Vol 3 Chapter 71: “Creation”

“What…?”

The priest Mistrel grasped the situation in an instant, realizing he was falling.

Horo’s exaggerated use of mana in her attack was not solely aimed at Mistrel. Instead, she had gouged out the entire surrounding ground—not with flames, but with magic that conjured magma.

“Falling.”

It was a situation where there was no ground beneath—a counter to magic that could not eliminate what did not exist.

For the first time, Mistrel’s face showed astonishment.
A strategy involving death by falling. It was conceivable but so grand in scale that it was unimaginable.

Using a massive torrent of flames as a smokescreen, she had gouged the ground around her opponent to a depth where a fall would be fatal.

Mistrel immediately considered a counter-spell, but death magic was, in the end, just mist. Unless he layered it thickly, like the cocoon from before, it wouldn’t be enough to support his weight or even slow him down.

Despite preparing multiple strategies in parallel, this particular one had also been within Horo’s sights from the start.
How far ahead had she been planning?

“But still…”

Mistrel felt death approaching.
In this rare situation, he even felt a twinge of excitement.

Now he was certain.
Horo was not Sukui.

It wasn’t someone who merely worshipped death.
No, it was someone seeking to bring him death—someone who worshipped the same god as he did.

In the corner of his vision, he caught a glimpse of her—equally on the verge of death, yet just as lethal.

Horo. She was the one enemy he was destined to kill.

“Then this, too, shall be a step toward God!”

Shouting this, just before hitting the ground, Mistrel cast a spell to destroy it.

Ironically, it was the same singular breakthrough Horo had used to evade his death magic.
He directed a death magic spell, no larger than himself, downward toward the ground.

The destruction of the ground wasn’t just about creating a hole.
As he fell through the opening, Mistrel continued to expand the death magic until just before his mana was depleted.

He filled the bottom of the hole with the massive amount of sand created by the destruction, burying himself in it to cushion the fall.

“I… somehow…”

He had survived. But he couldn’t exactly call it “success.”
Even though the ground had been turned into sand, the fall from such a height was still severe.

Moreover, in creating the sand cushion, he had inadvertently increased the height difference.

But he had won.

He might have only narrowly survived, but Horo could no longer use magic.
Mistrel still had a little mana left.

Climbing out of the vertical hole required collapsing the ground at an angle to ascend, but he had just enough mana left for that.

As he thought this, Mistrel looked up to see Horo’s face peering down at him.

“That’s an incredible amount of mana you have,” she said.

And strong—she was strong.
Mistrel admitted it without pretense.

Though he had believed that, if fought systematically, he wouldn’t lose, he hadn’t expected to be driven into a corner like this.

He had never sought strength for its own sake, but in his pursuit of a path to becoming a god who could grant death, he had undoubtedly gained power greater than most.
To think that he would be pushed this far by one girl.

No, he would no longer view Horo as just a mere girl.

“Thank you. I don’t have much left, though,” Horo replied matter-of-factly.

Still, she had no means of action.

Although Mistrel’s position inside the hole was less than ideal, he believed Horo lacked the means to attack him from her position.

The fact that she still had any mana left at all was astonishing.
She had fought a mana-draining duel against Mistrel, created this crater, and kept herself airborne throughout.

Even though Mistrel himself had been flying halfway through, the creation of this massive crater wouldn’t have consumed a significant amount of mana for either of them, given their total reserves.

Yet, Mistrel had used mana to cushion his landing.

Even accounting for all of this, Horo’s mana consumption must have been far greater.

“Would you like to make a final attack? If you hit me with a single earth magic spell, I think you could kill me,” Mistrel offered.

Horo shook her head in response.

Her body was battered and bruised, and Mistrel realized that Horo had not emerged unscathed from his death magic.

Burn marks were visible on her. The high-intensity flames she had continuously unleashed had also scorched her own body, which had been closest to the source.

Yet, in this state, Horo seemed almost pleased.

To experience the same pain Sukui endured—the same agony she had felt when wounded by the organization.

If Mistrel’s madness stemmed from the amalgamation of such deep pain, suffering, and despair, a torment so profound that death seemed the only salvation, then Horo seemed almost delighted to understand it.

It was this glimpse into her madness that convinced him she was his true nemesis.
As the battle approached its end, Mistrel felt a tinge of disappointment.

Then, a faint noise reached his ears.

A sound from above.

“With the mana I have left, I don’t think I can launch any attack strong enough to break through your magic and defeat you,” Horo admitted.

