Decisive Battle: The Sorcerers’ Association

It had been nearly a year and a half since my second summoning to the world of the seven moons.

Today would probably become an important day that determined the future of this world.

Over the past year and a half, Annie and I had gathered roughly eighty sorcerers.

Some we had rescued from desperate situations, while others we had persuaded through reason, gradually increasing the number of people willing to cooperate with us.

With this many people gathered together, continuing to remain hidden from the Sorcerers’ Association was becoming difficult.

We finally decided that the time had come to do the opposite of what we had done until now—to openly declare our existence and become a deterrent against the Sorcerers’ Association.

Today, Annie and the eighty sorcerers would publicly announce the formation of the Sorcerers’ Party.

At the same time, they would issue a declaration condemning the current Sorcerers’ Association for having lost sight of its original principles and run out of control.

The Sorcerers’ Association had originally been created so that sorcerers who rejected control and domination by nations could help one another.

It had never existed to rule over people who weren’t sorcerers, and it was certainly never meant to become an organization that murdered sorcerers who opposed war.

That was the message they intended to send.

How much effect the declaration would actually have remained uncertain.

But surely it would influence, in one way or another, those who remembered what the original Sorcerers’ Association had been like, as well as those exhausted by the continuing conflict.

Precisely because of that, however, it was certain that the Sorcerers’ Association would launch a large-scale attack today in an attempt to crush the newly formed Sorcerers’ Party and erase its declaration along with it.

Naturally, the Sorcerers’ Party had no intention of simply allowing itself to be destroyed.

Preparations to meet the attack were already complete.

And of course, that included me and my companions.

“They’re here.”

I sent out probes toward every swelling mana reaction surrounding the Sorcerers’ Party’s base.

It would be impossible for only me and my companions to stop every enemy advancing from all directions, and there was no need for us to do so.

Every sorcerer gathered inside this base was powerful and had already resolved to fight.

Even so, I wanted to reduce casualties as much as possible, so we would handle the especially troublesome enemies.

“The group of angels coming from the front is probably meant specifically to counter me. I’ll handle them, of course. Bella, head south. There’s one mid-ranking devil there, so take it out. Pisca, go to Annie and Lenis. Protect them.”

As I watched the two of them scatter according to my instructions, my own resolve hardened as well.

I manipulated spiritual particles and magical essence, gathering darkness into my hand.

These enemies were by no means weak.

Even an angel’s attacks could harm me.

To be honest, I was scared, and I would probably get hurt.

Even so, I would be the one standing victorious in the end.

With that firmly decided in my heart, the decisive battle began.

My opening long-range Magic attack only caught three of them.

There were more than a dozen angels, and most reacted quickly to the Magic, scattering to avoid it.

But the fate of the three who were caught was miserable.

Even without taking a direct hit, their bodies turned black from wherever the attack had grazed them, then blistered and melted away with a hissing sound.

Within only moments, the three angels had become black stains upon the earth.

“How wicked.”

“Such a powerful devil.”

“We must destroy him without fail.”

Three angels who possessed noticeably greater power than the others declared this while trembling as though shaken, yet with anger in their voices.

Well, I couldn’t really complain about being called wicked.

Even I myself was appalled by just how vicious the effect of the Magic I’d unleashed had been.

But if seeing that still wasn’t enough to make them retreat, then I would simply have to turn every angel in front of me into the same sort of stain on the ground.

Light, flame, and lightning gathered in the hands of the three angels who had spoken, while every remaining angel charged toward me at once.

Then the three completed offensive spells—light, flame, and lightning—formed into spears and were launched straight at me.

What an unpleasant situation.

If they’d all simply fired spears of light, I could have put up a single shield of darkness and blocked them, but because every attack had a different attribute, I’d have to use a large-scale spell to defend against them all at once.

But if I focused on blocking the elemental attacks that way, the angels charging toward me—probably the lower-ranking ones—would manage to latch onto me.

