Earth's Greatest Magus

Chapter 3020: Agreement

She stared at the intruder—at a face that was the spitting image of Emery himself—and the color drained from her sharp features.

"You..." she breathed. "I thought you were dead. It’s been almost forty years."

"Well, clearly I wasn’t," the clone replied, every word guided by Emery’s will.

Its gaze never left her.

"What... what do you want?" Lyanna asked, instinctively taking a step back.

"Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten our agreement."

Nearly half a century ago, the two of them had struck a bargain. Emery would free Lyanna and help her obtain a new body. In return, she would serve him as one of his Khaos seeds.

Lyanna’s expression tightened as her thoughts raced.

"No... I haven’t."

Sensing her hesitation, Emery extended his divine sense through the clone.

Like all of his seeds, Lyanna’s connection had gone dormant during his journey into the Tartarus Realm, but it should still have remained buried deep within her soul, waiting to be awakened once more.

Instead, he met resistance.

A powerful seal had wrapped itself around the place where the Khaos mark should have been, forcefully repelling his divine sense the moment it made contact.

The probing lasted only a few seconds.

But Lyanna felt every moment of it.

"Get out of my head!"

She recoiled, fury flashing across her face.

"I am not the same person I was."

Then she proved it.

Power erupted from her without restraint. Gone was the modest strength Emery remembered from forty years ago, replaced by the dense, overwhelming aura of a Grand Magus. During the decades since he had last seen her, Lyanna Darkmoon had advanced beyond his expectations.

Almost simultaneously, powerful auras ignited from the surrounding cabins.

Two guards burst into the compartment—one from the front carriage and the other from the rear, a man and a woman, both Grand Magus realm.

"My Lady..."

The pair immediately positioned themselves between Lyanna and the clone, ready to attack at a single command.

The clone remained perfectly calm as Emery’s voice continued through it.

"Have you truly thought this through?"

Lyanna hesitated for only a heartbeat.

Her eyes hardened.

"You held my soul prisoner for decades."

"Never again."

"That’s unfortunate."

The words had barely left the clone’s mouth when the roof of the cabin exploded.

BAMMM!!!

Emery’s second shadow clone crashed through the ceiling like a spear of condensed darkness, its arrival detonating with tremendous force. The shockwave shattered the reinforced walls, ripping the entire carriage apart and exposing it to the screaming wind outside. Caught squarely by the blast, Lyanna was hurled clear of the wreckage before her guards could react, her body flung high into the open air above the mountain valley.

The train never recovered.

The explosion tore through its central structure, rupturing its formation engines as the massive vessel lurched violently off course. Metal screamed against metal as carriage after carriage buckled and broke free, the entire train beginning a catastrophic plunge toward the valley below, trailing fire, smoke, and twisted steel across the sky.

The two Grand Magus bodyguards shot after their mistress without hesitation, racing through the air with astonishing speed.

"Two Full Moon humans dare attack my lady?"

The male dark elf exploded forward in a flash of lightning, his entire body wrapped in crackling arcs of electricity as he crossed the distance in a single heartbeat. Beside him, the female advanced through a cloak of fire and black smoke, both palms glowing white-hot with condensed flames.

The woman’s burning hand clamped around one clone’s head, crushing inward—

Only for it to burst apart into black smoke.

At almost the same instant, the man’s lightning spear punched clean through the second clone’s chest.

It too dissolved into shadow.

Both clones dispersed into a dense cloud of roiling darkness that rapidly expanded through the air, swallowing the surrounding light and obscuring the guardians’ senses.

"Cheap tricks!" the male snarled, sweeping his arm to disperse the smoke.

A figure burst from the darkness.

A massive scythe cleaved through the smoke in a single savage arc, its blade carrying enough force to send both guardians flying. They slammed into the mountainside with explosive impact, fractures spiderwebbing through the rock beneath them.

As the smoke slowly dispersed, the attacker revealed herself.

A young woman with two horns curving from her forehead stood calmly upon the shattered cliff, effortlessly resting a giant scythe taller than she was across one shoulder. The dark blade still hummed from the tremendous swing.

"You two are fighting me."

It was Livi—the Baphomet.

Emery had sent her ahead in secret for precisely this moment. Her hybrid bloodline, exceptional concealment techniques, and burning desire to redeem herself after past failures had made her the ideal operative to infiltrate dark elf territory. She had waited in silence among the mountains until the perfect opportunity presented itself.

