Chapter 382 - 371: Your Star of Death is Shining
Chapter 382: Chapter 371: Your Star of Death is Shining
Spatial ripples spread across the gray sky.
Allen’s figure stepped out of the void, landing steadily on the frozen earth.
The first jump with the Ring of Instantaneous Shadow was complete, covering three hundred kilometers.
The biting wind, laced with ice crystals, lashed his face. The temperature of negative forty degrees was enough to freeze a mortal to death, but Allen didn’t even frown.
He was still five hundred and twelve kilometers from the Icewind Academy. He did not continue to jump.
"Strategically, despise the enemy; tactically, take them seriously."
He had just whispered the maxim from his past life when the fierce wind swallowed his voice.
His opponents were three battle-hardened Second-level Black Wizards. They deserved his full respect; any underestimation could lead to disaster.
He stood his ground, his mind’s subprocesses running at full speed as he began a threat assessment of each one.
First, the Bloodline Wizard. Fused with the bloodline of an Ancient Giant, he was a close-quarters brawler. Tough hide, thick flesh, and immense strength.
Allen had no shortage of ways to deal with such a pure physical-damage brute.
Second, the Mind School Wizard—a nightmare for the vast majority of Wizards.
Invisible mental control, psychic assaults that were impossible to defend against... a Wizard of the same level could be turned into an imbecile with the slightest carelessness.
But Allen wasn’t afraid. He possessed the permanent Core Witchcraft, "Mechanical Mind."
His Sea of Spirit had long been completely restructured by a logic matrix, turning it into a fortress of steel. Mind-based Witchcraft hitting him was like striking armor plating with a sledgehammer. Besides, his Golem Legion had no true souls or minds to speak of.
But the third one...
A Witchcraft School Wizard, specializing in curses.
Allen’s expression grew solemn. Curse-type Witchcraft was the most "unreasonable" of all the schools of Witchcraft.
It required no contact, no physical touch, not even knowledge of your exact location.
A strand of hair, a drop of blood, or even just a name and a vague causal link was enough to launch a killing curse from hundreds of kilometers away.
You never knew when you’d be hit, making it impossible to defend against. Even more terrifying were certain "Death Curses"—a venomous backlash unleashed by the caster at the moment of their death. To be touched by one was like being infested by maggots that clung to the bone.
Allen quickly made his decision.
’The enemy is in the open while I am concealed. Rushing in for a one-on-three confrontation would be foolish.’
’I can’t give him any time to react.’
’I have to kill that curse Wizard in a single, fatal blow while he’s completely defenseless. Best to evaporate his soul along with him, leaving no chance to cast anything.’
Allen looked up at the gloomy, gray sky.
"Then I’ll strike from high above the heavens."
A dark blue spatial rift silently tore open in midair.
The Sky-Throne.
The oval-shaped, space-based weapons platform, one hundred and twenty meters long and eighty meters wide, flew silently out of the Half-Plane. Its massive shadow instantly blotted out the wind and snow.
Immediately after, two divine statues stepped onto the deck.
Divine Statue Gabriel went first.
Its white, porcelain-textured armor gleamed with a soft luster under the gray sky. The eight wings on its back spread slightly, and golden motes of light drifted down like the first snow of winter.
Next was the Divine Statue Cyclops. The single eye on the Cyclops’s face lit up with an orange-red flame, blazing as fiercely as blood under the glow of the aurora.
The moment this forty-eight-meter-tall, dark-red ancient god of war stepped onto the deck, the entire Sky-Throne visibly sank by several inches.
The two divine statues stood side by side: a white Angel and a dark-red ancient god. One gentle, one fierce. One for the sky, one for the land.
The ultimate forces Allen had spent sixty-seven million Magic Stones to create.
Today, for the first time, they were both being deployed to the battlefield.
"All Illusion Runes active. Cloaking array to maximum power."
Allen issued the command. "Vertical ascent. Target altitude: thirty thousand meters."
On the outer shell of the Sky-Throne, layers upon layers of Runes lit up and then faded.
The massive metal island, along with the two divine statues upon it, was simultaneously erased from the three dimensions of sight, Magic Power detection, and Spiritual Power probing.
It began to ascend vertically, in complete silence.
It passed through the low-altitude wind and snow, through the troposphere turbulent with Magic Power, through the eternally surging aurora, and entered the thin, near-vacuum of the upper atmosphere, right up to the edge of the layer of Law at thirty thousand meters.
At this altitude, it was extremely cold. The churning aurora below had become a jade-green ocean, while overhead was a black void dotted with points of light refracted from the Plane’s barrier.
Even the limits of a Second-level Wizard’s perception could never reach this high.
"Stealth cruise mode engaged. Target: directly above the Icewind Academy. Estimated time to arrival: forty-seven minutes."
Jarvis’s voice rang out in his mind.
With the Sky-Throne taken care of, Allen himself began to move.
He used all of his concealment methods: his Magic Power was constricted to a minimum, the Phantom Cloak was draped over him, and three layers of aura-suppressing Witchcraft were stacked on top.
His presence was compressed until it was fainter than that of a rock on the ice field.
He didn’t fly too high. Instead, he skimmed close to the surface of the ice field, advancing north under the cover of the howling wind.
His destination was a point one hundred kilometers from the Icewind Academy.
