” she replied as she returned to my crest.

  I gently caressed the mark before looking up at the sky, where I saw the malicious black grain of sand that was Monochrome slowly descend towards the surface.

  There were a little under 30 minutes left before Torne was in its range. I could only hope that the analysis would be complete before then.

  “Ｋ ｙ ａ Ｈ Ａ ｈ ａ Ｈ ａ ｈ Ａ ｈ ａ Ｈ!” it cackled, as if to announce its approach.

  I felt obligated to respond, and said, “I’ll shut you up... for good.”

  The battle was only just beginning.

  ◇

  “Is this an air-raid shelter?” I muttered as I looked up at a half-spherical building that hadn’t been there before.

  I could see two other structures exactly like it, too. They’d probably been made by the cooperation between people with earth magic skills or Masters with earth-manipulating Embryos. Their material was the land itself, so they looked like they were buried in the ground.

  Additionally, the structures’ surfaces were emitting a faint light. That was probably the result of some sort of barrier skills they were channeling in preparation for the attacks.

  I had no idea whether those structures could take Monochrome’s close beams point-blank, but they could probably hold against its 10,000 meter range beams for a while.

  I entered one of the shelters and walked around the crowds of tourists and villagers, searching for B3, Louie, and Farica.

  We had about 20 minutes until Monochrome could attack us again, and Nemesis was still analyzing the skill, so I thought I’d spend this time by going to B3 and explaining the situation.

  Finding her didn’t take too long.

  “Let me go! Please!”

  She was with Farica.

  “I’m sorry, but I cannot allow you to exert you
rself and risk hurting your baby...” B3 said.

  The woman was desperately trying to leave the shelter, while B3 was holding her back. As I tried to understand what was happening here, I discovered that Louie wasn’t with them.

  A bad feeling came over me as I walked up to them and called out, “B3!”

  “Ray, how did it go with Monochro—”

  There was a menacing cackle from outside.

  “Oh, I see.” She instantly realized that the problem hadn’t been solved yet.

  “And what’s going on here?” I asked.

  “It’s Louie!” cried Farica. “We can’t find him anywhere!”

  “He’s not in the shelter?!”

  “Right,” nodded B3. “We looked in the other shelters, as well, but he wasn’t there, either. According to one of his friends, right before Monochrome appeared, Louie went to invite Mrs. Farica to the dance.”

  “Ah!” I gasped. That meant that Louie had been all by himself at the start of the monster’s rampage. I imagined the worst case scenario, and it made a chill go down my spine.

  “I’ll search for him!” I exclaimed.

  “Let me join you,” said B3. “Please wait here, Mrs. Farica.”

  “But Louie is...”

  “For his sake, please don’t go anywhere!”

  After making sure she wasn’t going to leave, we hurried out of the shelter.

  Louie’s life was in danger, so we had to find him as soon as possible.

  Not much time was left until Monochrome’s attacks would restart.

  Please don’t be hurt, I thought as B3 and I got on Silver and began frantically searching the village.

  Interlude: Family

  Torne Village

  Louie was in one of the village’s stone windmills, curled up and crying in fear.

  The moment of Monochrome’s first attacks, Louie had been on his way back home. Thankfully, due to having been away from the festival crowds, he hadn’t been targeted by the monster, and had made it out completely unhurt. Nevertheless, the sight of the burning village had terrorized him into a panic, spurring him to run for it until he’d stumbled upon this windmill on the side of the road.