The Grokk's fist, a boulder the size of a carriage, blotted out the sun. The shadow fell over the "Tome and Trinket," a final, silent promise of oblivion.
Inside, Lyno was having a complete mental breakdown. He was gibbering, hiding behind the trembling form of his newly appointed chef, Ren. Ren, for his part, had gone completely catatonic, his knuckles white around the sad, lonely turnip he still clutched.
[We're going to be paste! He's going to smash us into a fine, meaty paste!] Lyno's internal monologue had devolved into a primal scream.
His body, now fully in the grip of his survival instinct, did something his conscious mind would never have approved of. It acted. His panicked gaze was still locked on the monster's descending fist. He felt the turnip in Ren's hand brush against his own. It was a solid object. An object could be thrown.
Throwing the object at the giant fist would not stop it. His rational mind knew that. But his lizard brain didn't care. When threatened by a predator, you make yourself loud, you make yourself a threat, you throw things.
In a single, convulsive movement of pure terror, Lyno snatched the turnip from Ren's limp grasp.
"GET AWAY!" he shrieked, his voice cracking like a boy soprano.
With all the force his scrawny, terrified body could muster, he hurled the turnip through the front window of the bookstore.
CRASH!
Glass shattered. The turnip, a lumpy, unimpressive projectile, flew through the air in a wobbly, pathetic arc, aimed vaguely in the direction of the Grokk. It was a gesture of utter futility.
But the universe of "My Incompetence is the Foundation of the Universe" operates on a principle of Absolute Causality that bends to protect its nexus: Lyno.
As the turnip left Lyno's hand, two seemingly unrelated events were occurring simultaneously.
One, a thousand miles away in his citadel, Emperor Theron IV, in his proactive appeasement strategy, had commanded the Arch-Mage to test the new 'Continental Aegis Shield'—a planetary defense system designed to protect against orbital attacks. The test was simple: channel a massive amount of pure, kinetic force-magic into the shield's emitters for a single picosecond, just to see if they would hold the charge. This pulse of unimaginable kinetic force was not aimed at anything. It was contained within the shield's aetheric matrix, high in the stratosphere.
Two, the Demon King Xylos, paranoid that his Grokk might fail, had tasked one of his magic-weavers to scry its progress. The magic-weaver had just opened a tiny, invisible scrying portal in the air directly in front of the "Tome and Trinket" to get a better view. A scrying portal is a microscopic wormhole, a direct link between two points in spacetime.
The thrown turnip, glowing with a faint, imperceptible aura of Lyno's reality-bending luck, flew directly into the scrying portal.
For a femtosecond, the turnip ceased to be in Oakhaven. It appeared in the demon realm, inside the scryer's workshop, passed through the back of his scrying crystal, and exited another linked portal Xylos had opened high above the Aethelian Empire to monitor for magical retaliation.
The turnip emerged from this second portal directly inside the containment matrix of the Aegis Shield, just as the Arch-Mage initiated the test.
The turnip, a simple root vegetable, was hit by a pulse of directed, god-tier kinetic force sufficient to knock a small moon out of orbit.
It did not have time to disintegrate. It simply accelerated.
Instantly.
The turnip re-entered the original scrying portal in front of the bookstore, traveling at a velocity that made light itself seem leisurely.
What exited was not a turnip. It was a relativistic kill vehicle. A lumpy, purple-and-white god of pure, hyper-condensed kinetic energy. It was a turnip that had been promoted to the conceptual level of "absolute, unstoppable impact."
The projectile, still retaining its vague turnip shape, covered the thirty feet to the Grokk's descending fist in less time than it takes a thought to form.
It did not make a sound. There was no bang, no boom. The air itself did not have time to get out of the way.
It struck the Grokk's fist, the stony hide of which could withstand dragonfire, dead center.
And the Grokk's fist... vanished. Not exploded. Vanished. The atoms that composed it were instantly converted into a cone of superheated plasma that erupted from the back of its arm.
The turnip did not stop. It continued its journey, passing cleanly through the Grokk's wrist, its arm, its shoulder, its torso, and out its back, boring a perfectly clean, three-inch-wide tunnel through twenty feet of magically-reinforced monster-flesh.
The cone of plasma, erupting from the monster's back, shot upward into the sky. It was a brilliant, silent beam of incandescent light, visible from a hundred miles away. In the upper atmosphere, it struck the newly-activated Aegis Shield, causing the entire sky over the northern continent to flash a brilliant, shimmering aurora of gold and purple.
The Grokk froze. Its massive fist was gone. There was a neat, cauterized hole through the very center of its body. It looked down at this new, surprising ventilation shaft. Its tiny, stupid brain managed to form a single, final thought.
'Ouch?'
Then, it simply... fell. Not forward, not backward. It collapsed in on itself like a dynamited building, its structural integrity completely gone.
THOOOM... crrrrumble...
A twenty-foot-tall behemoth was reduced to a mountain of stony rubble in the town square, a cloud of dust billowing outward.
Back in the bookstore, no one had processed what they saw. It was too fast, too silent, too absolute. They saw Lyno throw the turnip. They saw a flash of impossible light. And then they saw the monster collapse into a pile of rocks.
Lyno, cowering behind Ren, slowly peeked out. The monster was gone. He was alive.
His three followers were not looking at the pile of rubble outside. They were staring at Lyno. At his outstretched, still-trembling hand. Their faces were masks of pure, religious ecstasy.
It was Valerius who found his voice first. It was a choked, strangled whisper.
"The... The Sermon of the Thrown Turnip..." he breathed.
His mind, his brilliant, beautiful, and completely insane mind, had already processed the events into a glorious, logical, and flawed narrative.
"He didn't just throw a vegetable," Valerius's voice grew stronger, ringing with the fervor of a prophet who had just witnessed the face of god. "He took the Chef's offering—a symbol of life, of the humble earth. He did not imbue it with mana. That would be vulgar! He imbued it with a concept. He imbued it with the philosophical principle of... 'This Shall Not Be.'"
He pointed a trembling finger out the broken window.
"He threw that concept at the creature of pure destruction. He did not counter its force with equal force. He opposed its very right to exist in his presence! It was a negation! An axiomatic veto! He did not kill it. He un-made it! Turned its own power against it to erase it from reality! And the flash of light! The heavens themselves bore witness, roaring in applause at the perfection of his lesson!"
Seraphina and Aurelia could only nod, their minds too stunned to form their own interpretations. Valerius's explanation was so magnificent, so complete, that it had to be the truth.
The Master had not hidden behind his chef. He had Wielded him. He had not thrown a turnip. He had Thrown a Word of divine power, and had simply used a turnip as the somatic component. It was the most brutally efficient and philosophically dense act of warfare they had ever imagined.
Lyno, hearing their whispers, had no idea what they were talking about. He just knew the monster was gone. The turnip had worked. Somehow, the magic turnip had saved them.
He looked at Ren, the terrified chef still standing catatonically in front of him. A wave of immense gratitude washed over Lyno. This boy... this sad, quiet boy and his magic vegetables had saved his life.
Impulsively, he did the only thing he could think to do. He reached out and, just as he had with the Princess, he gave the top of Ren's head a gentle, grateful pat.
pat, pat.
And just like that, Ren the Sad Chef was no longer just the cook. He had been anointed. He had provided the 'ammunition' for a divine act, and now he had been blessed by the Master's own hand. His status had just been elevated to "Sacred Armorer of the Divine Kitchen."
His life, and his cooking, would never be the same again.