Alice felt her heart start to race as she stared at the group of Society mbers. Information clicked into place in her mind. The oddly undefended base. The empty hallways. The elaborate base and massive research project, without anywhere near the adequate manpower to start the whole operation.
They had even kidnapped [Scholar] Matista, who Alice had been wanting to talk to. Cecilia had spoken with Matista long before Alice had, and Cecilia was known to be helping Alice. It wouldn’t have been hard to realize that Alice might be interested in a eting with the [Scholar], and to kidnap her beforehand.
The whole base was a trap. It was designed for her.
Before Alice could finish processing that information, the worshippers in the room started to collapse. They were like sandcastles washed away by reality itself. Centiter by centiter, their flesh turned into black motes, which shrank into nonexistence monts later. Alice saw so of their dull, lifeless eyes flicker with relief, while others still stared deliriously at the statue - their minds too damaged for any awareness of their impending death. In monts, they all died.
However, they didn’t completely disappear - while their physical bodies turned to dust and ash, small orbs of mana remained where their bodies had collapsed. Those orbs of mana sent a steady, unbroken stream of mana through the air… towards the statue. Alice felt her heart sink as she realized what she was looking at..
The previous floor’s test. Whether people could still supply sothing with mana after their death. Clearly, the Society had found a way to make that happen, if it didn’t already happen naturally.
“Distract him,” said the Immortal who led the Society Mages, pointing towards Ethan.
A mont later, the statue shifted. Before, it hadn’t moved with purpose - it had only squird and shuffled in place.
Now, it rumbled to life. It got to its feet, and strode towards Ethan. Its movents were a jagged ss of unsteady steps, like a toddler learning to walk for the first ti. However, its effect on the nearby mana was horrible - every single movent it made broke the nearby mana, like a portal spewing broken mana into the void. Even though its movents were clumsy, the amount of mana radiating from its body made Alice suspect that it was still a threat.
“I’ll deal with the [Bard]. You grab the girl,” said the Society leader. “Three against a [Farr] and a noncombatant. It should be fine.”
“Other Mages, deal with the [rcenaries], then assist the other fights as needed,” said the Society leader.
Alice felt a chill in her heart.
They really were here for her.
The three near Immortals, as well as several other Society Mages, rushed towards Alice. The [rcenaries], who still numbered about fifty, adopted a defensive stance. Given that they were outnumbered nearly two to one, and the Society mbers were all Mages, Alice doubted they would last long, but she didn’t have the attention to spare to help them out.
Ethan tried to ignore the statue entirely, and instead rushed towards the Immortal who was attacking Allira - but the Statue shut that down nearly imdiately. As Ethan moved to help Allira, the statue raised its hand. A cone of broken rainbow mana fizzed into existence, surrounding both it and Ethan, and sohow, Ethan’s forward montum just… disappeared. In a tenth of a second, Ethan had been isolated from the rest of the group. Ethan’s eyes narrowed, before he imdiately tapped the air in front of him. Alice realized that Ethan couldn't see the rainbow bubble - so he didn’t even know exactly where the boundaries of his ‘prison’ were. He tried to open a portal using dinsional mana, but the other side of the portal just… never materialized. It was sothing Alice had never seen before when using dinsional mana. Where did the portal go? Into the void?
Ethan snapped the portal closed, and turned towards the statue. He started blasting it with pieces of shrapnel, but the statue shrugged off the attacks. Alice whirled towards the three near-Immortals who were advancing on her, and started to panic. Jonathan stepped in front of her, while Cecilia started throwing enchanted items at them, but the Society Mages stepped around Jonathan like he wasn’t even there. Jonathan was an extraordinary at shield - but his [Dexterity] was uninspiring. Cecilia’s enchanted items didn’t slow the Society Mages down much - there was far too big of a level difference between them for Cecilia’s actions to matter.
Alice’s mind raced. She needed to figure out how to turn the tables in this fight. But how?
A mont later, Alice felt {Adrenaline Rush} activate. The Society near-Immortals were far too close for comfort, and her Perk had finally decided she was at risk of death. Ti seed to slow down as the Perk worked its magic.
Alice scrambled for a solution.
