Overpowered Wizard-Chapter B4 Ch42: Chopping Board

With her vitality-rich snacks gathered, Foodie went down the path that led closer to the end. Something fast whooped through the air. A cannonball flattened against her abdomen before exploding, costing her some vitality. Foodie reached into her barbecued gravity hoard, ripped free a limb, and ate her fill. Her vitality refilled as normal before another cannonball landed. Then another landed after that. Then more and more.

She marched through the barrage, eating and moving while staying out in the open. A while ago, she wouldn’t have dared. Today, she dared as the fog slowly cleared. The old ruins and weird trees fell behind her. With no obstructions in her way, Foodie revisited one of the deadliest locations she’d suffered thirty years ago.

The bombardment field stretched on seemingly forever. Craters covered the ground like wide pores in a porous rock, with piles of blasted bodies and warped weapons filling the bottoms or leaning out of the slopes. Further ahead, the chamber morphed into a pristine city with a mighty wall. Countless cannons poked out of the wall’s surface like stiff hairs, almost all of them shifting their aim down at her.

A pulsating wave of magic left the city and washed over her. There would be no teleportation, space magic, or dimensional magic. If there was one thing that made dungeons like these so deadly, it was their ability to block off convenient powers, sealing them. Yeah, sure, Zarian and Ruvaria would break through those seals as a fun date night activity, but Foodie wasn’t a full-on archmage or unbeatable caster. She was a halfie. She could actually take a hit and not shatter like glass.

Foodie cast another spell from her Bibliotheca of the Errant Aberration Chef. Her vitality-rich gravity snack transformed into a little meatball that she swallowed whole. It had enough coating on it to fend off her stomach acids and keep it from dissolving too quickly, feeding her a steady supply of vitality as a thousand of celestial cannonballs smashed against her front.

The field lit up with harsh white lights and fleeting shards. Heavenly magic, even of the monstrous kind, roared like a disjointed symphony made of thunderclaps and singing choirs. The resulting crater could swallow an army and would’ve been the grave of ninety-nine percent of Master Rankers.

Foodie hopped out of the smoky crater with her clothes intact. Vitality magic surged around her body, healing the scrapes, cuts, and burns. As the cannons reloaded, she looked down at herself with her eyes while scanning for anything unexpected with her sharpened senses and magic. Everything felt fine. Better than fine, really. The goblin grinned. While she lacked her parents’ finesse, she had her immense Strength and very high Wonder.

Low handle, all power.

Foodie made that even more obvious by bolting forward off an explosive lunge of her powerful legs and a cast of sorcery. She darted forward faster than all the cannonballs, the city’s defense failing to catch her the second time around.

Explosions shook the ground far behind her while she zoomed up. Once she reached the angle that made the wall cannons useless, Foodie cocked back her fist and swung forward. She smashed through the first barrier and broke it like glass with a sharp retort.

Her grip on her aura-guzzling cleaver tensed. Again, she cocked back and punched forward, breaking the next with a thunderous punch. Then she did it a third time and a fourth, breaking barrier after barrier.

There was supposed to be a trick to this.

A while ago, she’d tried to play the game by searching the craters for keys that would get past the barriers. That weaker version of her couldn’t have imagined she could punch the barriers down one by one now. She’d lacked the power and know-how back then.

Finally, she reached the wall itself. There was a big and fancy gate that was rattling as it opened upward. Within the recess, Foodie saw another familiar form that had made her run away the first time she’d encountered it. Scornful Cavalier, a more humanoid type of monster, far stronger than the cherub-types from before.

It was like a fusion between a knock-off angel and a centaur, with broken wings on its equine back, a unicorn horn jutting out from the forehead of its helmet, and its arms fused with armaments. Most of its body was heavily armored, even if the metal was scuffed and rusted.

The one in front of her lowered its jousting limb and gesticulated with its shield arm. Then without further word, it charged, flapping its wings for a sudden burst of speed. For once, Foodie took this a bit more seriously, activating multiple skills. She still had her vitality meat ball and extra aura, fueling the fire of her more physical and wondrous powers.

Her veins glowed with yellowish light under her green skin and black clothing. She summoned another cleaver, but this one of greater size, like a crude greatsword. Then she applied a few simple sorceries for weight, force, and shock redistribution before the cavalier ran into her with every intent to crush her.

Her bigger cleaver struck the lance and deflected the weapon and all the magic behind it in an explosion that eclipsed the power of the many cannons on the wall. The cavalier kept thundering toward her anyway, its hooves raised to smash her head. Foodie’s follow-up swing was faster while she stepped aside. She split the upper torso of the monstrous man from the lower body of its equine half.

Her cut reached further than that and sliced through the wall higher up, like a knife through skin. The monster’s guts painted a small part of the damaged wall with a splash, and that would’ve seemed like the end of things if it wasn’t for the cavalier’s rapid healing magic that lit up both parts in white light.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Foodie turned and chopped the monster apart into fine pieces with her brunoise technique, one of many from her Archcook Culinary Battler skill. She didn’t want to mince. That would ruin the meat. Once it was obviously dead, Foodie cast her magic, eating some of the cavalier raw while serving herself a plate that was cooked to perfection.

Unfortunately, she had both hands occupied, so she had to rely on her detestable telekinesis sorcery. Ugh. She was more of a physical and touch-based type of goblin, but whatever. She glared at the plate as it wobbled around a little and held up the lightly charred and well-seasoned monster chunks before her awaiting mouth.

As she ate bit by bit, she walked straight down the main thoroughfare of the dungeon city and took in the sights. She’d never gotten this far before. The place liked its arches and tiered constructions, with everything made of white stone or fancy gems.

