After surviving the onslaught of the Exploding Leaf-Bugs, only fourteen wizards remained alive in the camp.
Excluding the traitorous Victor, his three lackeys currently attacking Damian, and the four wizards already possessed by the Spirits of Corruption, only six expedition members were left with any actual combat capability.
Lilith quickly pulled a specialized potion syringe from her robes and administered it to the convulsing Vivian. The antispasmodic seemed to work; Vivian stopped struggling, though she remained deeply unconscious.
To make matters worse, the four wizards who had just been blasted by the Exploding Leaf-Bugs were suddenly hauled to their feet. Parasitized by the Spirits of Corruption, their broken bodies jerked upright like grim marionettes. The situation had instantly devolved into a nightmare.
Damian reacted ruthlessly. With a surge of his earth magic, three massive stone spikes erupted from the ground beneath his attackers. One of the traitors failed to dodge; the jagged rock pierced straight through his abdomen, lifting him screaming into the air.
As the other two scrambled backward, Damian shifted his magic. The remaining stone spikes sharply altered their trajectory, shooting out to skewer the spots where the men were trying to land.
With the immediate interference handled, Damian leveled his wand. Instead of channeling standard magical power, he poured his raw, concentrated mental energy directly into the wood.
The tip of his wand blazed with blinding white light, condensing into a massive, glowing sphere in front of him.
An impossibly large, clawed paw reached out from the sphere, gripping the empty air. A split second later, a massive, ferocious head pushed through the light. The beast looked like a terrifying cross between a tiger and a lion, with jagged fangs and a wild mane. It hauled itself further out of the sphere, extending a second massive paw. While its front half was fully formed and solid light, its rear half trailed off into a swirling halo of ethereal energy and a long, sweeping tail.
It was the Expecto Patronum charm. However, Damian wasn't casting it the traditional way. He was utilizing a highly unorthodox technique he had learned from the enchanted portrait of his grandfather, Alphard Black.
A standard Patronus is fueled by positive emotions like happiness and hope, making it the perfect counter to Dementors. But Damian wasn't fighting Dementors today. By substituting emotional fuel with pure, refined mental energy, the resulting Patronus possessed a devastating suppressive effect against souls, specters, and the undead.
Furthermore, the vast majority of Patronuses took the form of mundane animals. Damian's was incredibly rare: a Zouwu, a legendary, monstrous feline from the mysterious East.
Because the mental-energy casting technique was so complex, and the Zouwu itself was so gargantuan, Damian could only manifest its upper half. But it was more than enough. The moment the radiant Zouwu let out a silent roar, the pale faces of the Spirits of Corruption wandering the air shrieked in terror and frantically scattered.
"What... what is this?!" Victor roared, fury and panic warring on his face. As the ritual's caster, he could feel the absolute, paralyzing terror radiating from his Spirits of Corruption.
Before setting off on this expedition, Victor had thoroughly vetted the roster. He was certain no one on the team specialized in soul-based magic. He had kept a particularly close eye on Damian, the newcomer from White Stone Town. Based on his observations, Victor had pegged the boy as nothing more than a highly skilled elemental combatant.
Furthermore, Victor had sacrificed vast resources and human lives to forge these Spirits of Corruption. Ordinary soul magic shouldn't have been able to suppress them so completely. In the Wizarding World, soul-magic was an incredibly complex, highly taboo branch of study. Finding a rogue wizard with this level of soul mastery outside of ancient, highly secretive dark factions was practically unheard of.
Gritting his teeth, Victor yanked several transparent glass spheres from his robes. Inside the glass, dense black mist boiled violently. Looking closely, one could see dozens of shrunken, agonizing faces rolling within the trapped smoke.
He crushed the spheres in his bare hands.
A localized hurricane of black mist exploded outward from the shards, rapidly blanketed the entire forest clearing. Hundreds of pale, ethereal faces of the Spirits of Corruption floated into the air, their mouths opening to emit a chorus of maddening, inexplicable murmurs. The mist tethered the faces together, drifting around them like long, shadowy hair.
Victor spread his arms wide, his bloodshot eyes bulging as he let out a maniacal laugh. "Even if you are a master of soul magic, you cannot stop the combined weight of hundreds of Spirits of Corruption! Die in despair!"
Link stared at the sky in absolute horror. "These were all living people... Victor actually butchered this many innocent souls?"
Victor's atrocities hadn't been limited to White Stone Town. He had fled to the town because his previous hunting grounds had drawn the attention of the Court Wizards. Tipped off about the investigation, he had relocated to White Stone Town to lay low and rebuild his twisted arsenal.
The surviving expedition members—and even Victor's three surviving lackeys—stared up at the churning black mass with despairing expressions. The sheer density of the corrupted magic paralyzed them. They felt an inexplicable, magnetic pull on their very souls, a horrifying sensation that their spirits could be ripped from their bodies at any moment.
Damian was the only one completely unaffected. The radiant Zouwu Patronus acted as an impenetrable barrier, shielding him entirely from the soul-crushing pressure.
Suddenly, the glowing Zouwu opened its massive jaws and inhaled fiercely.
The vacuum of pure mental energy was absolute. The Spirits of Corruption were violently peeled out of the black mist, sucked directly into the radiant beast's gaping maw. The purification was incredibly rapid. By the time the paralyzed wizards regained their senses, the sky was completely clear.
The oppressive black mist had been devoured whole. The massive Zouwu licked its glowing fangs, let out a surprisingly loud, satisfied burp, and settled back on its haunches with a contented expression.
Victor's maniacal smile froze. His spread arms began to tremble violently.
"Impossible! That's absolutely impossible!" he shrieked hoarsely.
Victor's mind fractured. He simply could not accept that the army of Spirits of Corruption he had painstakingly forged over years of slaughter had been casually swept aside.
While his current Spirits of Corruption were only converted from mundane humans, there were hundreds of them! Their sheer volume was what gave him the confidence to ambush a team of trained wizards. His grand plan had been to harvest the expedition team's souls to create Wizard-class Spirits of Corruption. Spirits forged from magical cores wouldn't even share the mundane Spirits of Corruption's weakness to fire. With an army of those, he wouldn't even fear the Court Wizards!
To see his entire life's work devoured like a light snack shattered him.
"You all must die!" Completely unhinged, Victor drew a jagged ritual knife from his robes and plunged the blade directly into his own chest, right over his heart. Dark, guttural murmurs spilled from his lips. "Oh, great Lord of the Moon Candle..." Thump-thump— "Your faithful follower... Victor Hansen... requires your descent..."
Thick, black blood vessels instantly bulged around the knife wound, rapidly spider-webbing across his neck and face.
Thump-thump— Beneath Victor's mad chanting, the horrifyingly loud sound of a heartbeat began to echo. The drumming noise radiated from his chest cavity, so violently forceful that his ribcage looked ready to burst.
Within seconds, the rhythmic thumping filled the forest clearing, booming like rolling thunder. The sheer, concussive acoustic force of the eldritch heartbeat was so overwhelming that the remaining wizards collapsed, shocked into instant unconsciousness.
Only Damian, safely cocooned within the mental-energy aura of the Zouwu Patronus, remained standing.
Thump-thump— Victor's face was now a horrific mask of pulsing black veins. His murmurs escalated into a fanatical, agonizing scream. "I offer my everything to you! Please descend, my Go"
"Avada Kedavra," Damian said flatly, treating him to a point-blank Killing Curse.
[75 STONES] - Unlock1 Bonus Chapter
[150 STONES] - Unlock 2 Bonus Chapters
[300 STONES] - Unlock 3 Bonus Chapters