Turning the body into a magic scroll.
Every time you cast a spell, you don’t have to perform a complex process of manipulating magic yourself. You simply call upon the runes inscribed on your body and infuse them with magic.
The flesh was the paper, and the runes were the spellbook.
It’s not quite instantaneous casting, but it’s close.
A system of magic like no other, combining runic magic and scroll magic with the human body.
Louis Ancton, who conceived the idea first, thought that it wouldn’t work and rejected it.
Magic had evolved, and runes were too primitive.
It would be too inefficient to abandon a developed system and return to primitive methods to implement modern magic through an ancient magical language.
The first step was to reinterpret and rework modern magic into runes. A deep understanding of runes was therefore a must.
Harriet could do it.
The importance of runes had been emphasized from a very young age by her father, Grand Duke de Saint-Owan, a master of magic, so Harriet had a very deep understanding of the language, if not on the level of a professional scholar who had spent a lifetime studying it.
But on top of that, she had to memorize these vast amounts of runic formulas, activating and rearranging them whenever she needed to.
Harriet could do that, too.
Memorization was too easy for her.
As such, Harriet’s body, not her mind, was doing most of the actual work of manipulating magic beyond the math. All that was required was to memorize a large number of magical runic combinations.
A magic scroll that could be used indefinitely, as long as her body’s magic allowed.
So while Harriet doesn’t have the supernatural ability of no-casting, she had gained an ability that rivaled Redina’s.
-Kurrrr
She’s not done yet. Harriet stretched her hand toward the acrid smoke rising from the collapsed arena.
Blue power lines of energy, shaped like runes, etched themselves into her right arm. The greater the scale of the magic, the greater the magnitude of the power lines that color her entire body.
Right now, Harriet’s entire upper and lower arms were glowing with runes.
-Crumble
Magic reorganized into runes.
Thunder.
She will finish with a thunderbolt from the sky, not a mere lightning strike. As sudden darkness descends upon the otherwise clear sky, the people begin to shout.
-Flash!
A bolt of lightning struck the arena.
-Crackle!
Soon after, a tremendous explosion shook the stadium as the thunderbolt sent the ground trembling.
In the area where it struck, there was a moment of silence.
“….”
“Haah….”
Harriet smiled at Olivia as she emerged from the rubble.
She hadn’t won or lost, but she was confident that she had already landed a blow.
Olivia Lanze emerged from the rubble of the collapsed stadium.
“This is… This is really pissing me off…?”
Despite Harriet’s successful attack, the fact that Olivia Lanze was a monster remains unchanged.
Her bare body withstood a Flame Strike and a Thunderbolt. Flame Strike was a large-scale destructive spell, and Thunderbolt was a pinpoint, but powerful anti-personnel attack spell.
But Olivia withstood both of them.
The audience, no matter how unaccustomed to high level magic, couldn’t help but be astounded by the fact that such high-level destructive magic was being cast and that there was someone who was able to withstand it with their bare body.
The smile faded from Olivia’s lips.
As if the funtime was over.
Concealed beneath Harriet’s sleeves, the lines of magical power began to etch themselves anew upon her right and left arms.
The arena had collapsed, destroying any footing in the immediate vicinity..
Harriet will be defeated if she allows a single attack, and Olivia Lanze will be defeated if that impregnable barrier of Magic Body Strengthening disappears.
The state of the arena itself favored Harriet.
For Olivia Lanze, who needed to get in close, the collapsed and bumpy ground was a difficult place to maneuver around.
But Olivia was unaffected by such considerations.
Gracefully bounding across the ground, Olivia approached Harriet with seemingly effortless ease, never faltering in her steps.
Of course, Harriet herself was far from ordinary, having accomplished the unprecedented feat of imbuing magic directly into her own physical body. She existed outside the bounds of conventional standards.
Harriet stood, awaiting Olivia’s arrival at the point of her leap.
She casted a spell on a piece of the stadium floor where Olivia will land next.
It’s a simple telekinesis spell.
-Puck!
With a dull thud, the rock on the ground that Olivia was about to step on suddenly bounced off to the right.
