小嫂子的味道

"Emmeric! Do something about this! Fast! Or Else we\'ll get frostbites!" Seiren shouted.

"I can\'t move my legs!" Wrena alarmed.

"How many times do I have to tell you to shut the fuck up?! I didn\'t ask you to come along, you did it on your own. So don\'t come screaming to me about every little problem," Emmeric replied harshly.

But the frost was starting to grip his feet too and if he didn\'t do anything, then he will be immobilized and this fight will end before it even started. He didn\'t want that and thus he activated one of the spells he\'d practiced just for a moment like this.

A ring of magic circles appeared around him and with a raise of his hand, all six magic circles blasted insane amounts of raging flame and sparks in every direction.

For a moment the cave was filled with flames burning everywhere, but it didn\'t last long as they soon extinguished. However, they\'d done their work, and all the ice that had once covered every inch of the cave had now melted.

"You motherfucking son of a bitch! Have you lost your fucking mind!? What would\'ve happened if you burned us with that too?" Wrena cursed.

The flames he\'d released had burned everything in the cave with pure indifference, if Wrena had not covered herself, Alada, and Seiren in a force field made by a custom magic spell, they would most certainly have died.

"Heh, as I said. It\'s not my problem. If you die, you die," Emmeric replied.

Seiren bit her lips as she fought down her urge to go and stab the bastard from behind right now.

Emmeric\'s gaze then shifted back to Zero. He was still standing at his place, unharmed, along with a half-melted ice dome around him. When the flames caved toward him, he\'d covered himself in the thickest piece of ice he could create to protect himself.

"Ah, that was hot. But let me remind you of something since I think being the idiot you are, you wouldn\'t have noticed on your own," Zero said.

"There\'s only one way that connects this cave from the outside world, and I have blocked it completely right now. So what I want to say is, the amount of fire you produced had probably consumed around eighty percent of the total oxygen present inside here, and the more fire you will use, the less oxygen there will be for us to breathe.

"Now, you have enough brains to know what that means, don\'t you?"

"Heh…heh…hahahahah," Emmeric burst out into a burst of laughter, even though Zero had said the previous words in a serious tone. And it was not as if he didn\'t know this.

"L-Le… Less oxygen, you say?" Emmeric asked as he controlled his laughter. "That is the least of my problems right now. All I had to do is break that ice behind me and let all the air come in. Then I can burn you to a crisp to my heart\'s content," he said.

Zero didn\'t reply.

Emmeric turned around and raised his hand toward the ice wall blocking the entrance of the cave. A magic circle appeared, and he blasted a hot beam of fire toward it. The beam hit the ice, and slowly all of it melted and turned into water.

However, the cave was still blocked. This time it was a black wall that was behind the ice wall and had come into sight when it melted. The new wall was of stone; all stone.

"You can\'t possibly melt rock, can you?" Zero asked. "Even if you could, there\'s not enough oxygen left to power that type of flame."

For the first time in a while, the fearless expression on Emmeric\'s face evaporated away.

Emmeric turned to face Zero, his expression a little worried at something purely unexpected that  just happened.

"How?!" he stressed out the word. "How the hell did a rock that was never there appear out of nowhere?" he asked.

The look Zero had on his face was terrible, good-terrible.

"You thought I could only use ice magic, didn\'t you?" he said. Zero then raised both his hands to his sides, as if showing off his body.

A second later, all the four elements he controlled appeared before him. A ball of water, a shard of ice, a ball of fire, and a spike of stone. All formed out of nothing and floated in the air in front of him.

The faces of all the girls turned into horror as they saw this happening, their jaws dropped, and they were in utter disbelief. "D-Does that mean you can—"

"Yeah. I can control all the natural elements, and all without using an incantation or a magic circle," Zero said, completing Seiren\'s sentence.

He turned his head in Emmeric\'s direction. "Now, what will you do? Since you prepared yourself, thinking that I can only use the ice magic. Which one do you think will I attack with? Will it be fire? Water? Earth? Or the ice you\'d prepared for?" he appealed.

All the pieces of the four elements started spinning in a circle before they gathered in Zero\'s palm and vanished when he closed his fist.

"Tch!" Emmeric clicked his tongue. "I\'m ready for whatever!" he said, though he didn\'t sound as sure of himself as he did before.

And in the end, he didn\'t wait for Zero to attack and blasted four magic circles toward him. All of them swirled fire at him, and a storm of flame headed in Zero\'s direction.

Zero instantly used elemental magic and a wall of water appeared that covered him from all directions. Both the elements collided, and clouds of steam were formed everywhere. But it was Zero\'s water that won.

It was only to be expected. He\'d used his water magic to defend himself against the breath of a klauth, Emmeric\'s flames were nothing in front of him.

"It\'s over for you now," he said, and the surrounding water disappears. "It was fun playing with you, and you did exactly what I expected you would do."