Frustration and worry had been mounting in Vivi since her meeting with the Duke, and especially since Saffra had banged on her door in the middle of the night. Having something physical to vent on, especially a monster rather than a sapient being, was, honestly, a blessing. She might not know how to navigate sensitive discussions with a potentially insane Duke, but when it came to putting down city-erasing monstrosities from beyond the dimensional veil—well, that happened to be her specialty.

She had learned a lot during her fight with the Red Tithe. Combining that practical experience with an understanding of where exactly the material was sourced from, she thought she had a grasp on the big picture. These ‘voidlings’ and ‘voidbeasts’ were otherworldly fauna, and their bodies had evolved to be not only extremely tough and sharp physically, but also resistant to magic. All forms of it, including the effects the System bestowed on this world’s denizens—skills, stats, and all others.

Attack and defense in organisms had always been a game of escalating cat and mouse. She didn’t fully understand how these void-monsters’ glassy black armor resisted magic of all forms, but where they had evolved, she could too. They were deep-sea creatures with slick aerodynamic bodies, parting water with ease—but Vivi could make the water thicker, introduce obstacles within. She had made strides even during her fight against the Red Tithe, and his dagger had been more refined—modified somehow, undoubtedly—than even this Greater Voidbeast’s armor.

Still, that had been a tiny dagger, not three hundred feet of building-thick alien-worm-dragon.

It would be a challenge.

She looked forward to it.

Her staff fell casually toward the gigantic creature that easily rivaled the middle-rank Cataclysms. Red eyes sharpened on their target. She didn’t register it mentally, but her lips pulled back in excitement, or maybe vicious anticipation.

“[Greater Telekinesis].”

The core of the spell had remained mostly the same. Before, the means of actually grabbing an object involved a uniform distribution of force suffusing the entire target. Vivi had made changes. She clamped down, stabbing hooks and barbs all across the huge beast.

The magic almost slid off despite all her efforts. She poured more mana in. Opened her channels fully. Sometimes, there was a quality in quantity. Not all problems could be solved by drowning them in mana, but the best ones could.

[Greater Telekinesis] settled across the beast, her slipping fingers catching hold. The corners of her lips pulled even further up—for her, it was nothing short of a grin.

She knew this wasn’t the most efficient use of her mana, and perhaps she was letting herself get carried away. But she was stressed and angry, and needed to vent. Moreover, she hadn’t been allowed to cut loose, magically speaking, since arriving in this world. Everything broke too easily.

An inefficient method of killing, a highly resistant, nearly immune-to-magic Cataclysm-level monster. The two combined were enough to actually strain her muscles. She felt like a caged lion released into the wild. She tore forward with glee, ripping through the open plains.

Or rather, she pulled.

The entire three-hundred-foot length of the Voidbeast shuddered, then locked in place as its flight was suddenly halted. Vivi began at its skull, prying its jaw open to reveal huge circular rows of jagged glass-like teeth. Pulling—leveraging her full power, leaning with all her weight—she forced its mouth as wide as it could go.

Then more.

She wrenched.

The sound was indescribable. Gruesome, yet satisfying, even to her squeamish sensibilities. Incredibly durable material cracked and splintered and shattered all down its body, showering onto the streets below in huge chunks.

Segment by segment, she tore the creature in half. She savored each second, and the oceans of mana coursing through her to make it happen. It was ecstasy in two parts: satisfaction in how she’d successfully adapted a spell to work against even one of the strongest of these monsters, and the more pure joy of having liquid power channeling through her veins in quantities she had yet to experience.

When she finished, sagging in place, the huge corpse crashed down from the sky. She realized how deeply she was breathing, and how thunderous her pulse had become. It had been viscerally satisfying to exert herself. She’d gotten a taste of something similar back at the manor, when she’d rewound time, but even that hadn’t compared.

Truthfully, she wished the monster had been more durable.

Coming back to herself, she realized Rafael—and the others—were watching her. The whole process had taken ten seconds at most. Vivi reined in her expression, smoothing her face out.

Rafael’s eyes were coldly calculating. She couldn’t say what he’d made of that…display…but he’d certainly come to a conclusion or two.

Duke Caldimore was finally stirring to wakefulness. She grimaced at him, then repeated to Rafael, “See what you can find out.”

She [Blinked] away.

With the worst, most immediate threat cleared—she didn’t want to know what that level 1950 could have done to Meridian, and she was glad she never would—the monumental task of dealing with the invasion as a whole remained.

Even with massive perception dilation, Vivi struggled to take everything in and make a plan. The good news was that the outbreak had occurred in the center of the Adventurer’s District, and nearest the most powerful guilds.

The bad news was that adventurers tended to be foolhardy and heroic sorts. A subset of them, in any case. With deafening alarm bells ringing across the city—which had begun nearly immediately—the streets of the Adventurer’s District were filling with adventurers. Some weren’t even geared, rushing to see what was happening without so much as donning their equipment.