”!”
Her foothold suddenly disappeared, so to speak.
-Kwadang!
“Ack!”
Olivia stumbled and fell to the ground, unable to find solid footing.
In the middle of a heated battle, a sudden loss of footing was a deadly crisis.
However, Olivia’s fall was so comical that it was actually hilarious.
“…pfft.”
And Harriet, who had created the spectacle, did not take advantage of that misstep but rather deliberately held in her laughter.
“Wow… Wow, really….”
Olivia staggered to her feet and looked at Harriet, who was smirking at her.
Oh no.
She never thought she’d be laughed at like this.
By a mere child.
Just a little kid.
To be humiliated like this by this wizard.
“Really.”
“Shit.”
“I’m really angry right now…?”
A dark emotion tugged at Olivia’s heart.
The veins in her neck and forehead throbbed, and Olivia Lanze gritted her teeth and approached Harriet once more, calmly. The same trick won’t work this time. That was an unexpected attack.
Being cautious wasn’t going to cut it.
Olivia lunged at her, punching her in the stomach, and Harriet disappeared with a Blink.
However, just as she reappeared. Harriet found herself facing a rushing boulder.
It was too late.
She didn’t even have a second to cast.
-Shhh!
It wasn’t Harriet’s reflexes that dodged the rock, it was the trajectory of the rock that caused it to miss her.
The speed of the flying stone was such that if it had hit a normal person, it would have cracked their head open and killed them.
“It didn’t work.”
Olivia bit her lip in disappointment.
Knowing that Harriet would flee using Blink when approached, she had thrown the rock at the moment Harriet had disappeared.
Luckily for Harriet, it was far enough away to miss.
A chill ran down Harriet’s spine.
Her opponent was getting used to her pattern of attacks, and had started prodding holes and predicting her movement.
In that moment of teleportation, the brief interval between arrival and departure.
In that split second, Olivia could snipe at her with a rock.
Next time, she wouldn’t miss.
This was the last time she could use Blink.
She doesn’t have much magical power left anyway. She had already used a lot of powerful spells.
“Your magical power seems to be running low, isn’t it?”
And Olivia knew it too.
-Thud!
Seeing Olivia advancing, Harriet opted to utilize the surroundings rather than cast an outright offensive spell.
Using telekinesis, she picked up the rubble of the arena and flung it.
-Thud! BANG!
The boulder-like debris crashed into Olivia’s face as she continued to advance.
Ellen had at least managed to smash through a wall and cut through a door with her Holy Relic Lament.
Olivia Lanze was doing it with her bare body. Throwing stadium debris at the ever-approaching Olivia could only go so far.
However, as if it were the only way to go, Harriet continued to fling the rubble at her, and Olivia crushed it as she advanced.
Not surprisingly, a cloud of dirt rises.
Olivia gritted her teeth as she reached Harriet’s face, only to see her escape with another Blink.
“Annoying.”
Olivia realized this was Harriet’s intention as she watched the dirt obscure her view.
You can’t tell which way your opponent had moved. Because of the dust, the audience couldn’t see what was going on either.
“Whoa….”
Suddenly, a burst of blue magic surged through Olivia’s body.
-Boom!
It was the same as what Saviolin Turner had done when she fought the dark Charlotte.
A shockwave of magic exploded, instantly clearing away the scattered dust.
Olivia blew the dust away like she was clearing away a fog, and watched as Harriet appeared on the other side once again.
By now, the arena had been transformed into a chaotic wasteland, as if it had been obliterated beyond recognition.
“Nothing to throw anymore?”
From what Olivia could tell, Harriet had used up enough magical power that she couldn’t use Blink anymore, so she’d only been using her telekinetic spells to hurl large chunks of debris.
But Olivia had smashed all of the boulder-sized shards.
All that remained were small stones.
So much for the wizards’ last hurrah.
At this point, she had been dealing with the little mage for far too long.
“I don’t need to throw anything anymore.”
But Harriet was laughing.
“I’ve already thrown everything.”
“…what?”
She has already thrown everything.
What does that mean?
What the hell?
