Dracula turned his head, his cloudy, single eye looking toward the entrance.
That golden thread was now only an inch away from the stone pillar's core.
Bell stood on the final step. The Soul Vibration Cannon in his hands emitted a sharp charging sound. The runes on its Mithril skeleton lit up one by one, and a high-frequency hum pierced through the surging waves of blood-scented air in the secret chamber.
But his attention did not remain on Dracula.
To the right of the chamber...
Cecilia's fire explosion erupted in mid-air. The orange-red shockwave swept across the stone walls, charring the reliefs on the surface. A wind-based severing followed immediately, transparent blade arcs strangling from three directions at once. A lightning penetration spell squeezed through the gaps, arcs of electricity splitting into white forks in the air.
The stacking of three high-level spells was enough to blast a city gate into dust.
Tia stood right in the center of that firelight.
She didn't dodge. She didn't block.
A white mana-conducting film rippled over the surface of her Mithril body. The etheric conduction lines operated at full capacity, converting all the incoming violent energy into harmless breezes. Her silver hair was blown upward, then gently settled back onto her shoulders.
The three spells vanished.
Not even an aftershock remained.
Cecilia's fingers froze in mid-air.
She had tried everything.
Fire. Wind. Lightning. Shadow attribute curse chains. Dual-element fusion blasts. Triple-element sealing magic arrays.
All of them were ineffective.
Every spell that touched that Mithril body simply sank into the surface and dissipated, leaving not even a ripple behind.
The combat experience accumulated over hundreds of loops—slaying dragons, butchering gods, draining the World Tree...
In the face of this pile of scrap metal, it had all become useless scrap paper.
Anxiety surged up from her stomach. Her nails dug into her palms, leaving four crescent-shaped white marks.
But what made her feel even worse than the anxiety was the fact that this thing was made by her brother.
Her brother had personally built a wall she could never smash through.
A very low guttural sound escaped Cecilia's throat.
She turned her head.
Leon stood fifteen meters behind Tia. Both his hands maintained an ice field, blocking her overflowing fire and wind magic five meters away. His short platinum hair was flecked with ice shards, his boots were wedged into the gaps between the stone tiles, and an ice-blue chill slowly spread out from beneath his feet.
An image flashed through her mind.
At the entrance of the Royal Magic Academy. That kid from a noble family was showing off while holding an ice butterfly, the patterns on its wings refined to a ridiculous degree.
She had extended a finger and flicked a tiny fire snake.
The ice butterfly melted.
A mere bug.
And now, this bug dared to stand in her way.
Cecilia's left hand rose.
No chanting. It wasn't necessary.
Fire, wind, and lightning. Three violent mana elements were forcibly kneaded together in mid-air. The center of each composite elemental storm was extremely compressed liquid lightning, with an outer layer of wind blades sharp enough to slice through city walls and high temperatures capable of liquefying rock.
The three storms formed a triangular formation.
Cecilia's finger pushed forward.
She didn't even spare it a second glance. She turned around, preparing to deal with the real trouble.
In her mind, this strike was enough to evaporate that mortal, along with the ice beneath his feet, into gas.
The storms tore through the air, emitting a piercing shriek.
Leon stood his ground.
His tactical map completed the simulation within 0.1 seconds. All dodge routes were sealed. The storm's coverage exceeded the limits of a retreat. The only option was to take it head-on.
He did not retreat.
He stepped back half a pace with his right leg. His boot wedged firmly into a gap in the stone tiles. Power surged from his waist. His spine twisted. The muscles of his right arm tensed to the limit beneath his sleeve.
Ice Spirit stacked frantically upon his fist.
It wasn't defense. It was absolute cold.
Minus sixty degrees. Minus a hundred.
Absolute zero.
The moisture in the air crystallized instantly. A white frost mist exploded outward from his right fist, whipping up a layer of bone-chilling ice waves in the secret chamber.
Ice Spirit Sky Frost!
He threw a punch.
There were no fancy techniques. Just pure physical kinetic energy combined with the ultimate ice mana.
His fist slammed into the center of the lead composite storm.
The liquid lightning stalled. The wind blades froze. The flames were extinguished.
The sound of extremely brittle shattering echoed through the chamber.
The three elemental storms, powerful enough to level half a city block, disintegrated from within. They shattered into a flurry of ice crystals. The crystals pelted the stone walls, creating a dense rustling sound.
Cecilia turned her head.
The movement of her neck was stiff. Her cervical vertebrae made a faint grinding sound.
Leon stood where he was. The ice beneath him was perfectly intact. Not a single scorch mark could be found on his clothes.
He flicked his wrist. A few pieces of residual ice attached to his fist fell to the ground, shattering into powder.
Her logic chain snapped right then and there.
A mortal.
No World Tree Heart. No accumulation from hundreds of loops. No god-level blessings.
Lilian leaned against the rear wall, blood still dripping from the dagger in her hand. She looked in that direction—a human knight had just smashed the composite magic of a World Tree host with a single punch.
Her fingers gripping the dagger's hilt loosened slightly.
It turned out that the gap in power wasn't locked away by bloodline and fate.
