An Unborn Hero

"So, now what?" asked Rose, watching the range of expressions flickering across Hayedalf's face with some amount of amusement. She could practically see his memories returning.

The bit where he remembered Kellela was particularly obvious.

"... Eww..." repeated Mystery.

"First of all, where are we?" asked Grace.

"I believe we are inside the demon lord's egg," answered Rrillandral.

"Huh? How is that even possible? And shouldn't there be... I dunno, yolk and stuff?"

"I do not think this space is entirely real."

"So we're still trapped?" asked Rose, drawing her eyes away from the happily reunited couple, and trying not to think too hard about the looks of jealousy Grace kept flashing them.

"... What did... everyone learn...?" asked Mystery.

"Pardon? What does that have to do with anything?"

"... Final boss... trapped in dreams... always learn... something useful... about themselves... about friendship..." poorly explained Mystery. "... Will help... us win..."

ding

For trying to explain a trope to a population that doesn't even have the word 'trope' in their vocabulary, [Telepathy] advances to level 22.

"What? Like, you expect one of us to have had some sort of revelation about how to beat the demon lord while we were dreaming?"

"I learnt a lot, actually," chimed in Grace. "Firstly, whoever gave me that advice to picture an audience naked was a bloody idiot. Secondly, my father is rather blind in one or two very important places. I also learnt that despite what fifteen years' worth of my tutors insisted, I am definitely gay. However, I fail to see how any of this is helpful to our current situation."

"Me either," agreed Rose, who was starting to see a certain inevitability in her future. While she wasn't against the idea, as such, there was still a substantial mental barrier simply from the different strata of society Grace was from. Thankfully, she had a very good excuse for procrastinating right now, given their location. "If we're inside the egg, then I'd say our next move is obvious. Just blast the thing with your purification wave again."

"That does seem rather pertinent," agreed Rrillandral.

Kellela and Hayedalf didn't have anything to add, being too preoccupied with each other.

"I know 'love' is very important to magical girls," thought Mystery, "but I'm still fairly sure that's not quite proper behaviour. There should be a single kiss, then a few days of bashfulness. They need to take lessons from Rose."

"Come on, you two lovebirds," declared Rose, giving her first lesson by pulling them apart and stepping between them. "Time to transform."

The group did, employing the mana they'd regenerated while dreaming to transform, invoking the full power of [Transformation Sequence] and then taking a further boost from Mystery.

ding

For preparing extensively for the final battle, [Magical Girl Transformation] advances to level 30.

Achievement unlocked: [Skill Capped].

Skill Capped (Common)

You have maxed out a skill, raising it as high as its cap allows. This isn't necessarily the end, though; learn additional sub-skills to raise the cap. This achievement will aid in that task, making sub-skills slightly easier to learn.

"That was perfect timing; right before the final battle," thought Mystery. "Not that I should be happy with level thirty. Or even fifty-five, with the extra boosts. As the achievement says, I need more sub-skills. Maybe one to get them all magical wands? Magical girls should have wands, but they didn't really fit into Aster Blue's design given that Rose used swords, and now I have one while they don't. It's kinda backwards."

While Mystery found herself heavily distracted, Grace used purification wave.

The demon lord didn't like it very much.

The darkness flickered, patches of deep reds and blues rapidly flowing around what was, now that it was lit up, obviously a shell that completely surrounded them. A distant screech sounded, seemingly coming from everywhere, all at once.

"You. How. Escaped?" it psychically questioned, each thought hammering into the girls like a fist made of bricks.

Grace answered by blasting it again. The distant screech grew louder, and the patches of colour flowing around the eggshell grew minutely brighter.

"Did it not even notice we were here?" asked Rose, forming her executioner's axe and looking around for anything to hit with it. "Where is the bloody thing? Shouldn't there be, like, a really big embryo or something?"

"The demon lord is a vast accumulation of miasma, grown dense enough to gain some measure of physical reality," explained Rrillandral. "While it has begun to manifest, it has not yet coalesced sufficiently to assume a physical form, so while it wouldn't be incorrect to say it 'breathes' mana, don't bother looking for a pair of lungs. For all intents and purposes, the egg is the demon lord."

"What?" asked Rose, looking on at Rrillandral in polite incomprehension.

"She said keep blasting it!" paraphrased Kellela, so Grace did.

"No," boomed the shallow mind of the demon lord, half an arrogant statement and half a fearful plea.

The distant screech turned into something more like a whimper as the plea was ignored. The instincts of the demon lord screamed at the impossibility of Grace's purification wave, about the way it did not respect the proper laws. About how frightening it was. The demon lord wanted to flee. Wanted to run from a mere human. But it couldn't. Just like Mystery, the demon lord was rather lacking in the leg department.

