Chapter Ninety-Three: Half-Infernal Creature

Seeing the six former comrades before him repeating the same words, Roya could not help shivering all over despite gripping his weapon with both hands.

A single enchantment spell could turn your own kin into executioners raising their blades against you.

The renown of the Archmage Arthur had never been forged in a day.

There was a saying among Arthur’s people that if the gods did not roam the world in search of judgment, then the spellcasters would surely rule it; and those words had always carried a chilling truth.

“Do not be afraid. They are only illusions,” Zhao Xu said calmly.

His gaze had already passed over the six figures before him and settled on the fathomless darkness behind them.

In this tunnel, though the torchlight reached only a limited distance, its glow should still have offered a dim, shifting view of the farther reaches.

Yet now the light had been compressed entirely within a circle only a few paces wide, as though the world were wrapped in a vast black curtain.

“A spell of mage armor, providing invisible protection,” murmured the cleric’s wan figure, her face moving stiffly as if controlled by strings.

“A spell of protection from evil, granting deflection, saving throw resistance, and warding against intrusion,” said the rogue, Rainbow, his expression rigid, his mouth opening and closing woodenly.

“A sanctified ward, where an enemy’s attack must pass a will check first,” said the warrior, Maple, as though unseen hands were pressing his jaw and forcing the words from him.

“To find all three spells on a single person is no small feat.” The six voices spoke as one.

At that point Roya could no longer endure it. With a fierce slash of his blade, he cried, “Enough. Make them stop. Stop toying with my comrades.”

The sword strike was so powerful that even Zhao Xu heard the air split apart, as if mirroring the boundless fury in Roya’s heart.

“Noisy.” A cold voice drifted from the deep darkness behind them.

Nothing visible happened. Merely by the force of that voice, Roya’s entire body stiffened and he fell to the ground at once, as if all strength had been drawn out of him.

A prickling numbness ran down Zhao Xu’s back.

The instant that hidden hand spoke, his information panel reported that spell identification had failed.

A single quickened spell had struck Roya down directly, so swiftly that Zhao Xu had not even time to warn him.

His hands, gripping the protective staff, loosened slightly.

This was no longer something a four-circle arcane spell, no matter how fine, could save him from.

“Do not be nervous. It is only a spell of dictum: crippled, that is all. Some matters are best discussed between mages,” the voice continued from the darkness.

Zhao Xu gave a bitter smile. Dictum: crippled was no core spell, the kind that was difficult to learn.

It could reduce any character with less than fifty hit points directly to zero.

Only at minus ten hit points did one truly die; to bring a person precisely to zero, into that razor-thin state between life and death, was the kind of delicate effect only such a cunning spell could achieve.

A high-level mage’s casual spell could spill damage far beyond what was so easily controlled.

A quickened fifth-circle arcane spell, if it had not been optimized in any way, meant the caster possessed a ninth-circle spell slot.

A seventeenth-level mage capable of ninth-circle spells already sounded fantastical.

But even a ninth-level mage who could only cast fifth-circle spells was beyond Zhao Xu’s limits.

Let alone his own lesser spell negation barrier; even if he possessed the advanced sixth-circle version, the spell negation barrier that could ward off first- to fourth-circle spells, it would still be useless.

Once a mage could cast fifth-circle spells, the dimension of combat had already ascended to another level, and this was the stage Antinoya considered the true beginning of his becoming strong.

“Would it be better to dispel these illusions first?” Zhao Xu suggested.

Although Zhao Xu had not yet brought out his trump card, the hidden enemy before him seemed to be waiting as well.

“As you wish.”

Suddenly, the six motionless figures before him dissolved into nothingness.

The torchlit area on the ground widened considerably, and the darkness retreated a little farther.

Only then did Zhao Xu see that his original six comrades, from the cleric Yuanyou to the martial artist Jifeng, were all lying in disarray on the ground. He could not tell whether they had suffered the same treatment as Roya.

Zhao Xu quickly assessed the surroundings. The battlefield was simply too small; at this rate, the aftershock alone would probably send everyone here straight to the Shrine of Creation.

Still, Zhao Xu was not the sort of person who would surrender with both hands merely because his comrades had been taken hostage. The only thing he could do was fight to the death after his companions had fallen.

Slowly, a mage in a deep green robe with the hood drawn up stepped out from the boundary of the shadows.

He stood between firelight and darkness, graceful in his bearing, like one born to nobility, while in his hand he held a metal scepter slightly shorter than Zhao Xu’s staff.

A faint stench drifted through the air with him.

Zhao Xu’s attention, however, fell upon the scepter, and he recognized its origin.

Back when he had undergone the awakening ritual, the elderly mage Mokar, who presided over it, had held a scepter much like this one, a high-grade metamagic rod for quickened spells.

With that rod, Mokar had been able to quicken spells from the first through the ninth circle three times a day, without needing any high-level spell slots.

As for the mage before him, though the style was similar, it seemed nowhere near as valuable as Mokar’s rod; it was probably only a common version that could quicken spells from the first through the sixth circle.

That meant the quickened spells were being achieved through the rod, not through ninth-circle spell slots, and this realization eased Zhao Xu somewhat.

“Why did you knock down my comrades?” Zhao Xu asked after a moment.

The mage stepped another pace forward from the edge of shadow and lifted his head. “I should be the one asking why you trespass into the domain of the great mage Lyon.”

Seeing Lyon’s true face, even Zhao Xu, who had seen many infernal creatures in his past life, could not help but take a small step back.

The mage before him, Lyon, had horns upon his head, red light in his eyes, and half his face already covered in black scales. More terrifying still, a pair of bat-like wings, charred black, had unfurled from his back.

If Lyon had worn a mask, players might even have stupidly mistaken him for an Arthurian Batman.

But Zhao Xu, who had lived and died in the Demon-Sealing Campaign in his past life, knew very well that this mage had already become a half-infernal being.

Mages were entirely capable of altering their appearances through illusion, especially since Lyon had just used illusion to deceive them.

And yet Lyon still stood there with that dreadful appearance, clearly not caring that his half-infernal nature had been exposed.

Having understood this, Zhao Xu’s gaze also began to harden.

Half-infernal beings were creatures polluted by demons, devils, or other evil forces. In gaining formidable power, they also fell into darkness.

“So you mean to say that merely reducing you all to the brink of death is already quite polite of me?” Lyon mocked, madness glinting in his eyes.

“Then why didn’t you knock me down as well?” Zhao Xu shot back.

He had already completed the preparation ritual—at a single thought from him, the immense power behind him would burst forth.