Melody stood in front of the crowd.

A minute of silence followed before the laughing started.

“What?” A handsome adventurer hunched over, jeering alongside the rest of the crowd. “Are you expecting us to quit and go home after your speech, girly? Quit the dramatic and move out of the way already.”

“Is that girl crazy?” The scantily cladded woman wondered.

Melody sincerely wished she had Rem’s ability to piss people off, but things went further down the hill within seconds.

“Hey,” one of the low-ranking adventurers recognized the girl. “I know you!”

Uh oh, Melody had a bad feeling about this.

“You're the girl who stole my stuff! Weeks ago, I barely made it out of your antics alive! You steal my Water Stones and set the mob after me!”

“Oh,” Melody flinched. She finally understood why the man looked familiar. “Okay, I understand I'm not the best person in the world, but you need to listen-”

“You punch me in the face!” Shouted a woman with an eye-patch.

“Well, you also stole the stone!” Melody argued. “Not that it matters. I already sold all of it.”

“You broke my arm in a bar fight!”

“It’s a fair match,” Melody shot back. “And we already signed the agreement. I won the money fair and square, get it.”

“Stop it all of you!” An elderly man yelled. “We are getting nowhere. You Majestia’s daughter, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Melody recognized the old man. He was one of her mother regular customer.

The old man sighed.

“What’d you want to say, kid?”

Melody used this opportunity to the best she could.

“Illma will get you all killed. That dragon is an A-rank Sicilian Ghost Dragon! It's pretty much immune to all attack under A-rank! Fighting it with the normal tactic isn't bravery! This entire charter is a deathwish!"

The scantily cladded woman snorted.

“Okay demon brat, let me make this clear. "You, who have a record of stealing and cheating people, several of them are in this very group, are telling us we will die fighting the dragon? Why should we believe you? For all we know, this might be one of your scams?”

“It’s my word against Illma Zoldia Road,” Melody said. “You are not trusting a mass-murderer to play fair, do you?”

The woman snorted.

“Yeah, that makes this decision way too easy. Who should we trust, the official of the Seven Continental Alliance or a thief? Sorry kid, playtime is over. Richard, help me punt this kid out of the way?”

The scarred man accompanying the woman moved toward Melody, but a wrinkled hand blocked him.

“Let me talk to her, Richard,” the old man said. “Her mother and I go a long way back.”

Richard frowned, but he didn’t contest the old man.

The old man softly spoke to Melody.

“Did Majestia know about the dragon?”

“She’s the one who checked the math. Every calculation pointed out that over 86% of you will die. Please don’t do this?”

“Please?” The old man felt surprised by that word. “Majestia would faint from shock after hearing this? You, the tiny brat who went around behaving like you own the world, finally learned to ask nicely. Well, hell truly can freeze over.”

Melody glanced at the orange glow in the distance.

“Yeah, I have a long way to go. ” Melody said to both the old man and herself. “I have a dream, and I believe that I couldn’t get there by being better than everyone else. That every obstacle in my way will sort itself out if I am powerful enough. This last month was a revelation. I got knock off my high horse twice by a guy even weaker than me. I told myself that it’s unfair, but in the end, what I had isn't courage, it's stupidity. Arrogant idiocy wouldn't prove me worthy. That worthiness came with a responsibility to live up to heavier duty. The true leader knew they were facing an impossible odd. He may shake at its weight, but he won't hesitate, even if it meant laying down his life for his comrade. If I couldn’t come close to him, then I should give up on my dream, and I couldn’t do that.”

“Sorry,” Melody raised her fist. “But I have to stop you guys from killing yourself.”

“Such a shame.”

The adventurer rushed toward the girl as she ran to meet them.

The girl ducked under the old man's blade. He struck with the flat of his sword, but the girl knew he was a B-rank. Risking herself fighting him first was a sure lose.

So Melody aimed for the weaker ones; a person unable to move means one more who wouldn't die. She craned her neck to dodge a fireball and retaliated with a punch that broke the mage’s shoulder. His warrior teammate swung a sword at her, but she was faster. Batting the sword off course with the back of her hand, Melody finished the fight an elbow strike. Finally, a palmed on the panicking healer, eliminating an entire team.

“Touching story,” the old man drew his blade. “I believe you kid, but I also have a responsibility for my guide and my men. Out of respect for your mother, I ask you to move, or all of us will move you.”