A majority of the monsters, the voidlings, were approximated as weaker than Titled-rank. Thus, they should be containable by proper numbers of mithril and orichalcum-ranks working in concert. Vivi could wipe through quite a lot of those weaker monsters in an instant, even without specially-adapted skills, but there were dozens or hundreds of beasts that even Titled adventurers couldn’t handle. That even teams of them couldn’t. Some were above seventeen hundred—Greater Voidbeasts, as the System called them. Those were the ones Vivi needed to focus on: the threats that could rip open guildhalls and kill even the strongest Titled with a slash of their claws.

There were going to be casualties, she knew, looking down at the chaos from high in the air. There had been many already, simply while her attention had been occupied with the Cataclysm-rank Greater Voidbeast. This wasn’t like the assault on the Convoy, where she could cast a spell and erase the horde on a whim. Only [Greater Telekinesis] had been adapted so far, and while she could use what she'd learned as a template to more rapidly adjust the rest of her grimoire, that would take time, no matter how little, and people were dying every second.

Without further ado, she began her own slaughter.

“[Animus of Gaia].”

A 20th tier earth elemental ripped itself out of the ground hands first, emerging with a roar to shake the entire district. Wasting no time, it slammed into the nearest of the Lesser Voidbeasts—the name given to void-creatures above 1000, but below 1400. The enormous power difference proved sufficient; the golem pummeled repeated blows into the monster, breaking through highly-resistant carapace and flattening its opponent in seconds. It charged for the next.

Summoning magic, she noted, was just as effective as other types. Good to know.

“[Disintegration Ray].”

A beam a finger’s width in diameter sliced through a Voidbeast, the monster’s insides glowing bright red before collapsing in halves.

Promising.

“[Implode].”

The spell struggled at first, but she poured mana in, and a glassy black wolf-like monster the size of a house went from blurring down the street toward a group of adventurers to collapsing, with a crunch, into a ball no larger than a cannonball. The condensed black material dropped onto cobblestone and shattered the road for meters in every direction.

“[Greater Telekinesis].”

She picked up that dense black ball and slammed it into another creature, testing a hypothesis. Would the material serve as an effective projectile—more so than regular matter? The answer seemed to be yes, but only because of how naturally tough it was: more durable than even starmetal. But the moment the monster had died, she’d noticed something: the material had lost much, but not all, of its magic-defying properties.

She demolished a few Lesser Voidbeasts with the sphere, then released her hold on it and continued experimenting.

Focusing on a single spell and adapting it might have been better from an immediate standpoint, but not a prolonged one. She needed to see how the different spells interacted with the creatures’ alien nature. With a more comprehensive understanding, she could modify each spell faster than prior attempts, could develop more thorough counters.

Despite the horror of the situation, Vivi felt alive.

A column of brilliant orange fire falling from the heavens made her glance sideways. Nova had entered the fray. With a caw that echoed across Meridian, another sunbeam erased one of the weaker Greater Voidlings.

She hesitated briefly, since Nova was supposed to be Saffra’s guardian, but of course the girl had called him out to help. As a level 1300, though, the bird could only do so much. Especially since the ‘approximated level’ assigned to each of the creatures accounted for the scale of their immunity to some degree, but not completely. They were much tougher than their level suggested, almost mini-bosses each. The System was giving them a general ballpark, though. Nova could handle the very weakest of the Lesser Voidbeasts.

Mages seemed to be especially vulnerable, but the material’s physical properties were incredible too, and they ignored skills and stats as easily as spells. Warriors were definitely not finding it easy to kill their opponents. Just slightly more so than the magic-type classes.

She didn’t disapprove of Saffra’s summoning of Nova on principle, since any contribution might save a life, but she was concerned that a so-called phoenix appearing in the middle of Meridian might cause problems. Few people were knowledgeable enough to tell the summons apart from a real one. But on immediate reconsideration, Vivi supposed events had escalated far beyond the point she should be worrying about complications of any sort.

As she fought, other powerful figures entered the fray. Meridian was the capital city of the human kingdoms, and was home to more Titled than anywhere else. Though the world had grown calmer in the wake of the Cataclysms, society had hardly grown lax or indolent. Even with those great threats purged, all men and women lived in fear of not just other monsters more than capable of ripping apart a city, but the looming threat of the birth of another world-rending Cataclysm.

So, like a kicked anthill, heroes of all levels swarmed to the defense of their city, ready and willing to push back the horde. Vivi was merely one of many. If definitely the only one ripping apart Greater Voidbeasts with a spoken word. It was obvious, though, that if she hadn’t been present, Meridian certainly would’ve been overrun.

Vivi recognized a few of the figures appearing, either through the game’s lore, or simply from their Titles being exceedingly obvious—remembering them from Rafael’s briefings. For example: a woman with thirteen swords of different colors, each hovering like a peacock’s plumage behind her. The huge blades lashed out with lightning-fast slashes to sever limbs of even Lesser Voidbeasts with ease.

