Whether she was being controlled or not didn't matter right now. The problem was the force behind these attacks. It quite lethal. Pale red shock waves rolled across the landscape, hot enough to instantly burn all the buildings that were under construction.
That's unlucky! They just got started!
"Guys, don't move!" Rimuru yelled. "You'll wind up getting targeted!"
The three adventurers responded by bunching up together, launching both Magic Barrier and Aura Shield. I stood beside rimuru ready to react to ifrit next attack.
Talk about force, though. The magic power Ifrit was releasing—with no casting time at all—was blowing searing-hot wind a good hundred feet in every direction around us.
Suprisingly, In this predicament rimuru didn't get scared like previous times, He gained experience I guess.
"Hey. What're you trying to do?" rimuru shouted
"…"
Pop!
An explosion went off behind us, really now trying to talk with an aggressive opponent, I just said he gained experience. Ifrit just answered his question with another white-hot strike in our direction.
This time, unlike that untargeted shock wave from before, he was clearly going for the kill, and his beams of pure heat were vaporizing anything they touched on the way. The force behind them far outclassed that first release of magic power—but, we were evading it quite easily with magic sense, this skill is quite useful In predicting the trajectories if you know what you are doing.
In a way, it was lucky that the town wasn't finished yet. Our tents and temporary outhouses were gone, but that wasn't any disaster. we had already cut down the surrounding trees to expand the clearing; if we'd been in the forest, there probably would have been a massive wildfire by now..
Getting close to him was quite hard for me actually, he is generating a huge amount of heat, and splitting my focus between maintaining my defenses and attacking at the same time was quite difficult.
Rimuru shot a couple of water blades but it evaporated right before reaching the flame giant; a spiraling plume of fire cut it off. The summoned salamanders reacted to the attacks right after.
"Icicle Lance!!"
Elen's ice magic stabbed its way through one of them. As I took a peek at her, she was already fleeing back into her corner of the Magic Barrier.
It was a clever attempt. It looked as if the barrier was holding up well enough without much concentration on the caster's part. But it'd take more than an Icicle lance to shoot down those salamanders.
One of them lunged straight toward the adventuring trio.
"Can you handle it? !" I asked the adventures
"I can do this!" Elen said. "Risking our lives is nothing new to us!"
"Oh, come on," Kabal groaned, "I thought I was the leader! Well, so be it. I'll take one of 'em down!"
"Yeah?" Gido retorted. "I ain't heard of a bandit fightin' an elemental spirit before. Guess we're all in this together, huh?"
It was hard to tell whether they really counted on each other or not.
"All right," I said
"If you get hurt, use these." added rimuru as he spat out a few recovery potions and threw them their way. Gido managed to scoop them up.
"Um… Rimuru? What are these?"
"Recovery potions! Pretty good ones, too, so if you're hurt, use 'em!"
We didn't have time for details. I attacked a flame salamander, Rimuru attacked another, and the three of them were too busy dealing with the one that attacked them. Even one would be a tough opponent for them.
Ifrit was slowly advancing behind the summones.
I sidestepped a straight jet of fire breath then activated dark thunder but didn't shoot it, Instead I coated my fists with the lightning and hastened my step, moving right to the salamander's side, I let out a barrage of punches dispersing it in four to five hits. Using dark thunder this way saves up more energy.
I checked on rinuru and found him on Ranga back dodging the salamander's attacks, while rimuru is one who does the attacking, after dodging a breath attack he shot some water blades, Unlike the fire giant, the salamanders couldn't cut off the attack before it hit home. It managed to slice off a limb…but, the guy grew it right back again.
"Hey rimuru, physical attacks will not work against spiritual foes like me. Striking their elemental weakness or using magic will" I explained to him
"Icicle Lance!!"
We spotted the trio once more, doing their best to survive, with Elen casting magic in the center.
Rimuru suddenly exclaimed.
"Elen! Hit me with an Icicle Lance! Just one's fine!"
"Hahh?! Umm, that's kind of…"
"Just do it!"
The request gave her some pause, but after a second, she began chanting. After another moment, the freeze-magic Icicle Lance was launched.
"Don't complain about this to me later! Icicle Lance!!"
As she shouted out the spell, a pillar of ice shot his way. Don't tell me he could probably capture that magic with his Predator skill.
That's cheating.
If he could analyze and produce the same attack then this Predator had to be some kind of rule-breaking skill. That magic probably packed a punch, but Predator absorbed it all, leaving him undamaged, and he even learned it to boot.
"Hehh?! What happened to my magic?!" exclaimed elen.
"Icicle Lance"
And just like that, omitting the casting time he fired it toward the salamander and unlike the water blades, the magic did the trick.