Judging from the grim expressions on the lower-ranking angels and the way their power was gathering, their role was apparently to cling to me and self-destruct.

The three behind them, the mid-ranking angels, were likely commanders, and the lower-ranking angels apparently couldn’t disobey them.

I steeled myself and concentrated power into both arms.

Of the three incoming spears, I knocked the light spear down with my right hand, crushed the flame spear with a punch from my left, and finally crossed both arms to catch the lightning spear.

Ow! Hot! And now I’m numb too! Actually, forget that—this really hurts!!!

Compared with the mana-infused arrows I’d taken before, the pain was easily three orders of magnitude worse.

An attack from a mid-ranking angel hurt this much.

I quietly swore to myself that if I ever encountered a high-ranking angel, I would absolutely refuse to fight it.

Still, the ones here were ultimately only mid-ranking angels, and this wasn’t enough to destroy me.

Enduring the pain, I stomped one foot heavily into the ground and unleashed Gravity Magic at full power toward the charging lower-ranking angels—Magic that, for some reason, had apparently become synonymous with me in this world.

The lower-ranking angels crashed to the ground and were pinned in place before they could even get close to me, much less grab onto me.

Their strategy itself wasn’t bad.

If they wanted to destroy a high-ranking devil like me with the forces they had, there probably wasn’t any other viable option.

Even if they were only lower-ranking angels, if enough of them self-destructed at point-blank range, even I would take damage.

Once I had been weakened that way, the remaining mid-ranking angels might well have had a real chance of defeating me.

However.

What they lacked was the resolve of the mid-ranking angels themselves.

If they had truly intended to make this plan succeed, then at least one of the mid-ranking angels should have joined the lower-ranking angels in the suicide attack.

If they had done that, I wouldn’t have been able to completely stop a mid-ranking angel with such a wide-area spell, and if I’d used another spell to stop that mid-ranking angel instead, I wouldn’t have been able to deal with the lower-ranking ones in time.

In that case, I would have been caught in their self-destruction.

But the mid-ranking angels had forced only their subordinates to sacrifice themselves and had refused to risk their own lives.

Because of that, they lost their single chance at victory and had their existence erased by me.

With my next spell, the immobilized lower-ranking angels were annihilated.

The mid-ranking angels, having lost all their pawns, were then eliminated one by one, and it wasn’t long before the final angel, its face twisted in terror, became another black stain on the ground.

And with the Sorcerers’ Association’s greatest fighting force—the group of angels—defeated by me, the greatest fighting force on the Sorcerers’ Party’s side, the outcome of the battle could essentially be considered decided.

Just as I’d expected, Bella had no trouble taking the head of a mid-ranking devil who had been a devil far longer than she had.

Pisca, meanwhile, had apparently detected and defeated a Shadow, an invisible monster sent to infiltrate the Sorcerers’ Party and assassinate its sorcerers.

As a former fairy, Pisca had already possessed excellent detection abilities, and becoming a devil had sharpened them even further.

An ordinary being couldn’t fool her senses.

I suspected even I would have a little trouble doing so.

Of course, I also heard that the members of the Sorcerers’ Party had fought back fiercely from inside the base, placing familiars under their control—such as golems and spirits—on the front lines.

Among them, Lenis, who was overwhelmingly the youngest member of the Sorcerers’ Party, had apparently fought bravely without flinching and defeated many monsters.

Even under the tension of battle, she never lost control, used her sorcery efficiently, and fought all the way to the end without exhausting herself.

After the battle, even the veteran sorcerers who made up the Sorcerers’ Party praised Lenis’s efforts, saying that her courageous fighting had inspired them.

Annie was overjoyed by Lenis’s growth, and I was proud of her too.

In any case, the decisive battle ended in victory for the Sorcerers’ Party, and news of its existence, along with its condemnation of the Sorcerers’ Association—including the Association’s attack that day—was broadcast to the entire world.

The first step toward ending the conflict that had continued for so long in this world had finally been taken.