The corridor vanished in a storm of flame, violence and shrapnel. Elemental fury continued to rage across the structure, scorching the walls and tearing stone out of the floor and ceiling. Watching the explosions, the assembled mage corps laughed in triumph.
"Ha ha! That's what you get for invading Chairwoman Miranda's laboratory!"
"What losers…how did the two from earlier lose to them?"
"It must be because we all combined forces! The chairwoman was correct! The only way to defeat them was for all to work together! She really is a genius!"
"Hah! I bet I could have defeated those pathetic losers on my own…"
The braggart's voice trailed off when the smoke cleared and he spotted something gleaming behind the mess. As visibility improved, the mage corps were stunned into silence when they saw a gigantic glacial wall standing between them and their intended targets.
"What…? How?!"
The glacial wall slowly crumbled away to reveal me and my friends, all of us totally unscathed despite the merciless onslaught of violence from earlier.
"I stopped your spells cold," I replied with a shrug.
"You…you…!" one of the mages spat. "I will defeat you for the sake of my beloved Chairwoman Miranda!"
"You? Her beloved?" I burst out laughing. "I don't know what grand delusions you have of Miranda Miller, but the only one she's in love with is the Hero, Herman. No other man will measure up to him."
"That's a lie!" One of the mages at the rear yelled without thinking. I blinked and stared at him, finding him extremely familiar. My jaw dropped when I recognized his features.
"Herman…? How…?"
"That's not Herman," Chris told me, shaking his head. "That's Mikhail. He's…obsessed with the bitch and tries to please her in any way she can. One of the methods he did was to surgically transform his face into an identical lookalike of the Hero, Herman."
"And you are mistaken," Wilson added with a nod toward the gathered mages. "Many of those boys have been called to the chairwoman's bed. You might be right that she doesn't hold any real romantic love for them, but she definitely treats them as playthings on the bed."
"The other female mages speculate that it might be a way for her to get over her rejection by sleeping with the young male mages in the corps." Rose looked a little disgusted.
"How dare you slander the chairwoman!" one of the guys yelled. These idiots were truly just blindly worshipping Miranda, huh? "Who the hell do you think you are?!"
"At the very least, I know that I'm not Miranda's friend," I retorted with a snort. "I'm here to settle some business with your mistress."
"What sort of business?" another enemy mage growled. "You broke into our garrison and attacked us! You definitely don't have any good intentions!"
I laughed at that. "Good intentions? Perhaps I don't, but what about you guys? You, who go around abducting entire populations of villages and performing cruel experiments on them? How is that good?"
"You're so fucking narrow-minded!" one of the mages bellowed at me. "Chairwoman Miranda is an amazing mage! She has developed so much magic and will continue to contribute tremendously to the progress of magical research! Her discoveries will benefit the world! She has the right to conduct those experiments! It's for the greater good! For magical progress!"
"At the cost of human lives?" Chris shouted, his face red from anger. "How can you even justify that?!"
"Hah! Of course! For the sake of progress, for the sake of the world, sacrifices are inevitable! What sort of progress doesn't require sacrifices?"
"Listen to yourselves!" Rose shrieked. "You…you are nothing more than monsters!"
"That's right! These people should be honored! They should feel grateful that they have been chosen to be the pillars of our magical research! Their sacrifices will always be remembered!"
"What do you think human lives are?" Wilson demanded frostily.
"In exchange for their worthless lives, more people will be saved! The sacrifice is totally worth it!"
"What right do you have to judge who gets to be sacrificed and who doesn't?" Lance snapped.
"We are the chosen ones," Mikhail replied. "We mages are worth a thousand, no, a million of those worthless villagers! By sacrificing their cheap lives, our genius can contribute so much more to the world!"
"You know, you've been yammering away at all this sacrifice thing, but I have a question." I cocked my head to the side. "Have any of you ever considered sacrificing yourselves for your research?"
"Huh?"
"Don't be absurd! If we sacrifice ourselves, then who will carry out the research?"
"Miranda," I pointed out.
"N…no!" Mikhail's face flushed. "The chairwoman will never sacrifice us! All of us respect her from the bottom of our hearts! We will follow her no matter where she goes! We are the ones who will succeed her! She loves us! She loves me!"
"That's right!" his fellow mages hollered.
"Shut up and die!"
"Kill him! Kill all of them!"
"Try to keep the deserters alive! They will make good specimens for research!"
"Yeah! They deserve to be punished! We can't let them die so quickly and easily!"
