Almost the instant the final letter of "GO!!" left Pinusal's mouth, Heve launched herself forward with an incredibly powerful leap.
Her speed was absurd. She accelerated many times faster than lightning falling from the sky. However, producing that much force came at a cost: the bones in both of her legs didn't merely break—they were pulverized into dust. And the damage wasn't limited to her bones. Every muscle in her legs tore apart the instant her feet left the ground.
Normally, an injury like that would have ended the match immediately.
But for Heve, it barely mattered. Even before her fist could reach her opponent, her legs had already regenerated completely, bones, muscles, and everything else inside them returning to their original state.
Using all the speed and power generated by that monstrous leap, Heve aimed a straight punch directly at Enea's face, trying to strike him before he could even draw his katana.
But then something strange happened.
Heve seemed to pass straight through the boy.
Because of the momentum behind her leap, she continued several meters past him before finally stopping.
And that wasn't the end of the surprise.
The moment Heve turned toward her opponent, she saw Enea standing exactly where he had been before, now holding his katana in one hand. Its blade was stained with blood.
Only then did Heve notice that both of her arms were lying on the arena floor not far from him.
The audience stared in wide-eyed shock. Some of the more faint-hearted spectators—people who, considering the nature of this tournament, probably shouldn't have been there in the first place—immediately vomited at the sight of the minister's severed arms lying on the ground while Heve herself stood several meters away, completely armless.
Heve immediately began analyzing what had happened.
And she reached the most logical conclusion almost at once.
She hadn't truly passed through Enea.
Instead, he had simply moved out of the way and then returned to the exact same position so quickly that, from Heve's perspective, it had looked as though he hadn't moved at all.
Furthermore, either during that movement or only a fraction of a second afterward, Enea had summoned—or perhaps created—his katana using some kind of spell. Then he had cut through both of Heve's arms so quickly that she hadn't even realized they were gone until she saw them on the floor.
"Yes. That's the most logical explanation," Heve said to herself in her usual monotone voice.
By the time she finished speaking, both of her arms had already regenerated completely.
"Hmm. From your fight against that Ranger, I'd already figured out that your regeneration was insane," Enea said, looking genuinely impressed. "But I didn't expect it to be this fast. It's much faster than the regeneration of any demon I've fought so far…"
Then his unsettling smile returned.
"In that case, I hope you'll entertain me even more than any of those demons!"
Without chanting a spell or making even the slightest movement, dozens of ice katanas suddenly appeared in the air above him. At least fifty.
All of them floated for only an instant before shooting toward Heve simultaneously, each moving many times faster than lightning.
'Still no visible sign of him casting a spell…' Aislyra thought as she watched the barrage race toward Minister Heve.
The instant the katanas struck, an enormous cloud of dust and shattered ice erupted around the minister, completely obscuring her from view.
But there was no need to wait for the cloud to clear to discover what had happened.
Heve burst out of it herself, already running toward Enea at extreme speed.
"Allowing my opponent to launch another attack like that would be illogical!" the woman declared in the same robotic, monotonous voice.
A katana had pierced directly through her right eye and emerged from the back of her neck.
And that was far from the only one. Exactly half of the ice katanas Enea had launched had pierced Heve's body, making the elf resemble a walking pincushion.
Not that this stopped her.
She didn't have enough time to remove all the blades lodged in her legs, which prevented her from reaching her maximum speed, but she continued charging toward her opponent without hesitation.
"Fire Body!"
Only a couple of steps after emerging from the cloud of dust and ice, Heve cast another spell.
Immediately, raging flames engulfed her entire body as she continued running.
Fire Body was a fire spell that, as its name suggested, surrounded the caster's body in flames. Fire Magic users often used it as an alternative to spells such as Flame Blade whenever they were unarmed.
Interestingly, the temperature and power of the flames covering the caster don't depend on the amount of mana used to cast or maintain the spell. Instead, they depended entirely on how hot and powerful the caster wanted the flames to become, although the temperature could never exceed roughly three thousand degrees Celsius.
But just because a caster could maintain the flames at their maximum temperature didn't mean doing so was wise. The reason was simple. Beyond a certain point, the fire resistance granted by Fire Body was no longer enough to protect the caster.
The spell would begin burning its own user.
Heve, however, had activated it at maximum power immediately.
The skin on her face visibly burned away before regenerating almost as quickly. Fortunately, her clothes had been made from specialized heat-resistant fabric precisely for situations like this, making them practically immune to flames at such temperatures.
Being burned alive didn't concern the minister.
Her objective was simple: melt the ice katanas stabbed in her body as quickly as possible so that she could regain her full speed and unleash all of her physical strength.
But the katanas showed absolutely no sign of melting.
"This is illogical…" Heve muttered, staring at the ice swords that remained perfectly intact despite being engulfed in searing flames.
Even ice created by Aislyra—one of the strongest Ice Magic users Heve knew—would have begun melting under this much heat.
Yet Enea's ice didn't react at all.