Melody tried to catch her breath. Sadly, a profoundly built adventurer barged into her with a full-body tackle before she could catch her breath. The momentum carried her several meters, but the girl didn’t go down, her foot managed to found the ground. With the leverage of friction, she threw the adventurer twice her weigh-in a beautiful suplex, knocking him out in one move.

Suddenly, a massive column of water caught her by surprise, propelling the girl into the house behind her. Melody impacted with an explosion of splinters and dust.

The adventurers started to leave until Melody reemerged. Her clothing wet and sorry and her head screaming like hell.

"Four down, hundred more to go."

...

While Melody fought against the army of adventurers in, one certain goddess was screaming out her mind.

"This is a terrible idea!” Cytortia looked down on the ground beneath her. She was about fifty meters up with the wind blowing in her face and her heart dropping to her boot. The goddess hugged the worn and rusted ladder for dear life. Tears were visible on her eyes.

“Shut the hell up and climb the ladder!”

The badger was on the roof of the spires, looking the rampaging dragon setting a house on fires while getting annoyed at the crybaby who couldn’t tolerate a fifty meters drops.

“I don’t want to go up!” Cytortia made the mistake of looking down to the ground below. Images of her body shattering like glass flashed in her mind, and she cried even harder. “Just where the hell is Rem when I need him?”

Scathach sighed. She wanted to do the job herself. Just launched F-U2 into the dragon’s jaw and called it a day. Sadly, that action wouldn’t solve the problem. She was here as the useless goddess’s trainer; this meant no babysitting. Cytortia couldn’t afford to hide in the box of foams forever. Both Scathach and Rem talked about this. Horizon Dawn was her organization, and Cytortia must stand up and lead it. That girl needed to forge her courage and grew some actual leadership. Crying forever wasn’t an option for her.

“You have to,” Scathach said. “This is your plan, right?! Your friend needs you to take out the dragon’s fire! People are counting on you now, so get up here!”

“I can’t!” Cytortia screeched as the Sicilian Ghost dragon started stumbling toward them; burning the ground into a soul-roasting hell with every step. The goddess felt the heat from fifty meters up, and she screamed even louder. “The fire!”

“Imagine it isn’t there!” Scathach yelled. “You hold up against a Paracis Corruptor. What could a little bit of fire do to you? Now get your ass up here right now!”

The goddess sobbed from raw fright. What blazed below her wasn’t a little bit of fire, but the hell-plane level of it. Still, the goddess persisted. Fearfully, tearfully and regretting every single minute of the climb, the goddess reached her destination.

“What next?” Cytortia said.

Scathach put up a flare.

“We light this up and get the dragon’s attention.”

...

The Sicilian Ghost dragon burnt five mores cyborg made out of broken children. Although in pain, the energy it'd consumed from the ghost more or less move it away from critical danger. But nothing could quench its pain and rage. Fuel by its fury, the dragon demolished the wooden settlement that was once a souvenir shop in one swipe.

That was when the dragon noticed the light on the spires above it. Red-flame held by a furry animal and girl with a short blonde-hair framing the side of her neck.

The dragon rabidly leaped at the visible target; a mad mixture of hunger and furry enveloping its mind. The duo reacted. In one move, the furry animal lifted the goddess by the waist and leaped out of the spires. The dragon crashed into the building, leaving the rain of wood and brick in its wake.

Realized its prey escaped, the dragon chose to open its mouth and breathed a firestorm.

That choice was a blunder.

...

Panic rattled Cytortia’s mind, but the desire to survive trumped it. She twisted the green ball in her hand, priming the mechanism, and tossed it at the dragon’s fiery breath with all the strength she could muster.

F-U2 was a collaborative project between Cytortia and Melody under Rem's specification. If the first step of the plan was disabling the dragon mobility, the second stage was to disable its fire. Usually, this would be a fool’s errand. All dragon had fire-immunity, but Rem, the headmaster of Breaker's school of cheating, decided to break that rule with observation.

You might not be able to cook the dragon's scale, but you could assuredly BBQ its beef.

Hence, project F-U2 spun into motion. Cytortia again toyed with her Burning Sunshine chemical. It took the S-rank alchemist virtually no time at all to tinker with the chemical formula to create a hyper volatile fuel. The only alchemical difficulty left was altering to magnify the dragon's fire into something more deadly and mass-produced the entire things.