Suddenly, Olivia could see that despite her magical shockwave, there were rocks embedded around her.
These rocks should have been knocked away by the shockwave, but they were still there.
Olivia looked around her.
Amidst the scattered debris of shattered fragments and stone pieces lay a scene of chaos.
Though she can’t make out the details.
There was something in the shape of those shards.
An uncanny regularity.
“I’m almost out of magical power, but it’s not like I need it to do this.”
Harriet had flung the debris around.
And she arranged the scattering shards so that Olivia couldn’t see them.
A way to use mana from the environment.
Reinhardt had told them to figure it out, but the Magic Research Society still couldn’t.
But there was a way to use natural mana in the first place.
In the form of a magic circle.
Magic circles were used for all sorts of things, but large-scale magic circles use mana from magic stones, which essentially made use of magical energy from the environment.
During the match, Harriet has done the unthinkable, setting up a magic circle in the arena.
-Fwoosh
“Holy…!”
Olivia watched, dumbfounded, as the circle began to react, already covering such a large area that it was impossible to escape.
“I win.”
Harriet grinned.
At that moment the magic circle that Harriet had set up emitted a blue light and completed the shape of the seal.
The spell that was activated.
Inferno.
A fire-based destructive spell that ranks above Flame Strike.
It’s a spell with an area of effect so large that it’s impossible to avoid.
Olivia had a hunch.
She was in trouble.
As she watched the ground beneath her begin to erupt in flames, Olivia cried out in frustration.
“Y-you…! Just wait and see!”
“The people who say ‘just wait and see’ are usually the least scary.”
It was too childish for a conversation at the end of an intense fight.
-Crackle!
A roaring inferno engulfed Olivia and shot skyward.
Olivia could not resist this spell.
-Ha,Harriet de Saint-Owan takes the second set!
The audience stared in disbelief at the ghastly flames as they darted toward the sky like a snake’s tongue.
Although Harriet was not familiar with fighting itself, she knew well what was important in a fight.
Keeping your cards close to your chest.
Harriet hid her tricks well. She hid as much of what she could do as she could, and then she’d hit her with it. By creating the illusion that throwing debris was all she had left, she hid her true intentions of setting up a massive magic circle on the ground.
As it turned out, though, it was a blessing in disguise.
Olivia underestimated Harriet, and Harriet capitalized on the deception.
Plus, of course, Olivia didn’t use Divine Power until the end. If she had, she would have been able to survive Harriet’s final attack.
In the end, Olivia underestimated her opponent while being limited by various constraints, and had suffered defeat.
Regardless of the outcome, it was one of the most spectacular fights of the tournament so far, and the excitement in the crowd was palpable.
Set score 1:1.
Olivia would not let her guard down now.
Harriet and Olivia were summoned to the restored arena.
Olivia glared at Harriet like she was going to eat her.
She’s not going to let her guard down, she’s not going to be fooled, and she’s not going to be tricked anymore.
So, with Olivia still waiting for the match to begin, Harriet held up her hand.
“I withdraw.”
No wonder Olivia’s face went white at that.
“You, you, you, you, don’t, don’t, don’t withdraw!”
“I’m tired, I can’t do it anymore.”
Lack of magical power was not an excuse.
In Reinhardt’s case, he was unable to recover from the effects of his Magic Body Strengthening, but a normal depletion of magical power could have been remedied by an on-call mage with a magic called Siphon Mana.
Declaration of Abstention.
-Um… Due to the forfeit by Harriet de Saint-Owan, Olivia Lanze has been declared the winner of the Group C finals….
Of course, you can’t force a competitor to fight if they don’t want to fight anymore.
“Don’t you dare withdraw, you, don’t!”
Olivia shouted in frustration, but Harriet had no intention of fighting on.
She couldn’t beat Olivia.
“Okay, just one more set, one more set, and if you win the next set, you win, and I’ll pull out!”
“I don’t want to, why would I do that? I can’t even fight you.”
“Aaaahhhh!”
Her goal was never to beat Olivia, but to make herself impossible to ignore.
And she had already succeeded.
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