-KABOOM-!

Violet-gold fire erupted around Nom-Nom’s entire body and went upward in a pillar of pure violet-gold destruction, splitting the clouds above, and kept going in a continuous roaring torrent of dragon fire that twisted around her raised sword.

I genuinely could not see the top of it because it had already left the atmosphere’s jurisdiction.

The dirt around her feet turned to glass in real time.

Nearby trees did not even catch fire properly before simply disintegrating outright.

To me, standing sixty meters away, the fire felt like a warm gust of air courtesy of her being my familiar, but the shockwave it generated felt like being placed in front of a closing hydraulic press.

I noticed Peko was gone.

She was simply no longer in the clearing, and I had not seen her move, and the fact that she had reacted before I had even registered the situation as dangerous was a thought that would definitely be embarrassing to revisit.

"WAIT!" I shouted at Nom-Nom.

But the beam swallowed the word whole.

The sound coming off that fire was as though I was standing next to a rocket launch.

A continuous animal shriek at the sky itself.

[Holy shit, she’s not gonna stop...]

The thought arrived as I looked at her face, visible only for a second between bursts of her flames.

Nom-Nom’s eyes were calm, and her expression depicted absolutely no effort.

She was watching the sky splitting, roaring beam of dragon fire like it was a candle she had lit.

And then, her arm began to slowly lower the sword.

[MOVE!] Every instinct in my body screamed at once.

-Kzzzt-!

And I was already 10 meters to the left, having left a crumpled trail of space-time behind.

But it was still nowhere near far enough.

-Kzzzt-!-Kzzzt-!-Kzzzt-!

[FASTER! Dude! Come on!]

I was throwing Temporal Steps as fast as my brain could process the activation, desperately hoping to sidestep whatever it was Nom-Nom was doing.

The crumpled space-time kept tearing open and resealing behind me, ten meters a blink with as many blinks a second as I could push.

The forest was becoming a streak of brown and green and blinding violet light at the edge of my vision.

And through the gaps between blinks, I looked back and saw the sword descending and descending and descending until-

[It’s not gonna be enough!]

-KABOOM-!!!!

The sword hit.

What came next was not an explosion. An explosion has a center and a radius.

While this? This was just straight-up bullshit!

The concentrated blast of Dragon Fire that erupted from the sword tore through the earth, the trees, the air, and everything in between, instantly converting into a column of obliterating violet light that carved a massive trench straight through the forest in the time it takes to blink.

The shockwave alone picked me up and threw me sideways through the air, bashing me into the ground and sending me thrashing across the ground for a distance I genuinely could not calculate anymore.

Until eventually, I stopped face-first in the soil with my hand over my head... just hoping I’d get out of this alive.

The light through my closed eyelids was still white.

And as the silence slowly returned, I opened my eyes, and my vision was still white.

For a good second, I thought that I had gone blind until slowly the smoke-filled blue of the sky came into view.

I lay there for a moment, dirt in my mouth, while the ringing in my ears slowly separated into individual sounds of burning wood and falling debris before I slowly dared to look where Nom-Nom’s little ’turn’ had gone.

The forest was scorched flat in a line that damn near stretched to the horizon, the nearest trees on either side were just no longer there, and in their place was just lava.

At the end of it, many tens of kilometers out, was the mountain... or what had once been a mountain.

The top of it was gone.

Where the peak had been, there was now an open wound of glowing molten rock, burning treeline, and through the gap where the mountain used to continue upward, I could see the sky on the other side, clear and unobstructed, as though the mountain had simply agreed to have a hole in it from now on.

That mountain, I knew from what Peko told me, was large enough to influence Shinkotsu’s regional weather patterns.

I slowly sat in the dirt and just stared at the hole in the mountain and damn near cried.

[I am going to have so much explaining to do...]

That’s when I heard footsteps behind me, moving through scorched earth without urgency.

Nom-Nom was walking toward me with the hilt of her greatsword in her grip.

The blade itself was gone because the attack had disintegrated it entirely, and she walked with the repair enchantment active, rebuilding the blade outward from the hilt in a continuous feed of mana.

By the time she stopped in front of me, the full six feet had restored itself

"Your turn, Master." She looked down at me sitting in the dirt.

[Turn. My. ASS!!]

I looked at her.

I looked at the mountain and took a deep breath, ready to give her a piece of my mind.

And as I looked back at her, it all amounted to just a sigh.

"The spar is over...Congratulations. You won."

The expression on Nom-Nom’s face flipped like a switch in less than a second.

One moment: cold, elevated, apex-predator-standing-over-prey energy.

Next moment: "Yay!"

Yep, exactly like that, down to the syllable, the grin, the immediate physical brightening of every line of her posture.

Five seconds ago, she had blasted a hole through a mountain. Now she looked like someone who had just been told dessert was ready.

"Now..." I breathed, crossing my legs while I gestured to the forest, feeling as though I had just aged 10 years, "Get going, Iron Vanguard is probably at the dungeon by now..."

"Oh, right!" she chirped, turned, and immediately began skipping along, humming something formless and cheerful, every third step lifting off the ground entirely, while the destroyed forest continued smoldering around her in every direction.

I watched her go.

And the very next second, Peko stepped out, literally from my own shadow, and crouched beside where I sat in the dirt with a very entertained smile on her face.

"So," she asked softly, "what did we learn today?"

I gave her a side-eye.

Then slowly, very slowly, a grin spread across my face.

Peko immediately noticed, tilting her head in confusion.

While I looked back toward Nom-Nom’s retreating figure, feeling the grin widen into something increasingly unhinged.

"What we learned today," I began slowly as I turned to her, "... is that if I feed her a one-hour charged Ferrum Knight every single day..."

Peko’s expression froze.

Then slowly began changing as the math started assembling itself behind her eyes.

"...her MP capacity goes up by around 9,000 every month," I finished, watching her mouth slowly open. "Hell, she might evolve into a True Dragon before month one even ends."

-Ding!

{That is not- Hos-Host!! Listen to me! Do NOT do this!}

-Pfft!-HEHEHAHAHA-!

I immediately burst into a roaring feral laughter, after all systems had all but confirmed my little intrusive thought.

Looking at the distant skipping figure of the most destructive creature I had ever met, happily humming through the wreckage she had produced, I cupped my hand around my mouth and shouted:

"Hurry up! They’re probably waiting!"

"Right!" Nom-Nom called back cheerfully, and then-

-KABOOM-!

The ground exploded beneath her feet as she accelerated to hypersonic speed instantly, vanishing into the horizon hard enough that the delayed shockwave slapped the burning forest several seconds afterwards.