Supreme Magus

Chapter 4347: Falling Apart (Part 1)

Dethroning Orpal and helping Jorl to establish his kingdom of Upyrs was but a stepping stone for Akhton.

His final goal was to put an end to the territorial wars in Verendi and unify the continent under his banner. Yet Akhton knew that the Master’s Organization, the current shadow ruler of Verendi, wouldn’t let him put it out of business without a fight.

The Organization barely acknowledged Akhton’s existence, but to him, they were sworn enemies. The Bastet-Upyr had never forgiven the Organization for capturing and experimenting on his mother, Ileza, and for profiting off the wars that the people of Verendi waged against each other.

’Sooner or later, the Organization and I will have to fight, and only one of us will come out of the conflict alive.’ He thought. ’Tezka is a core member of the Master’s Organization and its strongest member.

’If today we kill him, getting rid of the rest of the Master’s hybrids and freeing Verendi from their clutches tomorrow will be much easier. If we fail, we’ll still learn a lot about Tezka’s abilities and how to defeat him.

’The outcome of this battle doesn’t matter. As long as we survive, this will be our victory!’ Akhton thought, his mind filled with dreams of revenge and future glory.

Salanoth’s swarm of magical weapons attacked Tezka from the front to cloud his vision, while Uragar’s spells came from above, and Jorl and Akhton flanked the Suneater.

The three Upyrs attacked in unison, striking at the same moment as the swarm, so as not to give the Fylgja time to react. Tezka exhaled slowly, waving his hands in a circle as he planted his feet and widened his stance.

A flick of the Suneater’s right wrist opened a large Zero Warp before the incoming metal swarm, while the splaying of the fingers of his left hand conjured two exit points beside him.

As the flying weapons crossed through the blue spinning vortex, the Zero element stripped them of heat at the molecular level. Their enchantments stopped working, and Chaos Dimension severed their link with Salanoth, turning the remote-controlled blades into a mindless avalanche.

Tezka split the torrent of frozen weapons in two and aimed them at the Storm Griffon and the Bastet. The Cursed ice element had sealed the artifacts’ magical powers, but Adamant was still Adamant, and Zero coated the entire length of the weapons.

Akhton and Jorl were forced to slow down, focusing on defence to destroy and deflect what they couldn’t avoid. The razor-sharp layer of cursed ice made the frozen artifacts dangerous from tip to pommel, but that was only part of the problem.

’I trust the Black Throne’s skill in crafting my Starpath armor.’ Jorl thought as he fought with the fury of a living storm. ’What I’m afraid of is what that kind of cold will do to me if even one of those weapons gets stuck in my body.’

His Dusk Wraith maces destroyed dozens of frozen artifacts with each swing, producing the silvery sound of a spoon tapping a crystal flute. Alas, they also made their master’s worst fears come true.

The frozen weapons shattered on impact into hundreds of Adamant fragments, and the Zero element they were imbued with allowed them to pierce through the gravity sheath of the Starpath armor.

The smaller the Adamant shard, the sharper it was and the deeper it dug through Jorl’s black hide. The invading Zero element reacted like a hungry beast, robbing the Storm Griffon of his body heat and turning him into a shivering mess.

Jorl’s movements and maces became too slow to keep up with the onslaught as the frozen avalanche kept pouring out of the Zero Gate.

On Tezka’s left side, Akhton made the mistake of hurling a river of Origin Flames. The first wave of weapons thawed as he intended, but they were already too close to him for Salanoth to regain control, and their power cores struck him with their full might.

The now-working artifacts didn’t shatter against his spear, but they unleashed the fiery explosions, nets of lightning bolts, darkness mist, ice blades, and mud bindings that the Ring of Space had intended for Tezk upon the Upyr-Bastet.

On the one hand, the single burst of Origin Flame had cleansed the Zero element only from a handful of weapons, and with Akhton’s size and mass, he only suffered a few shallow wounds.

On the other hand, the flashes of light and the mana released by the weapons’ enchantments blinded Akhtom’s Life Vision and overloaded his Full Guard. The Bastet failed to defend himself from the following waves of frozen weapons, ending up like Jorl.

At the same time, Tezka clapped his hands to conjure a Corruption Gate and its exit point side by side, right past the boundaries of Chaos Dimension. Uragar’s spells fell into the entry point and came out of the Corruption Gate with a different energy signature.

Not only were they now capable of hurting their caster, but their original earth element had been replaced by Corruption after the dimensional gate had robbed it of the air element that kept the earth element stable.

"Oh, shit!" The Book of Knowledge’s Source Magic spells hit him with the speed of sound and the destructive power of a Cursed Spell.

They weren’t strong enough to do more than tear his host to shreds, but until Uragar regenerated the human, his mana reserves were limited to what was stored in his white crystals.

"Don’t give him time to recover!" Salanoth took a deep breath of Invigoration and called upon the power of the Severed Sky array. "The Suneater is a candle out of wax. It takes but one decent blow to snuff his flame out!"

The Ring of Space inwardly thanked Teneb for building his base away from a mana geyser, the gods for the Eldritch’s inability to use breathing technique, and her own maker, Taresia, for preparing way more energy devices to sustain the Severed Sky array than Salanoth had ever thought necessary.

’If just one of these factors weren’t in place, we would be dead already.’ She thought. ’I’ve fought and survived many Eldritches during my life, but none of them ever came close to Tezka’s power.

’Whatever trick he used to regain his physical body made him more than an Eldritch should amount to. I’ve cut him off from his Suneater spell, and Jorl infused us with plenty of Life Maelstrom, yet even after taking so much damage, Tezka can still keep up with us!’

She released a large chunk of the power stored in the dimensional and Spirit devices, fueling the Severed Sky array, and activated an Eternity Seal even stronger than before.

Immense gravity pressed on Chaos Dimension from every side, locking Tezka into place like a trapped mouse. At the same time, the dimensional sheath that surrounded the Eternity Seal reflected the spell’s gravitational force spreading outwards, doubling its destructive power.

Chaos Dimension shrank further, covering barely 10 meters (33’) around the Suneater. He gritted his fangs but didn’t lose control of his spell, not even when his nose, eyes, and ears started to bleed.

To make matters worse, Jorl and Akhton had already shrugged off the effects of the frozen metal shards. As soon as their body heat neutralized the little Zero carried by the weapons’ fragments, their self-repair enchantments rebuilt them.