Stella quickly stepped to the front, her sword drawn. We could sense the buildup in mana. While the mages were rambling, they hadn't been idle. They were casting all sorts of top-tier spells. Now all of them were coordinating to unleash their spells at the same time.
"Everyone, stay close to me," I instructed and placed a hand on Stella's shoulder to pull her back. She glanced at me and reluctantly acquiesced.
"Be careful, Klein," she warned. I nodded with a grin. The mages weren't the only ones who had been spending all that time casting those spells.
Swords of flames, spears of lightning, arrows of ice, and scythes of wind streaked toward our position in a single titanic volley, embodiments of elemental fury manifested in physical forms. Even from a distance, I could feel the scalding heat or blistering cold emanating from the ferocious barrage.
They reminded me of court mages, one of the highest ranks of mages, just below arch-mage (like Miranda).
It was a pity that their opponent was me.
"Absolute Zero."
"?!"
The elemental projectiles that were racing toward me were immediately caught in a blast of total cold and frozen. The wave of azure-white washed over the corridor, turning it into an icy cavern, and entombed the stunned mages.
With just one spell, I annihilated the mage corps to a man. Quite literally.
"Ugh!"
Mikhail had more skill than the other mages. I guessed he wasn't just a Herman lookalike. He managed to throw up a wall of flame to counter the ice and quickly propelled himself away with a blast of wind. A dual element wielder, huh? Not quite the same as the multi-mage Miranda, but still impressive, given that the vast majority of mages possessed only a single element. Like me, for example.
"What the hell?!"
He stumbled away, conjuring a firewall to shield himself from the chilling effects of my spell. His jaw dropped when he saw the frozen figures of his comrades.
"Absolute Zero?! That's…that's the ultimate ice spell! For you to have reached the pinnacle of ice magic…are you the same as Chairwoman Miranda? An arch-mage?!"
"I don't know." I shrugged. "I ever got tested, thanks to your mistress and the rest of the Hero party trying to kill me while I was engaged in a mission against the demons."
"You…you really are the strongest ice mage, Klein Pearson!?"
"I don't know about strongest, but yeah, I'm Klein Pearson." Shaking my head, I snapped my fingers. The frozen figures of the mage corps shattered into a million fragments.
"HIIIIIIII! Impossible, this is impossible…!"
Screaming, Mikhail flung a colossal fireball at me before scrambling away. While I batted the fiery projectile away with an icicle, the fleeing mage disappeared around a corner. Stella clutched her sword and dashed across the corridor at extreme speed, reaching the corner in just a single bound and under one second.
"As if I'll let you get away!"
"Stella, be careful!"
However, before she could turn the corner, a gigantic chimera lumbered out. A golem, with a poor human fused into its torso. The poor lady seemed to be writhing in agony, her face in perpetual torment. At my warning, Stella ducked and avoided getting pulverized by the golem's gigantic fist.
"Hmph. So he had a card up his sleeve, huh?"
Stella weaved through the attacks of the massive golem, jumping on top of the debris that it gouged out with its huge fists. Jumping from one chunk of rock to another, she closed in on the clumsily assaulting golem and swung her sword.
"Be careful!" Chris shouted as he tried to cover her movements with a few well-aimed fireballs. "The golem's hide is tough!"
As if to prove his point, his fireballs exploded harmlessly against the golem, leaving little more than scorched marks on the sand-brown surface. The golem didn't even seem to notice and continued pummeling the place.
Stella did a cartwheel and flipped herself over the massive fist before swinging her sword. Her blade cleaved the golem from the shoulder and left a deep mark in the torso, but didn't go all the way through. Nonetheless, it was still impressive that she could actually cut through the thick, solid rock that made up the golem's body. An ordinary swordsman using a normal sword like that would have seen his weapon snap from the effort.
My knight's skills were steadily improving.
"Watch out!" Rose shouted and threw her hands forward. Vines sprouted from the floor and wrapped themselves around the golem's sturdy limbs, momentarily restraining it. Stella wasted no time, seizing the opportunity to deliver a fatal blow.
"I'm sorry," she whispered, and then plunged her blade into the place where the poor villager was melded into the golem's torso.
For a moment, the woman appeared to scream, and then she relaxed, looking gratefully at Stella. The golem then slumped down.
Taking a deep breath, Stella yanked her sword out and slashed the golem, shattering the colossal creature into hundreds of debris. She gritted her teeth before turning to me, her expression determined.
"Let's go. It's time we end all these horrors once and for all."
"Agreed." I nodded and turned to Chris. "Lead the way."
"Understood." Taking a deep breath, the fire mage quickly moved to the front, past Stella and round the corner. "We're almost there."