The Gale of Blades. A new hero, and one of the stronger ones. 1400 or 1500?

People Vivi recognized from the game, too. Rushing in on a floating white cloud with a full battalion of white-robed clerics around him was a man in white-and-gold, his tall hat boldly presenting a symbol of a golden star. The Archbishop. She recognized his face, though many wrinkles had accumulated over a century. Like Aeris, this man had been a great hero through the Cataclysm Wars, and was the de facto leader of humanity’s dominant religion. Vivi had not sought him out for a reason. His personality was one she would rather not deal with.

She couldn’t fault the firepower he brought, though. The man raised a white staff to the sky and cried out:

“[Bathe In Heaven’s Golden Light].”

Vivi watched the spell with interest, even as she was pulling together her own attacks. Every distracted moment was another surviving Voidbeast; she couldn’t afford to simply spectate.

Divinity-infused magic did not, though, work against the monsters better than other types. The Archbishop’s column of golden fire impacted a Voidbeast and burned deeply through its armor, but didn’t punch through the creature and kill it outright. Injuring a 1430 at all was impressive; Vivi had yet to see anyone besides her kill a Voidbeast, much less a Greater Voidbeast. Only the Lessers were in reach of humanity’s Titled.

There were many other figures fighting all around her, though she paid attention to few. The resident Institute archmages and grand magi had arrived, of course. She didn’t even glance their way, because there was little information to gather about their abilities, unlike the Archbishop’s divine-infused magic. Though exceptional specialists, they were simple mages like Vivi, and thus had little to offer from a research perspective.

Vivi refocused on her own fights. The sheer flood of voidlings and voidbeasts was impossible to keep up with, swarming out of the dimensional hole in shoulder-to-shoulder waves. The flow was only stymied when something truly horrendous, one of the [Greater Voidbeasts], emerged, blocking all others. Size seemed to correlate pretty closely to strength, in the case of these monsters.

She had ripped apart four of those greatest threats so far, each easier than the last as she adapted her spells. Killing magic-resistant Cataclysms wasn’t exactly easy on her mana reserves, though. She couldn’t maintain this indefinitely, even with potions on hand.

The problem needed to be solved at its source.

She had assigned Rafael to the Duke’s interrogation, but she had been keeping tabs on their conversation. She doubted that man could help seal the anomaly if he wanted to. The Duke was no ritualist, and even the Fell Apostate, had he not escaped immediately upon the ritual going wild, surely couldn’t have salvaged this disaster.

She needed to study it herself. She was likely the only person capable of closing it. But to do so would be to let the hordes go uncontested. To not do so would be to ignore the breach in the hull of a sinking ship, and continue desperately scooping out buckets of water as if that would save anyone, rather than merely delay their fate.

Maybe…maybe she could buy them a moment of reprieve, then, and use that gap to figure something out.

She withdrew the [Codex of the Hollowed Sun]. She hadn’t stored nearly as much mana inside as she had wished, since so little time had passed, and moreover, she had wanted to save what did lie within for an emergency. While the breach in general might qualify as one, she hadn’t truly struggled yet. Even the Greater Voidbeasts had come apart with nothing but mild strain.

The Codex had been for a threat where the boosted throughput—because it wasn’t just quantity, or stamina, the artifact provided—could help her take down something truly dangerous. Something on her own level or higher, if it existed.

But nothing of the sort seemed to be coming, and if she could buy herself a moment to study the gateway without mass casualties, she would do so.

She opened her senses to the artifact and accepted the bounty within.

For the first time since arriving in this world, Vivi truly put everything she had into her magic, spewing out the strongest spells she had access to.

“[Balefire Eruption].”

“[Crushing Singularity].”

“[Lance of the First Dawn].”

“[Everfrost].”

“[Oblivion’s Toll].”

Titled-rank threats died by the dozens. Mithril and higher by the thousands. Wherever her staff pointed, the earth was scoured clean of extra-dimensional scourge.

Killing wasn’t the hard part. Discriminate killing was. Minimizing collateral damage. Everything below her was so fragile, especially compared to the durability of her targets. So many mortals scurrying around, doing what they could against the waves of otherworldly monsters. The slightest lapse of attention could snap any of them, even Titled, like an unnoticed branch beneath her foot. She feared that despite her extreme caution, she had done just that, if not once, then dozens of times.

When she finished, much of the invading force had been cleaned away. She was vaguely aware of attention from all across the city on her, eyes looking up at the empty spot of air where her spells had originated. She doubted any could see through her reinforced invisibility, which she had thrown on herself early, but she suspected that the grand secret was out. Some, maybe most, would assume the Sorceress’s return before they did ‘wandering immortal’. Maybe the attempt to hide was pointless.

With a small reprieve bought, she [Blinked] above the dimensional anomaly and began to make of it what she could.