Kinetic Magic had been her go-to combat style most of the ti. After all, it was highly effective against non-mages, and also incredibly mana efficient, while still being highly lethal. It was like being a human machine gun. However, there was no chance in hell that would work here. The Society Mages could shut down her attacks with almost no effort - the level gap was too wide. Organic magic was useless for the sa reason. Alice couldn’t think of a creative way to use her System mana to fix this ss.
Then, Alice’s mind caught on a mory. Of the first ti an Immortal had attacked her, during the boat ride back to tsel.
Alice had proven that she could shut down even an Immortal’s Perks with anti-magic mana, during the fight with Emilia weeks ago. That could shut down one of the three monsters barreling towards her - but there was no way to handle the other two. Alice nearly rejected the idea.
Wait.
Alice found a path forward.
There was no way Alice could handle three near-Immortals on her own. That was hopeless from the beginning. Ethan was also shut out of the fight, at least for now. The statue was trying its best to keep him contained, and Ethan was doing his best to blast the statue into dust. However, that would take so ti. However, Ethan was incredibly good at fighting. That was his focus as an Immortal, and what he had spent centuries practicing. Alice suspected he could hold the three near-Immortals off just fine, or possibly even win against all three of them on his own.
Ethan was trapped by mana. What if Alice set Ethan free?
Alice’s mind spun, even as the first near-Immortal tossed a volley of stone and tal fragnts at Alice’s legs. Alice drag herself out of the way using kinetic magic focused on her clothes, even though the sudden movent gave her whiplash. Jonathan ineffectively tried to get between Alice and the Society mages again, but he was too slow to matter. Cecilia scread as a few chunks of shrapnel buried themselves into her side - Alice didn’t think Cecilia was in critical danger, but it looked like it hurt a lot. A few of the pieces of shrapnel veered back towards Alice, bending their trajectory in midair to rip into her legs and paralyze her with pain. Alice managed to deflect them with kinetic magic, but the pieces of shrapnel took far more mana to manipulate than they should have. As Alice desperately tried to deflect the attacks with her magic, she activated {Burst of Multitasking}. Four of her extra tendrils went to defend her, while the final one opened up a new portal, and then slithered through it.
The other end of the portal was right in front of the rainbow mana keeping Ethan imprisoned. The mont it touched the barrier, Alice unloaded nearly half of her anti-magic mana into the distorted rainbow mana imprisoning Ethan. It didn’t eradicate the bubble entirely… but it opened a massive gap in it.
Ethan’s eyes widened the mont he saw Alice’s portal, and then he grinned, as he seed to realize what Alice was doing.
A mont later, Ethan used dinsional mana. Unlike his first attempt at making a portal out of the rainbow mana bubble, this one worked fine. Ethan darted forward, and then reappeared right next to Alice - and right in front of the three near-Immortals from the Society. An extra hundred magic tendrils sprang up around Ethan. Then, his body started shimring with rainbow mana.
A mont later, dozens of different attacks launched towards the Society Mages. A chaotic flower of stone fragnts, lances of thermal mana, lightning bolts, and stones the size of Alice’s head nearly ripped apart the three near-Immortals as they scrambled to defend themselves.
One of them vanished into thin air, as Dinsional Mana flowed out of her body and sent her elsewhere.
The other Society mage slled like cooked pork for several fractions of a second, as his flesh boiled under the weight of Ethan’s thermal offensive. Alice saw organic mana writhe around the man’s body, like the tendrils of a snake worming their way through his cooking flesh. Then, to Alice’s astonishnt, the man teleported away, as his charred flesh knitted itself back together.
The man’s healing Abilities were ridiculous. They were nearly as ridiculous as the near-Immortal Ethan had killed, all those months ago when two Society Mages and a Sigmusi [Assassin] had tried to kidnap or kill her on the way back from Cyra.
The third Mage surrounded himself with so sort of enchanted layer of clothing, deflecting a great deal of the heat. However, his hands were quickly ripped to pieces by a head-sized chunk of stone, and the man barely managed to roll away with his life intact.
A mont later, Ethan pointed a hand at the [Organic Mage] who had survived, and all of the objects near them started to gravitate towards the man, like pieces of dust in a sandstorm. Monts later, it felt like the entire room was trying to fling itself towards him - but unlike the first [Organic Mage] that Ethan had killed all those weeks ago, this man was also a [Kinetic Mage]. While his arms and legs rapidly got torn to pieces, every single object heading towards his vital organs was deflected by two dozen magic tendrils, all moving far more quickly and flexibly than normal tendrils should.