Foodie’s goblin instincts stirred little. Her equipment was Eternal Quality, a tier above Celestial Quality. She’d seen her mother’s hoard and got to play with it to her heart’s content. This was nothing compared to what her parents could achieve with lesser materials in a weak forest-based mini-world.

The casual tour ended, and some new challenges appeared. This time, Foodie felt some genuine excitement as the street rumbled with the coming of a large cavalry charge. From the rooftops, another type of humanoid angel fiend appeared, Scornful Soldiers. They used flesh and feathered bows to shoot bolts of magic that could hit like missiles. The pressure mounted, and for once, Foodie felt like she could actually sweat a little.

She slid her smaller cleaver in the waistband behind her back while positioning her bigger cleaver on her shoulder. Then, with a burst of movement and sorcery, Foodie rampaged.

She didn’t run up the walls. She smashed through them, breaking the rhythm of the engagement, forcing her enemies to fight her on her terms. And the best part was that Foodie had no plans for what that would look like. For thirty years, she’d been the bane of her mother while being the joy of her father during their lessons. She was more like Zarian in battle.

Chaos was the point.

She hulk-smashed through a wall and shoulder-checked three cavaliers while using her bigger cleaver’s surface to block soldier shots. They plowed through multiple fancy stone homes and crashed into a tiered foundation. In the tight and destructible space, there was some difficulty for the monsters to bring their larger weapons to bear.

Foodie had no qualms about that. When she swung her bigger cleaver, she chopped through the stone, the crumpling supports, the foundations, and the flesh of her enemies all the same. Their hesitation in the face of human tactics fell to pieces against a brutal goblin girl who didn’t care about mere obstructions.

What was a wall compared to her parents? A temporary cover to hide behind? That didn’t do anyone much good as Foodie inhaled deeply through her nostrils and tracked all of her targets. Licking her lips, she swiveled around and ran through more walls and crashed into the cavalry even when they expected it.

She kept this up for a while, hunting down the cavaliers, bringing down celestial structures of the beautified and once pristine city. Then the soldiers were next on the chopping block. Foodie wished she could take her time. She could taste it. Their terror. It was a delicious thing when dungeon monsters feared for their false lives. They had just enough awareness to know they were trapped with an entity that was so beyond them, their only move was to scatter and flee in hopes of delaying their inevitable end.

It worked, actually. Foodie stopped in the middle of the city and concluded she was wasting too much time.

“Let’s move on.” With a deep breath, she closed her eyes and concentrated. Her aura shone like a solar flare. Runes appeared in the air, etched and maintained by pure wondrous power. She formed arrays for sharper edges, domain control, reach expansion, material destruction, vitality reduction, duplication, and more. Even after years of practice, she struggled a little as she stacked her power.

Wherever Foodie lacked finesse or struggled to comprehend the jumble of lessons jammed into her head, her Wonder stat plucked the answer out of the confusing mental gestalt for her. It took far longer than she was proud to admit, and she would’ve glared at her lower-than-average Mysticism if it weren’t for the wondrous power coursing through her as she channeled a mix of traits, skills, and sorcery.

Then she waved both of her cleavers and cast a single spell from her bibliotheca as the beneficiary of her preparation.

“Chopping Board,” she chanted.

She turned the dungeon city and its occupants into diced chunks. The stone, flesh, and all. Nothing escaped her, not even the most hidden and entrenched dungeon monsters. By the time it was over, Foodie stood at the center of the neatly cut devastation. Anyone coming in afterward would’ve assumed it was a strange formation of shiny gravel dumped randomly in front of a bombed out battlefield. The only thing that survived the cast was the doorway leading to the dungeon boss.

“Huh, that was easy,” Foodie said. “I suck at the set up, but if I wanted to, I could’ve done way more.”

She could’ve destroyed ten of these cities at once without breaking a sweat. No, maybe more than that. Twenty? Fifty? Maybe she could cover an entire country. Maybe further than that. She wasn’t really sure. She hadn’t pushed herself beyond her upper limit yet. Or she would’ve accidentally destroyed the mini-world retreat.

It was kind of ridiculous. With the right applications of magic, one could multiply their output while reducing the strain. Ruvaria’s way of teaching brought together efficiency and overkill like they were meant to merge as one.

Once Foodie left this place, she would have to be more careful.

She could easily kill everyone in the capital without trying. She found that a little amusing. A goblin shouldn’t be allowed to be that strong. She wasn’t going to follow through, of course. That was her home, and she missed it, even if it was far beneath her now.

“Father’s scary,” Foodie said on her way to the dungeon boss. “He can do this naturally. But with Mother’s lessons … he’s an even bigger monster. I’d never want to make him really angry.”

Foodie shivered a little. Her fear was a healthy one. She understood there was a lot lurking under Zarian’s friendly and silly guise. Years of being his beloved child, regardless of being adopted into the family, sometimes made it hard to reconcile how everyone’s existence depended on him.

“I have to be there for the tournament,” she said in a breathless rush. “I have to see him in his element.”

The doors to the boss room opened. Music started playing for her – she was special in that regard. When she entered, her thoughts were still on Zarian, almost forgetting that she was entering the chamber of her abuser.

Hm.

Wow.

Jack wasn’t that important to her anymore. He was foundational in her earlier development, but that was it. He wasn’t a current concern, which was strange. Apparently, enough time spent becoming powerful with her favorite people could really heal many wounds.

“Hey, Jack-o-boy, I need to make this reunion a quick one. I want to see Zarian fight at the tournament. So, I’ll give you a couple of chances to make this interesting before I finish this, okay?” Foodie said casually.