Leon straightened up. Beneath his short platinum hair, an ice-blue light slowly swirled at the base of his irises.
He spoke.
“Surprised?”
Short. Steady. No gasping for breath. No relief from a narrow escape.
“While you, Bell, and Tia were playing your sick game of house and boring emotional dramas—”
He took a step forward. His boot crushed a piece of ice crystal.
“I haven't stopped training for a single second.”
The air in the secret chamber solidified.
Tia's Mithril blade remained in an attacking posture, but the angle of the edge shifted by three degrees.
Her processing circuits tagged the information in that sentence. Leon was not lying. During the nights when Bell was managing the situation, analyzing intelligence, and designing equipment, Leon was at the training grounds. Every single night. Every single sword stroke.
The left side of Cecilia's cheek twitched twice. Her flesh jumped unnaturally.
A sick game of house.
Boring emotional dramas.
She had looped hundreds of times. Killed countless people. Destroyed countless worlds. Everything she had done—in the eyes of others, it was just a madwoman playing house.
And the person mocking her was a mortal she had never even bothered to look at.
Green light erupted from the blood vessels all over her body. It was no longer a flicker beneath the skin. It was a materialized pillar of light that pierced through her flesh. Droplets of blood seeped from the gashes, only to be evaporated by the green light, turning into fine white powder.
She clasped her hands before her chest, fingers interlocking.
Fire. Wind. Water. Earth. Lightning.
The five basic elements were forcibly extracted. This wasn't fusion. It was Annihilation. Five conflicting elements rubbed violently together within an extremely small space, producing a grayish-white beam of light. Black cracks appeared in the space surrounding the beam.
“Die.”
The word was squeezed through the gaps of her teeth.
The grayish-white Annihilation beam blasted toward Leon. Everywhere the beam passed, the stone tiles simply vanished, leaving not even dust behind.
The mana circuits within Leon's body operated at an overload. Veins bulged beneath his skin, appearing ice-blue. The temperature of his lips dropped below zero, and his exhaled breath condensed into a white mist before him.
He slammed both palms onto the ground.
Northland Galaxy.
The ice no longer spread in a fan shape. It pushed forward in a hemispherical wave centered on him. The extreme cold froze everything in space that could be frozen. The ice layer collided with the Annihilation beam. The grayish-white light was obstructed within the ice. As one layer of ice was melted, ten more layers were instantly replenished.
Blood seeped from the corners of Leon's mouth. It dripped onto the ice, instantly freezing into red beads.
But he did not retreat.
The ice field surged past the beam, creeping along the ground until it reached Cecilia's feet.
Cecilia's attention was entirely on maintaining the output of the Annihilation beam. The ice climbed up her boots. Within a second, it had frozen her shins and locked her knee joints.
The extreme cold severed the mana conduction circuits in her lower body.
Her fingers stiffened for a moment.
The output of the Annihilation beam paused for half a second.
Half a second.
Bell stood on the steps. The charging sound of the Soul Vibration Cannon continued to climb in his hands. His gaze swept over Leon—platinum hair flecked with ice and blood, knees trembling slightly, yet his feet were nailed to the spot, not retreating an inch.
This man had not wasted a single second while he and Tia were handling the affairs of Moon Phase City.
Every sword stroke. Every punch. Every night crushed at the training grounds. It was all being cashed in at this very moment.
A silver afterimage flashed through the chamber.
Tia did not take a straight line. She utilized the blind spots in the light refracted by Leon's ice field to cut in from the right. The liquid Mithril restructured itself on her right arm. It was no longer a single blade. It was an extremely thin, long Mithril rapier that lacked any reflection.
Cecilia's gaze had just shifted from Leon, preparing to shatter the ice on her legs.
The silver rapier was already there.
There was no sound of breaking air. No mana fluctuation. Only the dull thud of metal piercing flesh.
Pfft.
The rapier entered through Cecilia's left chest. It bypassed the obstruction of the ribs, precisely severing the cluster of blood vessels surrounding the heart. The tip of the sword emerged from her back, trailing a string of dark red blood beads. The beads lost their momentum in mid-air and fell onto the ice.
Cecilia's body froze.
The five-element magic in her hands instantly collapsed. The grayish-white beam vanished completely.
She looked down at the silver metal protruding from her chest. Green light surged frantically around the wound as the World Tree Heart attempted to repair the damaged organ. But the Mithril properties firmly wedged into the edges of the wound, and the etheric conduction lines emitted a faint white light, decomposing all the healing mana into harmless particles.
Tia stood before her, the distance between them less than half a foot.
Tia's upper body leaned forward slightly. Her Mithril face drew close to Cecilia's ear.
There was no emotional fluctuation. No anger. No pleasure.
“I won't be as soft-hearted as Bell.”
Tia's wrist twisted ninety degrees.
The rapier embedded in the heart rotated with it. The Mithril edge churned inside the ventricles. Muscle fibers were severed. Heart valves were torn apart.
A rattling sound came from Cecilia's throat. Large mouthfuls of blood surged from her mouth, flowing down her chin and dripping onto Tia's silver arm.
Green light points flickered frantically beneath her skin, the frequency reaching an extreme.
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