… A black hole?
Naturally, this was the first thing that came to mind when I saw this impossibly black sphere appearing out of thin air and absorbing a grown man. It being a black hole would indeed make him fit into such a small volume. 
But it’s not.
I could hear the deafening sound of the air gushing into the death sphere at a high velocity, after all. As fast as the speed of sound was, it was a joke compared to the speed of gravitation, which was thought to be equal or at least very close to the speed of light.
As such, my body would surely have been attracted by this “black hole” way before that sound could reach my ears.

If I were to use a crude approximation based on the relation between the Schwarzschild radius and the mass of a black hole, that black thing would weigh at least ten times as much as the Earth, dramatically altering the way everything fell on this planet’s surface as a result. Truth be told, even the ground would have started falling up toward the black sphere by now.
Actually, tidal forces from such a black hole would probably spaghettify everything within kilometers.
Since this was clearly not what was happening, the only conclusion was that it was not a black hole. Frankly, I had been aware of it even before the spell activated. That mana feedback I had received was the same as the pseudo-annihilation spell I had accidentally triggered a couple of years ago, although it was the first time I saw what it really looked like at a macroscopic scale.
… We’re still doomed.
The fact that I was able to actually see its true form was terrible news. Just the air initially present where the sphere emerged would be enough of a cataclysm but, now, the mass of an entire human being wearing gear had been added.
All in all, in terms of energy, we were talking about at the very least several dozens of Tsar Bombas, the most powerful nuclear bomb ever created, each of them being already more powerful than thousands of Little Boys. And that was if we ignored the large quantity of air drawn to this ephemeral sphere while it existed.
In any case, the upcoming explosion would do a lot more than just vaporizing the capital. Honestly, I couldn’t imagine the Ouronia Kingdom recovering from that.
Even the whole continent and possibly the entire world would probably be greatly impacted, for that matter. Since it would be a surface burst, it might very well trigger something akin to a nuclear winter by sending an astounding amount of ashes into the high atmosphere, leading to famines and doubling the casualties within a year.

All things considered, even though I was forced to helplessly watch this nightmare unfold before my eyes, I was rather calm. Heck, I was even casually estimating the number of people I was about to kill.
This was particularly surprising since I had been feeling pure terror just before. Right now, though, if I had to sum up what I was feeling in one word, it would be… opulence? I felt like I had so much mana at my disposal that I could never use all of it in a lifetime.
Well, compared to my mana pool’s capacity, dozens of billions of times this amount had already traversed my body. Saying it had replenished my pool would have been quite the euphemism.  Honestly, I was feeling ecstatic.
For a fleeting moment, such an abstract concept as infinity seemed within grasp. Of course, I was well aware that even several exajoules were still infinitely less than true infinity, but the amount of change I could produce was practically limitless with that much mana.

Change?
Maybe this strange state of consciousness made me intuitively understand the essence of my magic.
For instance, until now, I had always been thinking that it consisted of applying a one-time conversion to the targeted energy to turn it into one other form.
In this manner, my mana armors were the odd ones and had to successively cast that same one-time spell, over and over again. But, what if it wasn’t how it actually worked?

For one thing, this current spell wasn’t applying one unique mass-to-mana conversion. After all, that darkness could only be achieved by stripping away energy from photons as well, though that spell was going much, much further than what ‘Ortu Solis’ usually did.
It wasn’t even that this mana was multi-cast like I would sometimes do by merging a kinetic-style armor with a photon-style. No. It was one standalone spell, turning everything into mana without combining pre-existing spells. Something akin to a pure any-to-mana conversion.
It sounds a bit off to me…

From the feedback I was receiving amongst the overwhelming wave of mana, the spell wasn’t even targeting anything specific.
Or rather, it wasn’t particularly affecting the air that was present in the sphere. The air just so happened to occupy the same volume as what was being affected.

Within the bounds of the spell, no regular particle was allowed to remain unchanged indefinitely. In this sense, it resembled a black hole in ways other than the appearance of their horizon: the fate of all matter and energy was sealed as soon as it crossed the opaque boundary. All futures within this sphere converged into mana, instead of the singularity like in a bona fide black hole.

