When the "ball" bounced back for the fourth time, Shade had to lower his center of gravity to block it. By the seventh time, he had already used the Heaton Seal. By the tenth, the seal shield was shattered in a single blow, and Shade had to cross his arms before him to withstand the attack.
By the thirteenth time, when the "ball" rebounded at almost teleportation-like speed, Shade had no choice but to dodge.
But after passing him, the black "ball" did not punch through the shop wall and destroy an entire street. The swirling mass of black energy simply dissipated in midair.
The wax figure made no further attacks. It folded its hands before itself, then spoke in Sylvia's voice:
"Can you tell what principle that thaumaturgy just now was built upon?"
Shade used Moon Fire with his left hand to heal the bruises on his right arm and answered without even thinking:
"Those Golden Spirals that kept flashing just now—weren't they the Fibonacci Sequence?"
Then he remembered that, in this world, the sequence went by a different name:
"I mean the Golden Ratio Sequence.
"The branching of plants and the arrangement of leaves, pineapple patterns and honeycomb structures, sunflower petal arrangements, the spiral structures of pinecones and snail shells—many natural phenomena follow its marvelous construction. I remember there's even a value called the 'Golden Ratio.' The closer the structural proportions in art and architecture are to that number, the closer they are to so-called 'perfection.'"
The Outlander also remembered that number:
"It was around 0.618, wasn't it? Every rebound of your attack increased in power according to the Golden Ratio Sequence. Could amplifying it according to that ratio also increase the power of thaumaturgy?"
The wax figure fell silent for a moment, then split open along the