The choice of distance was precisely calculated. The Red Lotus-II guided Magic Missile had an effective range of two hundred and seventeen kilometers; one hundred kilometers was right in the middle of that range.
At this distance, the trajectory would be most stable, kinetic energy retention would be perfect, and accuracy would be at its peak.
He would set up his position there and commence the operation.
Meanwhile, inside the Cybertron Half-Plane, a vast war machine was silently awakening.
Five Golem Legions were awakened one by one from low-power hibernation. Swathes of red optical observation modules lit up in the dark warehouse.
One thousand Peacekeeper units marched in perfect unison, lining up in their deployment positions.
The auto-loading mechanical arms of the Purgatory Launch Platform were pushing one thick Magic Missile after another into their launch tubes.
Everything proceeded in silence.
...
「Icewind Academy」
The once-solemn academic sanctuary of this Plane was now unrecognizable. The corpses of several disemboweled faculty members who had tried to resist hung from the remaining walls.
The plaza was filled with the stench of dried blood and a palpable, unyielding terror.
Over a thousand apprentices huddled together like a flock of herded sheep, trembling in the ceaseless, cold wind of the Frost Wind Plane, not daring to make a sound.
The youngest among them was only twelve, the oldest barely in their early twenties. Fear and despair were written in everyone’s eyes.
In the center of the plaza, a massive Array had been drawn on the ground in dark red blood.
Thirty-one chosen apprentices were shackled to the edge of the Array with thick, black, runic iron chains.
They were the ones with the highest aptitude for Spiritual Power. Now, they were like lambs to the slaughter, awaiting a cruel ritual that could begin at any moment.
In front of the ruined clock tower.
The Bloodline Wizard, Herman, sat on a makeshift "throne." That throne was none other than the corpse of Headmaster Hrold.
Herman had his legs crossed, holding a delicate crystal glass filled with a vintage he had looted from the headmaster’s office. He took a large gulp, then spat it out on the ground in disgust.
"Tasteless," he grumbled, smacking his lips.
The "Whisperer," who had been hovering in midair, slowly descended. A strange light flickered in its purple pupils.
"Herman, is that New West stronghold cleared out?" the Whisperer asked.
"Cleared," Herman sneered nonchalantly. "Killed one First-level Wizard, captured two alive. Those Teaching Golems in their shop were kind of interesting, though. I had my men haul them back."
"There’s a Second-level Wizard behind them?" the Whisperer mentioned casually. "I hear he holds a position in the Gate of Truth. Think he’ll come looking for trouble?"
"What’s there to be afraid of?" Herman roared with laughter, the sound making the surrounding apprentices tremble. "There are three of us at Level 2. He dares to come? White Wizards are all a bunch of cowards hiding in their labs. They’ve got all sorts of flashy theories, but in a real fight, I could beat the shit out of him."
He stood up and walked over to the group of captives kneeling on the ground.
"From this day forward, the Icewind Academy is no more," Herman’s voice boomed like distant thunder across the plaza. "This place will become the ’Bloodthorn Academy,’ my territory. And you—"
His thick finger swept across the apprentices.
"—are all my property."
On the west side of the plaza, beneath a dead, giant tree.
The curse Wizard, Glen, who had been silent all this time, suddenly spoke in a raspy voice.
"Don’t be so absolute."
Glen was completely shrouded in a wide, gray robe, and the very air around him seemed to reek of decay.
Even the Black Wizard underlings didn’t dare come within ten meters of him. He raised a hand as withered as a bird’s claw, clutching a blackened bone pendant.
He held the bone pendant to his ear and closed his eyes, listening.
"There is... a trace of unease here." Glen opened his eyes, a flicker of doubt in his murky orbs. "The threads of fate are somewhat tangled."
Herman scoffed dismissively. "Old Glen, you’d be lucky if that mystical nonsense of yours is right three times out of ten. This is the Frost Wind Plane, a shithole even the Mystic Code Council can’t be bothered with. Who could possibly bring disaster upon us? Is the sky going to fall and crush us?"
Glen didn’t argue. He just silently tucked the bone pendant back into his sleeve, but his brow furrowed ever deeper.
「In the crowd」
Griffin knelt in the snow, his head bowed so low it was nearly buried in the ice.
His fingers were still trembling slightly.
He didn’t know when rescue would arrive, or if it would arrive at all.
Hatred churned in his chest like lava, but he clenched his jaw, forcing himself not to show the slightest hint of animosity.
The Whisperer’s mental scans swept over the crowd from time to time; any emotional fluctuation would bring a swift death.
’Survive.’
Griffin told himself, ’Survive until the boss gets here.’
Above the Icewind Academy, the sky was still a mass of gray clouds and howling winds. Everything looked no different than it had for the past several hundred years.
No one knew.
That at this very moment, directly above their heads...
...past the clouds, past the aurora, in the absolute silence of that place thirty thousand meters high...
...an oppressive aerial fortress was already hovering in silence.
The main cannon on the underside of the Sky-Throne—the "Light of Judgment"—had been extended.
Inside the eight-meter-long, six-meter-caliber abyssal silversink cannon barrel, three stacked layers of super-large Rune Arrays had lit up in sequence. Three second-generation Magic Engines were frantically drawing in the free-roaming Magic Power from the upper atmosphere.
A destructive light slowly coalesced deep within the cannon’s chamber, as if Death itself had just opened its eyes.