The spell was siphoning so much energy from particles, including force carriers, that they could no longer exist.
Essentially, it was getting rid of all the fundamental forces of the universe: electromagnetism, as well as the strong and weak forces, were no more. In the eventuality that gravitons existed, even gravitation might have been nonexistent in that thing.
A bit too overkill…
I was failing to understand why the spell would bother getting rid of everything, since just the mass emerging from the strong nuclear interaction accounted for about 99% of all the energy contained in matter anyway. Well, one could say this eerie darkness gave off a cool and dramatic edge to the spell.

In any case, without the fundamental forces and the particles implicated in these, that sphere was devoid of atoms and molecules.
This explained why it had such a strong suction effect in its vicinity. Mana, as intangible as it was, was the only thing in it. As such, pressure-wise, the interior of this sphere was the ultimate void and made the surrounding air gush into it to try balancing the pressure.
Since any air that entered the sphere was in turn destroyed by the spell, though, it created a loop of air rushing into it without ever being able to get the pressure to an equilibrium.

All of this confirmed one thing. Mana was not made out of atoms, since I could sense a tremendous amount being generated beyond the darkness.
Yet, I knew for a fact that it did react chemically with some liquids in certain conditions. That would mean the exotic particle making up mana had an electric charge.
If it was subject to redox reactions, maybe this particle could in certain cases capture electrons and form some kind of atom-like structure like muonium or positronium. This was merely a series of assumptions based on a single observation, but I might have been onto something.
Wait, what was I talking about again? Didn’t I digress a bit? For that matter, why am I even still alive?

Now that I thought about it, it had felt like quite a while had passed since the spell was cast.
Then again, I couldn’t move my body as much as I wanted.
Everything seems to be moving in slow motion…
So that was it. My brain was desperate, as this spell was undoubtedly about to bring an end to the lives of so many people. As a result, my brain may have been functioning at an unreasonable and unsustainable speed in a last-ditch effort to let me find a way to survive.
That sounded like one of the explanations for near-death experiences, so that might have been what I was going through.
Wait. By definition, does it even make sense to die after a near-death experience?
No dead people ever reported having one before they died, after all.
Sweet, that guarantees that I'll live~.
Mmh? Survivorship bias? Never heard of that.

In all seriousness, though, I would rather have watched my life flash before my eyes than be stuck watching my inescapable fate unravel in slow motion. I could have apologized to my former self for not being able to become the hero she wanted to be. Rather, I was about to become the villain of the story. Or maybe I would be more like an anti-hero, since it was not my intention to do bad things?
Who am I kidding…?
I had been aware the chances that I would destroy everything at some point during my lifetime weren’t negligible. I knew it from the day it had happened for the first time at a miniature scale.
I really should have killed myself, back then.
And yet, I didn’t have the guts to do it.

But… Maybe I tried, in a more insidious way.
One thought I had been having recently was that one of the reasons I chose the path of the adventurer might also have been to increase my odds of dying. Adventuring was a dangerous profession, after all, as there wasn’t a single month without hearing news about some party disbanding after losing too many members.
If I couldn't end my life directly, putting myself in a multitude of dangerous situations was a sound alternative. Although the Adventuring Guild restricted me from going alone on missions, which made it harder to risk my life...
Perhaps it was also to increase the probability of dying, at least unconsciously, that I refused to buy myself some protective plates to wear under my robe. Even if my mana armor was more effective, depending entirely on an active spell made me defenseless against any surprise attack.
Truly, it was as if I had been trying to indirectly cause my own death by being reckless. Well, I was apparently reckless by nature according to Serena, so this suicidal behavior might only have made it more intense…
How ironic was it that I unleashed this dreadful spell because I was about to die as I wanted, even though my death was supposed to prevent me from doing it in the first place? In retrospect, I really should have let us be slaughtered by those fake bandits without doing anything.