The two Grand Magus guardians pulled themselves upright, every trace of their attention now fixed upon the horned girl standing between them and Lyanna.

Both shadow clones reformed simultaneously. Without hesitation, they shot toward Lyanna from opposite directions, closing in from the left and the right.

Each clone wielded a blade forged from condensed darkness, and together they moved like twin phantoms around Lyanna. They attacked from opposite angles, their shadow blades carving through her fireballs before they could fully blossom, space folding around them as they blinked from one position to the next. They were never in the same place for more than an instant, making it impossible for her to pin either of them down.

Yet they never truly tried to kill her.

Instead, they circled relentlessly, driving her back while Emery’s voice echoed alternately from one clone to the other.

"You’ve grown much stronger," one observed, its blade slicing a black fireball neatly in half.

"And you’ve embedded yourself well within your new identity," the second added as it slipped past the sweep of her burning spear.

"But have you found your revenge?"

"SHUT UP!!!"

Something inside Lyanna finally snapped.

Her composure shattered beneath decades of buried resentment as overwhelming power erupted from her body. A roaring sea of black flames exploded outward in every direction, consuming the entire valley in an inferno hot enough to melt stone, the tidal wave of dark fire racing across the mountainside in an attempt to erase both clones at once.

The flames swallowed them.

Then space rippled.

Instead of dissolving into smoke, both clones vanished in the same instant, blinking through folded space before reappearing unharmed beyond the edge of the inferno.

Lyanna’s irritation gave way to unease.

She already understood they were clones.

But clones capable of spatial blinking, wielding dark-energy weapons, and possessing enough strength to contend with a Grand Magus?

Such things should not exist.

"This..." she muttered, narrowing her eyes. "This wasn’t part of our agreement."

Even as she spoke, her hands were already weaving another seal.

Crimson storm clouds condensed high above the valley, arcs of scarlet lightning writhing between them before erupting into a devastating barrage. Countless bolts rained down simultaneously, leaving no room for the clones to evade through spatial blinking alone.

The valley exploded beneath the bombardment.

Lightning tore through both shadow clones, ripping deep gouges through their bodies where the flames had failed. Their forms flickered violently, pieces of shadow scattering away before struggling to knit themselves back together.

For the first time since the battle began, the clones looked unstable.

"YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO HELP ME!!" Lyanna cried out, years of bitterness finally pouring into her voice.

From within the crimson storm, someone answered.

This time, the voice did not come from either clone.

Space quietly folded open behind her.

A figure stepped through the rift, radiating an aura that dwarfed the battlefield around him.

Emery’s true body, arriving through Livi’s waypoint at last. The real reason he had sent her into the dark territory.

Lyanna met his true gaze, and her breath caught as she felt his power.

A Grand Magus.

At least a Two Cosmos Grand Magus.

One whose aura was utterly overwhelming.

The last Emery she remembered had been nothing more than a Full Moon Magus. That memory was precisely why, after severing the Khaos seed and breaking through to the Grand Magus realm, she had convinced herself she could resist him if he ever returned.

The man standing before her now bore no resemblance to that memory.

This was true power—power worthy of a name feared throughout the dark elf domains.

Emery regarded her calmly.

Over the past several weeks, he had pieced together threads of her circumstances.

Despite all she had accomplished in seizing control of the Raine Clan, she remained far from possessing the strength needed to exact the revenge that had driven her for decades.

His expression softened slightly.

"I came to honor our agreement," he said. "I will help you... And in return, you will help me."

Lyanna’s composure wavered.

"Do you accept?" Emery asked.

A long silence followed before she slowly lowered herself to one knee.

"...Yes," she answered quietly.

"My Lord."

What followed surprised even Emery.

Lyanna handled everything herself with the decisiveness of the survivor she had always been.

She asked Emery to kill both of her guardians and stage the scene so it would appear that she had narrowly survived an assassination attempt. She even planted evidence directing suspicion toward one of the rival dark elf clans, laying the first stone in the revenge she had spent decades preparing.

When everything was finished, Lyanna Darkmoon returned as the sole survivor of a brutal ambush.

And, at long last, she also became Emery’s eleventh Khaos seed.