Then HD went to research Space Stone container to Scathach's sanity demerit.

Space Stone was raw materials for storage devices commonly used in Phantasia. When processed, Space Stone would produce a pocket space that could contain a specific volume of material. While high purity Space Stones used storage ring had an astronomical price, its raw material wasn’t. Hence, Horizon Dawn came up with an idea, jammed as much Burning Sunshine as possible into the storage stone, mixed it with dragon’s fire, and detonated it in the dragon’s mouth.

Scathach and Ebony reacted calmly until the math was written down. After witnessing Rem’s calculation, the Duchess of the Craft and Warrior Maid lost their lunch completely.

Low-grade Space Stone produced the pocket space size of a small storage room with a volume of 6 m3. Burning Sunshine had a density similar to oil (800kg/m3). Quick calculation translated to 4.8 tons of volatile explosive for one unit of Space Stone. Considering that only 15 kilograms of Burning Sunshine melt stone by raw heat, Rem estimated that 1 kg of Burning Sunshine was scalable to a kilo of TNT. Even with that low-ball estimate, the power of the blast was comparable to half of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Simple translation: never mind the dragon, the gang wouldn’t survive it, Illma wouldn’t survive it. Milian itself wouldn’t survive it. That was how horrifying the original F-U2 was.

Thus, in unanimous agreement, Horizon Dawn decided to downscale F-U2. Instead of a city-busting explosion, the gang settled for bunker-buster.

Even then, the badger would have to live with the terrifying knowledge that Rem could nuke any capital in the world with zero effort.

The green ball of doom absorbed the fire and glowed. The explosive two-second delay kicked in, buying enough time for the bomb to come within a touching distance of dragon’s mouth.

Scathach leaped as far as possible into the air with the most potent propulsion magic she had. Her hand weaved the defensive spell to block the blast she knew was coming.

Then a hundred meters tall fire-ball lighted up of the entirety Millain.

…

Illma wasn’t angry. Petrified was more of a proper term to describe how she felt when the purple fire-storm that engulfed the entire block.

The shockwave blasted herself and everything else flying. The inferno incinerated every building within a hundred meters regardless of material. Port and Taku also ate the blast's full force. They didn’t even have time to register what had they done to deserve this.

…

In the middle of the street on another side of the town, Rem felt the explosion.

“Great job guys,” Rem leaned against an abandoned building and congratulated his absent friends. “The dragon will either be dead or severely injured at this point. I'm sure you guys will survive that blast. Now, it will be up to you Lux. Make us proud.”

It was a rare moment that Rem smiled.

…

The explosion was over.

Everything in the hundred-meter radius got reduced to ash, while all building outside of the hundred-meter proximity got flatten. Only the heavily injured dragon remained standing. The beast was dying where it stood. Its remaining wing hung torn, several scales stuck on it body broken and charred. However, it was the dragon's mouth that filed the most damage. The explosion ripped off the dragon’s lower jaw, while the fire torched its throat and lungs. River of steaming blood flowed from the nasty wound where its mouth should be. At this point, the dragon's tremendous vitality was the only thing keeping it alive.

For once in its life, the beast truly felt tiny and small beneath the hand of mortality. Its experiences at the edge of death awakened its survival instincts. Instincts that was telling it that the pain wasn’t even close to over.

Then it saw its next death god walking in the distance. An elf in black uniform featuring a small cape was holding a set of harpoons. She slowly put on white an eye-mask resembling the face of the death god.

…

Luxinna Latoria

Lightning Caliber

Stat:

Str: 275 [D]

End: 375 [C]

Mag: 550 [C]

Wis: 320 [C]

Dex: 550 [C]

Skill

Active

Static Glass [A]

Animal Communication [B]

Spear Mastery [C]

Magic Control [B]

Snipe [B]

Passive

Child of Thunder (SS)

Sword's Grace [A]

Hidden Potential [N/A]

Natural Instinct [S]

…

Round 2’s result

1)Rem still incapacitates.

2) Cytortia and Scathach survived but missing.

3) 27 out of 36 X-cution unit down.

4) Millan's garrison force= completely scattered.

5) Melody Solarmaria still in combat (>15% survival).

Horizon Dawn won, but the only member standing is Luxinna Latoria.