Chapter 69: Your Understanding of Mages Is Still Too One-Sided
Among the ten thousand or so participants still struggling to survive in the subsidence pit, those three figures were impossible to miss.
They stood in the heart of the storm like monuments hammered into the earth, letting the violent purple tide crash around them without so much as a flinch.
Hodell tilted his head slightly.
Under the flickering violet light, the silver gray mask of White Crow looked colder than ever.
"What are you staring at?"
His voice came through the amplification rune low and steady, yet it still cut through the roar of the tide with frightening clarity.
"Mr. Pale."
The man in the middle answered first.
He wore a dark gold robe covered in countless microscopic pores. Every second, those pores sprayed out a colorless repulsive field at a strange frequency, forcing the tide to bend around him before it could touch his body.
"There are plenty of lunatics in Shadow Valley. Someone as eager as you to hand over his inheritance is much rarer."
He smiled faintly.
"Allow me to introduce myself. Gray, Polar Merchant Guild. These two are my deputies."
The giant on his left stepped forward at once.
He had to be over two meters tall. The greatsword in his hand was as broad as a door panel, and when he dragged it across the ground, it carved a glowing groove through the blood slick stone.
"Kid," he rumbled, voice muffled and deep, "that armor of yours, White Crow, is tough. I'll give you that. But in front of my sword, it is still nothing but an expensive tin can."
Hodell gave a low chuckle.
"So it really is the Merchant Guild."
His tone did not change at all.
"Homan still wasn't confident enough, it seems."
Gray spread his hands slightly.
"No. Mr. Homan is very confident. He is confident that once you die here, the custody agreement will take effect immediately."
Hodell was not surprised in the slightest.
The Merchant Guild had never intended to share a table with him forever. A lone wolf with too much money, too much strength, and no interest in obeying rules was always dangerous. If he died during the Ranking Festival, every asset tied to that agreement would flow into the guild's hands without a single ripple.
In truth, the first stage was the best place to kill him.
Here, in the chaos of the tide, murder could pass for misfortune.
"So that is the plan." Hodell slowly raised his right hand, pale blue energy pulsing faintly over his fingers. "You want my chips and my life."
Gray's smile widened.
"A merchant has never complained about too much profit. And no one likes an unstable variable."
At that exact moment, the tide surged harder.
The magic storm howled overhead, and the center of the pit became a true killing ground.
Gray's voice snapped like a whip.
"Kill him. End it before the second wave arrives."
The giant moved first.
He exploded forward with speed that his size had no right to possess. The greatsword came up in both hands, and the three huge [Gravity Magic Crystals] embedded in the blade ignited one after another.
Hodell did not retreat.
He curled his fingers and released a burst of simulated fire energy.
An incandescent wheel of light unfolded in his palm. From it, dozens of tightly compressed crimson bolts screamed outward in a fan shaped barrage, each one arcing toward the giant with ruthless precision.
The giant roared, swung, and met them head on.
The gravity crystals on his sword produced a violent pull. Most of the incoming firebolts were dragged sideways and smashed against the broad blade instead.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Explosions chained across the sword edge, swallowing the giant in fire.
The next second, a vast purple crescent tore straight through the flames.
The giant charged through the blast cloud, armor scorched, momentum untouched. The tide itself had been dragged into his strike and attached to the sword edge, turning the slash into a several meter long arc of crackling purple destruction.
"If you've got the guts," he bellowed, "take my sword!"
Hodell did no such thing.
The thrusters on White Crow's back exhaled a burst of pale violet steam. His body shifted three meters to the side in an instant, skimming past the crescent edge by a margin so thin it almost looked insulting.
The sword smashed down.
The ground split.
A ravine more than ten meters long burst open where he had been standing a heartbeat earlier.
As the giant recovered, Hodell flicked his fingers.
Thin strands of ghost blue electricity shot out and clung to the giant's armor rather than dispersing. They crawled over the power joints like living parasites, locking themselves into the seams with adhesive force.
The giant gave them a dismissive glance.
"Pathetic."
He roared, and a ring of earth yellow gravity ripples burst outward from his chest.
His charge resumed without slowing.
The greatsword came around again in a crushing horizontal sweep.
Hodell felt White Crow groan as the local gravity field spiked around him. Metal strained. Weight multiplied.
He raised one hand.
Source energy burst through his palm, forming a sharply tuned repulsion field.
To outside eyes, it looked like some instantaneous gravity counterspell.
Boom!
The sword passed in front of him, but its trajectory slipped by a few vital centimeters, deflected just enough to miss his torso and instead split the ground at his side.
Now Gray moved.
Bone thin forbidden wires sprang from his fingertips and cut through the storm like silver black fangs, targeting the vulnerable junctions at Hodell's neck, waist, elbows, and knees.
At the same time, the third man, Bone Engraving, finally acted.
The nine white runes orbiting his body flared darkly, then plunged into the ground. In the next instant, the stone under Hodell's feet softened into a black, viscous mire. Skeletal hands burst out of it and grabbed at his ankles, calves, and knees.
"Locked," Gray hissed.
His fingers hooked sharply.
The forbidden wires struck White Crow's armor and exploded in showers of sparks. A clogging effect spread along the exoskeleton's surfaces, interfering with the smooth circulation of energy through its outer lines.
The giant came in for the kill.
"[Polar Triple Slash: Breakflow]!"
His sword descended three times in succession, each cut landing precisely on the points where Hodell's movement had been suppressed.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
Deep dents appeared in White Crow's forearm guards as Hodell crossed his arms and took the impact. His knees bent slightly. The stone beneath him webbed with cracks.
Gray advanced one step at a time, wires tightening further.
"Did you really think one man could fight the Merchant Guild?"