Heve could feel that directly through every katana lodged inside her body. Not one of them had increased in temperature even slightly. The ice composing each weapon remained well below zero degrees. The flames were so completely ineffective that Heve began questioning whether the swords were actually made from ice at all, despite possessing every other characteristic of it.
"Ah, sorry about that," Enea said casually. "The ice I normally create is completely immune to changes in temperature. This time, I decided to give those katanas durability roughly comparable to ordinary ice—although they're slightly tougher—so originally I was planning to give them the normal melting point of ice too."
He shrugged.
"But then I remembered I was going to launch them at roughly two hundred thousand kilometers per hour. They probably would've melted before reaching you. So I kept the normal durability while leaving their usual resistance to temperature unchanged."
While Enea casually explained all of this, Heve continued advancing.
Despite still being unable to free herself from the swords embedded throughout her body, she had nearly reached him and was preparing to throw a flaming punch using every bit of strength she could currently muster.
But suddenly, more ice katanas appeared in the air behind Enea and just above his head. This time, there weren't fifty. There were a hundred. One hundred extremely sharp ice katanas hung in the air behind the adventurer. And an instant later, all of them began raining down on Heve at the same terrifying speed as the previous barrage.
Heve hadn't reached him in time. Not that she ever truly had a chance to. Enea could have created and launched them the instant she emerged from the cloud of dust—or at virtually any other moment he pleased. And this time, even if Heve had wanted to dodge, she couldn't have avoided even a single blade. The swords still embedded throughout her body obstructed her movements too much. In her current condition, she simply couldn't move quickly enough to escape their trajectories.
But although she didn't have enough time to dodge, she did have enough time to cast one spell.
"Enhancement: Red Lines!"
Heve chanted in her monotone voice without even slowing her advance.
Instantly, nearly every muscle in the elf's body contracted with tremendous force. Most of the ice katanas lodged inside her snapped apart, and the holes left behind were immediately repaired by her other spell, The Doctor Who Never Dies. Then nearly every vein in Heve's body swelled beneath her skin, becoming clearly visible before turning a vivid, glowing red. Her speed increased explosively.
Unfortunately, Enea's incoming katanas were already too close. Even though Heve now possessed enough speed to dodge them, there was no longer enough time to do so. The first blades struck her skin. And shattered. It was as though they had collided with a solid wall of metal. One after another, the ice katanas were reduced to clouds of frozen dust, unable to penetrate the elf's newly hardened skin.
Even the flames of Fire Body no longer seemed capable of burning her.
"I'd whistle in appreciation, but unfortunately I've never been able to," Enea commented as he watched his katanas shatter harmlessly against her body.
The spell Heve had just activated was essentially an artificial Fire Magic reproduction of the rare disease known as Red Dragon Lines. She had created it roughly forty years earlier while researching the illness in an attempt to discover a cheaper and more accessible cure for ordinary people.
Unfortunately, after several years of research, she had failed to find any alternative treatment. Eventually, Heve concluded that continuing to search for a completely different cure was illogical. So she changed her objective. Instead of replacing the existing cure, she would make the current one—the King of Dragons flower—far cheaper and easier to obtain.
With the assistance of a party of top-tier adventurers, Heve traveled to the Dragon's Lair and successfully retrieved a King of Dragons flower, along with a large amount of the rock and soil in which it naturally grew. After returning to the Kingdom of Yggdora, she worked alongside the former Minister of Technology Archiego and the current Minister of Agriculture, Agratà. Together, they developed a special greenhouse capable of recreating the conditions necessary to cultivate King of Dragons flower in virtually any environment. As a result, the treatment for that rare and lethal disease became vastly more accessible.
Enhancement: Red Lines had been another product of Heve's research.
The spell reproduced the disease's skin-hardening symptom, making the caster's skin even tougher than that of someone naturally born with Mana Skin and rendering it completely immune to heat. Furthermore, it exponentially increased the user's physical strength, far beyond what an ordinary physical enhancement spell could accomplish. That enormous increase in strength was itself another symptom of Red Dragon Lines—one that hadn't been discovered until Heve studied the disease, because it manifested only after the patient entered a coma.
There was only one major symptom the spell didn't reproduce: the coma that afflicted the patient for several weeks before their body burned from within. However, if the caster kept Enhancement: Red Lines for more than two minutes, the protection of the spell could no longer prevent the same catastrophic internal fire damage from occurring.
Not that this limitation was much of a problem for the woman who had invented the spell.
With her physical abilities now enhanced to such a ridiculous degree, Heve crossed the remaining distance between herself and Enea instantly.
She immediately prepared to strike him. At that moment, every flame surrounding her body suddenly gathered around her fist. Then that fist shot forward.
Enea avoided the punch with a simple movement.
But the attack didn't end there.
At the exact moment he moved aside, all the fire concentrated around Heve's fist erupted outward in a violent explosion of flames. And Enea, who had moved only far enough to avoid the minister's physical blow, was completely engulfed by it.