Uh?
As I was reviewing my psyche thanks to this near-death experience I was having, I sensed that something within my mana veins was happening, as if a stray spell was about to take action. It wasn’t like when I had conjured that sphere while in a half-unconscious state, though. This time, it was trying to fire by itself, visibly in reaction to all the surrounding mana.
Ah. Is it that ridiculously-demanding one?
I had theorized that something like that was the reason I was constantly emitting mana. If ‘Ortu Solis’ wasn’t enough, surely, the pseudo-annihilation was. A part of me was curious to see what would emerge from this spell but I had the gut feeling that, in these conditions, things would get pretty bad.
… But how could it get any worse?
Well, in this enlightened state of consciousness, I was more inclined to trust my instincts. As I peeked into this spell’s instructions, I didn’t recognize most of the mana operations besides ‘move mana here’, ‘compress mana like so’ or some other standard ones. I could only vaguely tell that there were similarities with my usual conversions.
What I was certain, however, was that just the heat losses would be catastrophic for the entire area.
What about it? It already will be, even without this spell.
Frankly, the heat from the sphere that had caught up with me was barely bearable, already.

… Wait a second.
Barely bearable? That was it? I might have made a lot of progress in the efficiency of my conversions over the years, but I was sure to lose at the very least one percent of the input energy in the form of thermal energy. In the case of the pseudo-annihilation, even such a tiny fraction of heat would bring forth a disaster. I wouldn’t be here, noting that a long-term exposure to that heat might be bad for my skin. It wasn’t like the release of heat was gradual either. This amount was clearly the maximum I would get from the sphere.
Why was I realizing that only now, anyway?
Isn’t something off?
To begin with, what was up with this absurd amount of generated mana leaving the sphere like that? Wasn’t it supposed to be highly unstable by going beyond some critical density?

And then, it clicked.
I did not exactly understand the specifics, but the exotic physics within the bounds of the black sphere had sparked the emergence of a hidden mechanism that prevented the mana from degenerating and exploding.
As such, if there was a bad move to make here, it would actually be to manually uncast the sphere. Even doing nothing would be bad, as the spell wasn’t making use of the astonishing amount of mana still inside the sphere to sustain itself. Because only the pre-annihilation mana was cast, the spell was about to be crushed by the universe in retaliation for going against the natural order. That was what it felt like, anyway.

… What do I do?
Letting it be wasn’t an option. One solution was to tweak the pseudo-annihilation spell to make it much more robust by forcing it to recursively cast the same spell onto the newly-generated mana. The sphere of destruction would become self-sustainable as long as there was air to devour, which would give us at least a billion years.
I was certain I would be able to do it, as making a spell cast the mana it generated was something I always did. Just the other day, I had created on-the-fly a new kind of mana armor centered around that property. Surely, in this heightened condition, I would be able to do it.
But I can’t do that, can I?
It wasn’t the fact that I would have to constantly cast the abhorrent spell I had feared all this time that made me reluctant, however. It was just that I didn’t know what was making the generated mana gain the momentum that caused it to leave the sphere. If this gargantuan amount of mana started expanding the sphere’s size as it propagated through space, it would easily engulf the entire world. I could force the generated mana into place, but there was no telling if it would compromise the stability of the mana. There were too many unknowns here.
Perpetuating the spell is a no-go, huh…? Should I just get everything out of here?