And the multiple ice pillars he'd just launched—too big, really, to be called "lances"—had just skewered the flame salamander. That, apparently, was all it took to rid them of all their magical force. They instantly vaporized.
As rimuru was defeating his opponent, I was helping the trio deal with theirs, It wanted to blow itself but I was quick enough in finishing it with a ranged dark thunder bolt it before accumulated enough force.
The resulting shockwaves blew everything away. The three of them were all exposed to some remnant heat as they soared backward into the air.
Rimuru having just finished his opponent, had Ranga run up to them. They were burned a little and had difficulty moving—and Kabal, up in front, had taken the worst of it. If it hadn't been for his shield, the relatively defenseless Elen and Gido easily could've been seriously injured.
"Dammit… Ranga, protect these guys. Get them somewhere safe!"
"But…"
Rimuru's order gave him pause for a moment, but he fell silent, perhaps sensing the mystical force he was letting.
"This is an order! Do it! They've got recovery potions on them, so get them to a safe place and heal them."
"As you say. May you fight well!"
"Don't worry. We can deal with Ifrit!"
That must have convinced Ranga well enough. He nodded, gathered all three of them up in his mouth, and—giving one more look of respect—sped off. Now that the side dishes is clear we can deal with the main one.
"Come on Raiden it's two against one, we can do this"
As rimuru said that, Ifrit, before our eyes, had split himself up. Now we had multiple giants blocking our escape routes.
"You just had to say that didn't you?!"
I exclaimed as I was dodging the multiple attacks launched at me.
I wasn't too concerned about the situation. Our detection skills could accurately tell where the fire was going. Even if the multiple Ifrits all launched attacks at the same time, we could easily determine their fire's danger level from the temperature and take suitable action. I already noticed that they weren't all at the same level.
I doubted that Ifrit could hit us with any kind of effective attack. But at the same time, nothing we do was successful against Ifrit. Those flames were rough. The ground was turning into magma amid the ridiculously high temperatures. No way we could just walk across it.
"Hey we need to attack from a distance, Dark Thunder!!" I reminded rimuru
"All right, Take this! Icicle Lance!!"
we launched several shots at the Ifrit clones and successfully vaporized a few of them. Vaporizing with ice and thunder sounds a bit odd, but with the clouds of water vapor after the attacks struck home and being charged with lightening, that was the best way to describe it. We started getting into this little target-shooting game, knocking down the clones one by one.
Suddenly I sensed something wrong with surroundings, I instinctively Flash stepped to gain distance, warning rimuru at the same time.
"Careful! the dying clones' energy is strange!!"
But—
By the time he heard me, crap! it was already too late. The moment he sensed it, He was already surrounded. I tried to get him out, but there was a wide-range barrier to trap him? One of Ifrit's intrinsics?
In an instant, there was a magic circle painted on the ground, no chanting required to cast it. Looks like rimuru wasn't the only one who could do that. Ifrit had transformed his own body into gas and turned a hundred-yard radius into a searing-hot ocean of flame. Probably one of Ifrit's high-level ranged attacks, and even worse, the area was brimming with energy from the Ifrit clones we had defeated.
"Flare Circle!"
I heard a voice that I couldn't quite decipher. Man, woman, young, old? Hard to tell.
I charged a Dark Thunder attack at him but it didn't stop the spell.
Dammit!! We let our gaurd down.
WeI kept reacting to his attacks instead of making one big move to clear the area.
Rimuru was swallowed by the flames, I hurriedly moved to his side trying to disperse the remnant flames.
"Rimuru are you alright?!!" I asked
Suprisingly nothing seemed to have happened to him
"Yeah, I am fine, I have Resist Temperature Skill, it cancels flame-based attacks."
"...Cheats..." "Haha, I forgot about it"
"Since you have cheats on, you deal with him by yourself, I will back you up if anything changes."
I left the remaining fight to rimuru since he is immune and all.
"What was that?" He shouted as he silently unraveled his Sticky Thread across Ifrit's body. He was done for. It looks like that he was using Shizu for his body's core. He couldn't have tied up a pure spirit beast like the salamanders with this string, but one with a physical core was a different story.
Next, he'd combine the Sticky Thread with some Steel Thread to get the benefits of both. Another product of his experimentation during practicing —and as a bonus, it adopted the same immunities he had, so it wouldn't get burned up.
"That was a little anticlimactic, right?"
Ifrit, in a panic, struggled to free himself. But the "Sticky Steel Thread" was never going to let him, Rimuru took his sweet time, casually approaching.
It was time to land the final strike. On Ifrit, the monster that had probably taken Shizu's body over.
Ifrit was trying to throw every attack he could to stop rimuru. Sadly for him, flames didn't work on him.
Then…
He used his unique skill "Predator"
With a flash of light, I witnessed for the second time rimuru swallowing someone.