A roar.
Accompanied by a roar like heaven and earth breaking apart, the storm of crimson lotus flame came down on the wasteland.
The temperature climbed to its limit.
The world turned into a sheet of fiery red.
The searing flow of fire was like a waterfall and like a wave, sweeping in all directions with terrible blasts of flame.
Just as before, it charred the earth, melted the soil, baked the rocks apart, burned the sand and stone red, turning this battlefield into a hell on earth, a crimson lotus hell, terrifying and dreadful.
Facing this firestorm, enough to crush the entire main force of Loki Familia in an instant, the twelve star beasts Leo had summoned in one breath roared at the sky and, instead of retreating, advanced, charging together into the sea of fire that came blotting out the sky.
The first to move was Aquarius's Star.
The mermaid holding the jar swayed her graceful body as if swimming through the sea, meeting that terrible sea of fire, and with a flick of the jar in her hand an endless torrent of water burst from its mouth, forming a vast flood that crashed into the waves of fire.
The flood took shape fast, as though a waterfall had slammed straight down onto the ground, and the surging water became towering waves that collided with the oncoming firestorm.
Water and fire clashed, steam erupting like an explosion, covering the whole battlefield.
Under Aquarius's Star's defense, that terrible firestorm really was held back, and it advanced no further.
A crash.
A crash.
Suddenly, amid two sounds of waves breaking, two star beasts appeared out of the flood Aquarius's Star had made.
One was a giant crab as unreal as a dream.
One was a twin-headed whale giving off extreme cold.
The crab opened and closed its pincers, its whole body growing more illusory still, and then, as if producing avatars, it split into countless giant crabs, forming a crab legion that attacked the defiled Spirit together.
The defiled Spirit was startled and hurriedly worked her tentacles, whipping them about while smashing them wildly down onto that crab legion.
Yet most of the tentacles landed on empty space.
They passed through the crabs one after another, as if striking air, never touching anything solid.
These crabs were all phantoms.
That was Cancer's Star's ability: to create endless phantoms, its true body impossible to pick out.
Those phantoms were like unreal bubbles, unaffected by physical things, and the defiled Spirit, unable to tell which was the true body, grew frantic, swinging her tentacles again and again, smashing at the phantoms, never once hitting the real Cancer's Star.
And while the defiled Spirit's tentacles were tangled up with Cancer's Star, Pisces's Star let out whale calls in unison, and the blowholes on its back sprayed out ice and snow, forming an extreme cold current that swept forward.
A crackling.
The teeth-grating sound of freezing spread through the wasteland.
Everywhere the extreme cold passed, the charred earth and the mud and stone burned red alike all began to ice over.
The crimson lotus hell turned into a world of ice and snow, and the firestorm still clashing with the flood was broken apart by the cold current and swallowed by the ice and snow, as if it had nothing left to give.
"Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...!!!"
The defiled Spirit's small face twisted with rage, and she screamed again, making the seedbed of the entire floor shake and sending down pillar after pillar of tumorous green flesh that crashed toward the star beasts at the front.
But these flesh pillars were all blocked in the end by two giants burning with flame from head to foot: Gemini's Star.
The two giants were the tallest on the field, a full ten meters, not falling short even next to the defiled Spirit.
One carried a great flaming axe, the other a flaming spear, and roaring, they leapt high, throwing themselves at the endlessly falling flesh pillars and smashing them apart one by one with their weapons.
Every time the great flaming axe came down, it threw up an explosive wave of fire.
Every time the flaming spear thrust out, it formed sheets of rolling flame.
Gemini's Star displayed overwhelming power, moving as if nothing stood in its way, splitting and smashing the falling flesh pillars for all it was worth, blocking every one of them.
At least, that was true of the green flesh pillars falling from the sky.
The pillars rising on the left and right and out of the ground were blocked by Taurus's Star and Aries's Star.
Taurus's Star reared up its upper body, then brought its forelegs down hard, and the whole earth turned to mire under its control, wrapping around all the rising green flesh pillars and dragging them back underground.
Aries's Star grew countless huge tree roots, forming a dense forest all around, and with a series of cracking sounds it blocked the oncoming flesh walls, keeping them from advancing another inch.
The defiled Spirit only grew angrier at this, and her cry turned into a call, summoning up great numbers of gaudy multicolored monsters.
Worm-types and Violas alike struggled out of the flower buds hanging on the green flesh, forming an army of monsters that came surging toward them.
So the lion, hard as steel over its whole body, and the swaying black shadow of a beast with a long snout, sharp teeth, and a fish's body met them head on.
Leo's Star, as the steel-attribute star beast, had a very plain ability: impervious to blade and spear, untouched by water and fire.
Its body was extremely hard; no weapon could pierce it, no attack could hurt it.