As she spoke, a grinding noise—like something heavy being dragged—reverberated through the ground, growing louder with each moment. At the same time, the shape of the crater felt odd to Mistrel.

Why had it been shaped into such a perfect, conical pit?

If the goal was simply to make him fall, a rough, wide hole would have sufficed.

“As I said, this is my final strategy,” Horo declared.

The fall wasn’t her last move.
Mistrel realized what the sound was.

Where this place had originally been, and what was scattered around the edges of the crater—it all began to make sense.

The noise grew louder, escalating into a roar.

“You’re planning to drop the rubble from the cathedral into this hole!”

“Exactly.”

An earth magic spell—a single strike wouldn’t be enough to kill Mistrel.

But mass wasn’t something exclusive to magic.
Using her remaining mana, Horo had pushed the large rubble surrounding the crater into it.

Once the debris was in motion, gravity would naturally take over, causing it to tumble downward.
This was a setup, taking into account her lack of remaining mana.

“Thanks to the hole you dug, it’s much easier to aim,” she remarked.

With that—

Horo disappeared from Mistrel’s line of sight.

At the same time, the rubble began to fall—a mass more than sufficient to crush a person entirely.

“Not yet.”

Mistrel cast his death magic on the rubble, transforming it into sand.

“It’s not over yet!”

He continued to turn the falling debris into sand with the last remnants of his mana.

But against his finite mana reserves, the rubble seemed almost infinite.
Horo, who had climbed to the top, didn’t need magic to push the debris—her physical strength was enough.

As the rubble poured in, Mistrel relentlessly turned it into sand.

For the first time, he exhausted his death magic.

“The difference between us lies in the total amount of mana,” Mistrel declared.

With his vast reserves, he had managed to collapse the rubble into sand, an impossible feat for Horo.
And yet, as the sand piled up, it reached the entrance of the hole.

“Thanks to the rubble you dropped, I’ve been able to climb up using the sand as a foundation,” Mistrel said, standing as if he had been waiting for this moment.

Rubble could crush, but sand could serve as a platform.
Mistrel had turned all the rubble Horo had dropped into sand, using it to climb.

Repeating this process, he closed the gap of the hole, slowly making his way up.

“Shaping the hole as you did—it worked both for and against you, didn’t it?”

Now standing in what was barely more than a shallow depression, Mistrel emerged.
There, at the edge of the crater, stood Horo.

They now faced each other atop the ruins of the collapsed cathedral.
Two beings, stripped of divine protection.

“Now then…”

Mistrel still had a sliver of mana left.

He considered a surprise attack—one devastating blast of collapse magic.
If it was dodged, he could unleash it at point-blank range.
With this in mind, Mistrel muttered under his breath, a faint note of bloodlust in his calm tone.

But then, his hand reflexively shot to his neck.
In that instant, his understanding caught up with his reaction.

His throat had been cut.

“I-impossible!”

He couldn’t believe she had hidden a weapon.

Horo always transformed weapons into mana. If she had even a single knife, she could have turned it into mana to attack him in the pit.

But she hadn’t. So how could she have a blade now?
And yet, no ordinary shard of rubble could deliver such a precise, fatal cut to his carotid artery.

As he collapsed, Mistrel caught sight of what Horo held.

It was a golden fragment.
Too uneven to be called a knife, yet shaped to fit comfortably in her hand, its edge sharp enough to cut.

It was the cathedral’s bell.

Somehow, it had been reshaped into this blade.

His eyes widened as the realization struck him.

This was his magic.

Horo’s magic could destroy the bell, but it couldn’t refine it into a blade.

But death magic disintegrated objects cleanly.

In the moment he had surrounded her with the black mist of his death magic, Horo had crafted a blade from a shard of the bell.

From that moment, she had already set this situation into motion.

No—this had been decided even earlier.
Mistrel hadn’t been completely careless against the Horo standing before him.

But even so, her knife skill was too fast to evade.

She had simply demonstrated a level of skill beyond his imagination.

“When mana runs out, I make sure I’m not helpless.”

She had learned the art of knife combat—swiftly slicing a carotid artery with a surprise attack.

And she had created the conditions to use it.

A battered enemy, a weapon sharp enough to sever, though not divine.
And the tactical setup—a height advantage, with her opponent climbing from below, closing the gap in height.

Mistrel thought bitterly, “The Duke of Aquitaine—it’s not as you said.”
She had meticulously set up a situation for a single decisive strike.

“Well then… the conditions for godhood…”

“I hope they apply after death,” Mistrel whispered with a faint smile, before breathing his last.