And that made it angry.

The arrogant part of the demon lord screamed that a mere human could never be a threat. That humans were so far beneath it as to be unworthy of notice. Unable to even scratch it without the divine aid bestowed upon the [Hero]. That what was happening here was not possible.

"Insects. Crush," it declared, and the pocket universe inside the miasma egg creaked and groaned as reality shifted. Thousands of black needles, each a yard long, sprouted from the shell and were launched against the girls.

"Heart shield!" shouted Kellela, wrapping the group in a protective barrier. It flashed and cracked as the demon lord's assault beat against it, one or two of the spikes piercing a few inches through, but it nonetheless held firm.

The darkness pulsed, swirling and coalescing into a swarm of imp-like creatures, looking very much like the first nameless demon that had attacked Rose. Another wave from Grace washed over them with no effect, although it did continue to rip into the miasma of the demon lord itself, eliciting another apoplectic screech.

"It's manufacturing monsters!" warned Rrillandral.

"And it just had to make them look like that," muttered Rose, frowning angrily as her first encounter with a demon came flooding unpleasantly back. "Executioner's axe."

With a thunderous roar, the swarm of imps ceased to exist.

"That seemed like overkill," laughed Kellela, blocking another rain of needles.

"I had it preprepared," shrugged Rose. "No point wasting it."

"I feel useless," complained Hayedalf. "I have nothing to throw!"

"Enchant my swords," suggested Rose, materialising a few and throwing them over, aimed to land neatly at his feet.

They didn't land, and Hayedalf watched them tumbling into the distance below. "I don't think they quite have our ability to stand on nothing?" he suggested.

A mildly bashful Rose manufactured another pair of swords, then carefully handed them to Hayedalf.

"Are they bantering again?" thought Mystery. "Seriously... This is the final battle, and they're bantering again. I'm... I'm... so proud!"

"Enough," declared the demon lord, and the miasma within the egg fell, following Rose's lost swords downwards. It pooled at the bottom of the egg, where it became visible to all the girls, even those with no esoteric senses, as a black sludge.

"Uh... What?" asked Rose, just as the sludge erupted upwards, forming into a vaguely humanoid shape.

"It's made itself a physical body!" warned Rrillandral. "I'm even more useless here than Hayedalf. Where am I to find soil?"

"Just punch things!" shouted Rose as the black sludge rippled, a swarm of bone hornets bursting out from beneath its surface. "Sword rain!"

A storm of blades shredded the hornets, plunging into the manifested demon lord behind, which didn't seem to notice.

"Wow, I just made over a hundred swords at once!" exclaimed Rose. "I've never managed that many before!"

"The demon lord is... smaller than it should be," commented Rrillandral. "It must have forcibly manifested itself, despite not having gathered sufficient miasma."

"Or too much of its miasma has already burnt off," suggested Kellela as Grace blasted it again, her purification wave seemingly shaving a couple of feet from its height.

Alas, a couple of feet from a monstrosity more than the height of all five girls combined didn't make that much difference, in the grand scheme of things, and the incarnated demon lord kept on coming, screeching its newly formed head off all the while.

Hayedalf threw his freshly enchanted swords, which exploded somewhere in the sludgy torso, launching globs of the black tar through the air. Kellela conjured a shield to block one, but where it impacted, the shield flickered. The pink turned a dark purple, before Kellela gasped and cancelled her shield.

The glob, momentum lost, thankfully dropped to the base of the egg, far below the girls.

"... Mum...?" called a worried Mystery.

"I'm fine. Just... be careful of that stuff. It's concentrated miasma."

"Not for long," declared Grace, issuing another blast, but even though blast after blast tore into the demon lord, it didn't stop coming. It reached out an arm, rippling and dripping black drops of miasma, stretching for Grace. There was no hand at the end, but it didn't need one; it was still large enough to simply engulf her.

"Disappear," demanded the demon lord.

Grace squeaked, leaping backward, but in the strange unreal space, her evasion didn't take her as far away from the demon lord as it should have done. The arm kept coming, even as yet another purification wave tore into it.

"Don't you dare!" yelled Rose, a new axe formed in her hands. "If you think I'm going to let you touch Grace the minute I finally accepted her feelings, I've got some unfortunate news for you. Executioner's axe!"

Her attack tore through the limb of the demon lord, the arm falling uselessly into the depths of the egg.

That was quite fortunate for Grace, because she was so dumbstruck by Rose's confession that such necessities as dodging had been wiped completely from her mind. "You what?" she asked, dumbfounded.

"D... don't make me repeat myself," stuttered Rose. "You heard me the first time. Now keep blasting this thing. If we survive, I might even let you k... k... kiss me again."