When it charged roaring into the monster pack, the dissolving fluid the worm-types sprayed and the tentacles the Violas fired alike simply bounced off its body when they landed.
Like this it was a beast nothing on the battlefield could match. It only had to pounce into the monster pack, and its fangs crushed the Violas' hide easily while its claws tore worm-type bodies apart, leaving a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood.
And if Leo's Star was the beast nothing on the battlefield could match, then Capricorn's Star was the battlefield's death god, appearing and vanishing at will.
Its whole body had melted into darkness, and wherever it passed, shadows invisible to the eye stirred.
Some of these shadows turned into spears, some into swords, some into long ropes, some into black holes, and they either ran through the bodies of the multicolored monsters without a sound or dragged them into the dark and swallowed them, so that the battlefield lost many of its enemies without anyone noticing when.
"Ground, roar low..."
Things were going badly, and the defiled Spirit, as if she finally felt the danger, began another hurried, rapid chant.
"Come, come, come, shell of the earth, light of black iron, hammer of the flashing star, by the contract of creation I command you, invert, burn the sky, shatter the ground, raise a bridge, merge into one, descending axe of the heavens, calamity of destruction..."
A deep black magic circle spread open, and pitch-black magic light shot straight upward, turning the vault above into a heaven wrapped in darkness and light, and a cluster of meteors glowing with black light quietly appeared.
"In the name of the proxy, I command. The name granted to me is Gnome, incarnation of the earth, queen of the earth..."
A long chant magic, under ultra-high-speed chanting, was about to be released.
The moment before the defiled Spirit released her magic, something strange happened.
A whistling.
An arrow wrapped in a whirlwind came tearing through the air, flying at her at astonishing speed.
That was the arrow released by Sagittarius's Star.
The centaur warrior, which had stayed in place all this time, drew its longbow, worked the whirlwind, and loosed a shot that split the air, crossing the entire battlefield in a blink to arrive before the defiled Spirit.
A wet punch of impact.
The arrow riding wind and wave ran straight through the defiled Spirit's skull, piercing even the mouth that was chanting the magic.
An explosion.
The magic that had been on the verge of completion was stopped by an unexpected blow, and the enormous magic power backlashed, blowing the defiled Spirit's head apart and shattering her entire upper body.
With that, this terrifying defiled Spirit had finally taken damage.
This was without question the perfect moment to attack.
In this situation, the last three star beasts moved as well.
The giant scorpion wreathed in poison mist, Scorpio's Star, hissed and charged the defiled Spirit.
The defiled Spirit's whole body was convulsing. Badly hurt as she was, she clearly still had the ability to move and react, and she worked the petal armor to block Scorpio's Star and keep it from charging through.
But in that instant, the golden balance floating high overhead, Libra's Star, began to turn.
Its balance shifted, and immense lightning poured from the pans of the scale.
The light turned to thunder, to a thunderstorm falling from the sky, hammering down thick and close on the petal armor, forming an unbroken bombardment.
As the rolling roars sounded one after another, the immense thunder finally shattered the petal armor.
That petal armor, which had held back the magic of Leo, Lefiya, and Alicia all three, was broken by Libra's Star's lightning.
Libra's Star, as the lightning-attribute star beast, had the greatest destructive power among the twelve star beasts.
Its lightning could judge all things, pass sentence on all things, and bring ruin to evil existences.
The defiled Spirit's petal armor might have blocked the attacks of the other star beasts, but it could never block Libra's Star's lightning.
And so the petal armor was broken through by the star beasts.
No longer blocked, Scorpio's Star charged straight in, and with a movement of its tail stinger, drove it deep into the defiled Spirit's body.
"...!!!"
The defiled Spirit's whole body convulsed violently, and she turned purple-black at a speed visible to the eye.
She had been poisoned.
Scorpio's Star's ability was to inflict a deadly poison that could not be removed.
The poison ate into the defiled Spirit's flesh, and if her head had not already burst, she would surely have been screaming her lungs out in agony by now.
Even unable to scream, the pain still made her thrash violently, sending Scorpio's Star flying.
Like that, of course she could not see that above her, the beautiful goddess holding the ear of grain, Virgo's Star, had already flown over without a sound.
The beautiful goddess looked down at the defiled Spirit below, as if grieving for this ugly, pitiable existence, and with a wave of the grain in her hand she scattered endless light down onto her.
This light was not harsh. It was gentle.
But to the defiled Spirit, this light was more terrible than the deadly poison.
Because the ability of the light-attribute Virgo's Star was to purify all things with radiance.
An existence like the defiled Spirit was exactly what Virgo's Star's ability countered.
So when the radiance fell on the defiled Spirit, her violently thrashing body slowly disappeared.
The power of purification acted directly on her, wiping her out bit by bit.
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