Getting the sphere far enough, like in deep space, would certainly do the trick. To decrease the amount of light this planet received if it were to explode in space, however, I would need to move it way, way farther than the outermost layer of the atmosphere.
But there was of course a limit to how fast one could displace mana. Surely, without extending the lifetime of the spell, I would never be able to get rid of it in time.
… Couldn't I use that?
I took another glance at that unknown spell that was still pestering me to activate, tugging my sleeve like a child.
Honestly, I still had trouble picturing what the end result of the entire spell was supposed to be. I had a slight sense of what each operation from the set of instructions were, however, even though I was seeing them for the first time.
Well, it probably was because each operation was actually closer to the most fundamental bricks of my element, whereas the whole spell was a combination of all of them, resulting in the emerging phenomenon that we called magic. Normal mages didn’t often come across unknown, complex spells like these, as the only spell they had throughout their lives was supposedly the minimal operation they could realize.
In my case, though, even the unitary operations in that spell felt like they could still be decomposed into even more fundamental ones. It was a bit like atoms, which used to be considered the indivisible bricks making up matter, hence their name. Later on, however, electrons, protons and neutrons were discovered. Even the last two eventually were found to be composed of even more fundamental particles called quarks.
Now of all times, I wanted to delve deeper into the workings of my element and find the most fundamental brick that was making everything I could do possible.

… That can wait.
Earlier, one operation in particular had caught my attention. It was one of the last ones within this long sequence of instructions, and its simplicity made it almost intuitive to me.
It is definitely part of my magic type, but…
I would usually introduce an excess of energy in a system by adding mana in order to increase the velocity of said system. At this point, I no longer questioned it. This sub-spell, however, seemed to achieve a similar result in a totally different way. If anything, it was making use of the fact that the energy would remain constant throughout the entire operation.
Alright. Let’s go with that.

There were still some unknowns, but my instincts weren’t screaming at me this time. So, I ripped off this single operation from the spell, applied it on the whole sphere, and silenced the rest of that mysterious spell.
Even in this slowed down world, the sphere seemed to disappear in an instant.
How fast was that…?

As the source of all that mana traversing my body was no longer here, I sensed my muscles relaxing. It meant it was finally over.
This time, I had kept my cool, carefully analyzed the situation, and managed to save everyone.
Now that my clock was starting to realign with my body’s, however, something felt wrong.
What was I doing before all that?
The pain in my back served as an answer. I had of course been struck down by a sword.
The slash itself didn’t feel like it had penetrated particularly deeply from what I could tell, but the guy who had done it was certain to finish me off with another strike.
Well, I think I did fairly well.
Not only did I eliminate the main threat of this fight as soon as the sphere had absorbed him, but I had also saved the world from a cataclysm. It was a bit of a pity that I would die immediately after I had found a way to prevent the spell from hurting people, though.
Well, at least, Isaac and his men might very well win this fight.

I closed my eyes and waited for my death, but nothing seemed to be coming. It was after a few seconds had passed that I became a bit self-conscious about maintaining that satisfied smile while keeping my eyes shut.
Then again, I believed it would also be ridiculous to be beheaded while I was turning my head to get a look at what was happening behind me.
I still eventually performed that action while trying to remain as graceful as possible, but froze when I got a view of the bandit who attacked me: he was on the ground, unmoving.
He… passed out?
Part of me was glad that I wasn’t about to be killed, but I had the ominous feeling that something was terribly wrong.

“A-ah…!” I let out after I leaned my head over his body to get a look at his face.

Well, his eyes were wide open and he wore a horrified expression, so of course that scared me.
It was only a few seconds later that I came to an even scarier realization. He didn’t pass out. He passed away.
Only then did I have the idea of looking around me, and my heart sank deeper.
“Uh…?”
Everyone here had collapsed on the ground.
You must be kidding me.
I reluctantly stood up despite the pain and walked toward the ally that was closest to me, the leader of the guards who didn't seem injured by a sword.

“Aaaah...”
His expression was very similar to that of the bandit.
That can’t be…

I then looked in the direction of the carriage I had come from and saw an arm, which I assumed was Maximilian’s, sticking out of it.
“No…”

Yet another obvious thing I had quickly glanced over while I was in this altered state. That feeling of exhilaration the abundance of mana had caused in me was only possible because the generated mana had my signature. I had been the only one in the world who was excited by that. To other people, this immense scattering of mana would only trigger a mana rejection response from their body, ranging from unpleasant to horrendous depending on how much reached them.
How did I not think of that, congratulating myself even though this spell had brought death from the get-go?

My head reflexively turned in the direction of the capital and all its inhabitants.
How... many?