Attempting the k word may have been pushing a little too far, and Rose blushed furiously, staring at her feet.

"Seriously?" asked Kellela, dumbfounded for a different reason. "You can wear that without batting an eyelid, shout all the required catchphrases and do the silly dancing without the slightest hint of embarrassment, but you can't confess to someone without steam threatening to erupt from your ears?"

"Not everyone is as okay with public displays of affection as you and Hayedalf!" pointed out Rose, rather more loudly than required.

"Actually, I remember Kellela being a little bashful herself back when she was your age," laughed Hayedalf. "Dangerous times, the teenage years."

Grace, for her part, looked upon the demon lord with renewed vigour. "For love and justice and friendship and all those other things we're supposed to shout about, but mostly love, just die already!" she yelled, firing off another pulse of her magic.

For its part, the demon lord was starting to feel something new. Mixed in with the fear and the anger was another emotion. Something it had never had time for in the past. Something it never had reason for, given the certainty it had about the proper state of the universe and its personal place within it. Confusion.

In all of its cycles, in every battle it had ever held with a [Hero] and their party, how many of them had stopped to chat in the middle of it? How many took a few seconds out from a literal fight to the death to banter?

This was... not normal.

The demon lord hesitated, staring at the five insects that dared laugh in its face. Its enemies should not be having fun.

"What. Are. You?" it demanded.

"... We want to... save you... So stop fighting..." answered Mystery, noticing the hesitation of the demon lord, her hopes of successfully purifying it and achieving a proper magical girl ending rekindling after the initial attack had broken them.

The demon lord stared at Mystery with the blank ball of tar that served as its face, apparently able to perceive her astral projecting soul floating in front of the girls. All fighting had paused, the demon lord not making any move, nor the magical girls fighting back. For a few seconds, everything was quiet.

Then the demon lord swung its remaining arm, impacting Mystery before she could react, and once the arm had passed, there was no sign of her.

"Don't. Want. Saving."

Mystery (Human)

Age: -9 months

Occupation: Hero (L)

Skills:

- Soul's Eye (U) (44/100)

>> Sense Vitality (U)

>> Sense Soul (R)

>> Sense Mana (U)

>> Sense Light (C)

>> Sense Sound (C)

>> Pierce Illusions (U)

>> Sense Miasma (R)

>> Multi-focal (R)

>> Sense Spirit (R)

- Astral Projection (U) (26/60)

>> Sure Navigation (U)

>> Uncontainable (U)

>> Tether of Will (L)

- Robust (C) (31/50)

>> Hardened Soul (R)

>> Secured Mana (U)

>> Pain Tolerance (C)

>> Strengthened Will (U)

- Stealth (C) (3/20)

>> Camouflage Vitality (R)

- Magical Girl Transformation (R) (30/30)

>> Age Correction (R)

>> Gender Bending (R)

- Light (C) (12/20)

>> Heterochrome (U)

- Increased Attributes (C) (11/20)

>> Mana Storage (U)

- Investigation (C) (8/10)

- Cosplay (U) (12/20)

>> Skit (U)

- Mana Absorption (U) (14/30)

>> Drain Mana (U)

>> Conduit (U)

- Translate (U) (11/20)

>> Two Way (U)

- Telepathy (U) (22/40)

>> Reciprocity (U)

>> Empathy (U)

>> Guarded Mind (U)

- Lightning Bolt (U) (8/30)

>> Multishot (U)

>> Continuous Discharge (U)

- Fireball (U) (9/30)

>> Multishot (U)

>> Overcharge (U)

- Wall of Light (U) (1/10)

- Energy Resistance (U) (7/10)

- Recharge (U) (4/10)

Achievements:

- Early Bloomer II (R)

- First Skill (C)

- Adept (U)

- Survivor of Zarklaxxos, the Arcane Infernal (R)

- I Broke The System, And All I Got Was This Lousy Achievement (E)

- Astral Explorer II (E)

- First Spell (C)

- I Broke The System Again, And Now The Administrators Hate Me (E)

- Famous Spell Forger (E)

- Demon Slayer III (E)

- Monster Slayer VI (E)

- Curiosity (U)

- War Veteran (U)

- Royal Audience (C)

- Diligent Hero (L)

- Studious (C)

- Pioneering Guider (E)

- Royal Pervert (R)

- I Couldn't Stop Breaking The System, And Now I've Been Smited (E)

- Royal Corrupter (E)

- Blessed of the Forest (C)

- Artefact Wielder (R)

- Veteran of the Corruption (R)

- Skill Capped (C)

Artefacts:

- The Vale's Finger