In the Wasteland, Homan was watching the live relay from a remote crystal terminal.
He leaned forward in his chair, eyes bright with greed.
"Yes. Exactly like that. Kill him."
In another tower, one of the Ranking Festival supervisors had already stood up from his seat, gripping the edge of the table so hard his knuckles had gone white.
At this moment, Hodell looked cornered.
Gravity pinned him. Bone hands dragged at his legs. Forbidden wires chewed at his armor. A giant sword hovered one strike away from breaking him open.
Gray's wire tips were almost brushing the plates at Hodell's throat.
"Pale," he said softly, "is this your limit?"
Hodell slowly raised his head.
A low laugh came from behind the silver mask.
"Your understanding of mages," he said, almost kindly, "is still far too shallow."
There was even a trace of pity in his tone.
"I gave you courtesy. You answered with contempt."
His voice dropped.
"Fine. No more pretending."
[Character Summon Card: Elanis]
[Uses Remaining: 2/8]
"Then feel what a real mage looks like."
Hum!
An immense, crushing energy ripple burst outward from Hodell's body without warning.
Within a radius of thirty meters, the raging tide abruptly flattened.
The air stopped moving.
The light bent.
Everything in that space took on the warped, heavy quality of a bubble sunk beneath the deepest sea.
The giant was hit first.
His charge halted so suddenly it looked absurd. His boots dug trenches into the ground. Every hydraulic component in his armor screamed under the load. The sword that had moved like a falling mountain now felt as though it had been shoved into a swamp.
Gray's forbidden wires suffered even worse.
The further they extended into the field, the slower they became. By the time they reached Hodell's throat, their speed had been cut so badly they might as well have been drifting.
Hodell merely tilted his head and let them slide past.
Gray's expression changed.
"What is this?!"
Bone Engraving's face twisted too.
A field of this scale should have required arrays, anchored rituals, external devices, something. Yet there had been no preparatory fluctuation, no corridor buildup, no casting pattern. It had simply happened.
"This is impossible!" Gray barked. "A domain spell of this size needs a gravity array network! There should be a structure!"
Hodell did not explain.
He had no intention of helping them understand anything.
Bone Engraving's eyes flashed with desperation. He bit his tongue and spat a mouthful of blood onto the dark gold staff in his grip.
The nine runes on the ground began to tremble.
Blood, debris, and free energy from the tide were devoured by the pattern, and within seconds, a towering skeletal construct rose from the mire.
It was five meters tall.
Its bones were carved with forbidden inscriptions. Ghostly green fire burned in its eye sockets and rib cage. In its hands it carried a giant bone scythe that split the air with a soul cutting shriek as it came down toward Hodell's head.
Even inside the field, its bulk let it brute force through some of the pressure.
Hodell watched it come with genuine interest.
"The magic system here really does love its little tricks."
The thrusters behind White Crow hissed.
Simulated wind energy flowed through his body. Simulated lightning sharpened his burst response. His entire movement pattern changed in an instant.
To those watching, it looked like his body simply blurred.
The scythe came down and smashed only an afterimage, carving a fresh trench through the ground.
Before the skeletal giant could recover, blue violet arcs shot from Hodell's fingertips and wrapped around its joints. Instead of dispersing, they burrowed inward, invading the structure and destabilizing the energy logic running through the construct.
The giant began to shake.
Its phosphorus fire flickered violently.
Bone Engraving staggered as the backlash hit him.
At the same time, Gray's restraint snapped.
His robe's overload module erupted. Tens of thousands of micro vents blasted out scorching waste heat. His eyes turned bloodshot. From his waist, he pulled a beautifully engineered magitech bomb.
He knew he could not throw it from range. The field would cripple the projectile before it got close.
So he did the only thing left.
He lunged straight in.
Like a man willing to die if it meant taking his enemy with him.
Hodell's eyes went cold.
Gray came fast, teeth clenched, bomb armed.
The simplest reading of his motion was panic.
The truth was more amusing.
"Still trying to liquidate me?"
Hodell bent his knees.
Simulated wind lightness and lightning burst overlapped perfectly inside White Crow. For one instant, his movement speed exceeded what the human eye could properly parse.
Gray's death charge sliced through empty space.
By the time he realized he had missed, Hodell was already behind him.
And in Hodell's hand rested a perfectly formed blue energy sphere no larger than a billiard ball.
The giant's pupils shrank in terror as he saw it.
"No!"
Hodell flicked his wrist.
The sphere crossed the field in a razor sharp arc and struck the giant square in the chest.
What followed was not a simple explosion.
First came silence.
A pale frost spread over the giant's torso in an instant. His alloy armor, which had endured the tide and the strain of overcharged gravity, lost all toughness at once. Fine cracks raced across it like a frozen porcelain shell.
Then thunder detonated inside the armor.
Boom!
Purple blue lightning flooded every crack, drilling into the power joints and tearing apart the internal structure at the microscopic level.
The giant's body locked up.
Then it shattered.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
His massive form broke into countless blackened ice bright fragments that sprayed across the field in a glittering, smoking cloud. His greatsword snapped apart with him, the broken blade tumbling uselessly across the ground.
[Ultimate Trial: Current Progress 699 / 1500]
[Kill Confirmed. Festival Points: 175]
The smell of ozone and burnt meat spread through the storm.
Hodell turned slowly amid the falling debris.
He did not advance right away. Instead, his hand rose again to the second storage compartment in White Crow's arm.
The silver mask glimmered under the last crawling sparks.
Gray and Bone Engraving stared at him as if they had just seen something crawl out of a nightmare.
Hodell's voice drifted across the deadened field, calm and cruel.
"You two don't need to panic."
His fingers touched another hidden sphere.
"There are still two portions of interest left to collect."
.....
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