The three near-Immortals quickly reorganized themselves to fight Ethan, but they were struggling to hold him off.
Alice imdiately stepped in to help out. She created several ‘portals’ that she used to intercept Ethan’s projectiles, before teleporting them closer to their destination. The Society mages quickly adapted to Alice’s new tactic, but since they were already struggling, it wasn’t long before one of the Society near-Immortals took a bad hit to the head. Ethan imdiately capitalized on the mont, and in seconds, the man’s body turned into fragnts of disembodied flesh and cooked at.
Then, Alice heard a hiss of pain from the side. She whirled around, and saw that Allira was struggling to fend off the Society Immortal. Allira was doing an admirable job of fighting against a Mage as a non mage, but there were limits to what she could accomplish in a one on one fight. Allira had always seed like soone who fought better by taking advantage of gaps in an enemy's attention - almost like a song-based [Assassin]. In a one on one fight, there were no attention gaps for her to take advantage of. Alice saw shadows leap up and try to rip out the throats of the Society Mags, and shadow maws coalesce into existence at just the right spots to do damage… and the Society Immortal just nullified all of it through sheer movent speed. He wasn’t just dodging - he was literally flying around, like a hummingbird without wings. Alice quickly realized that the man didn’t even specialize in Kinetic mana - but he seed to have poured every single Perk from so [Kinetic Mage] Class into better and better flight. The man could dodge out of attacks that hadn’t even finished forming yet.
Since Alice figured Ethan had things under control, she focused on Allira. After all, she still had half of her anti-magic mana left. However, the Society Immortal probably knew what she could do. Alice doubted that she would land a hit on him if she tried to open a portal near his body. So she decided to start with a distraction. She pulled out several of the consumable enchantnts that Ethan had cramd into her storage Perk over the past few days, and then fired all of them through a new portal. She didn’t even stop to process what half of them did - she just chucked consumable enchantnts at the enemy and hoped for the best.
Several explosions happened right next to the Society Immortal, who fended them off while barely looking at them. Several other bolts of kinetically-empowered shrapnel flew towards him, but he wove out of the way easily. Enchantnt after enchantnt was thrown at him, but most seed to do nothing as he fended them off easily.
Until a cluster of necklaces Alice tossed at him got lucky. All twelve of them used kinetic magic… and tried to stop ‘nearby objects that were moving quickly.’ For a tenth of a second, they managed to catch and hold the Society Immortal in place. The Immortal almost instantly adapted and broke free, but it gave Allira a fraction of a second to regroup. anwhile, a plant root instantly squird out of the ground and ripped apart the necklaces like they were made of paper. Before Alice could blink in shock, she saw another burst of organic mana mixed with rainbow mana squirm under her own feet, and then a bunch of plant roots rose in front of her. They squird into a new shape - and Alice realized it was a spear right before it hit her.
{Adrenaline Rush} had ended long ago, so Alice barely managed to flop out of the way. The vine grazed the edge of her clothes, and Alice realized the Immortal hadn’t been trying to kill her. He had been sending her a warning not to interfere with the fight.
Luckily, Allira wasn’t useless. The mont Alice occupied so of the Society Immortal’s attention, Allira responded by bursting out into a full song. The world around them trembled, before a full-fledged army sprang into existence around them.
Alice took a mont to process what she was seeing, before she realized it wasn’t just one army she was looking at. It was two. One was unmistakably Illvarian - Alice recognized the flag, as well as the way the troops carried themselves, the language they yelled in, and the way their soldiers organized themselves.
The other group was probably the Sigmusi, the nightmare that seed to haunt more than half of Allira’s perk-induced illusions.
Normally, Allira’s illusions were kind of random. Alice had always assud that this was because Allira had no control over what the illusions actually did. They reenacted scenes from Allira’s mory, with little understanding of the fact that they weren’t alive, or that their environnt was very different from before. They were illusions, after all. Not real people.
This ti, it was different.
The [Soldiers], both Illvarian and Sigmusi, started the first second of the illusion like normal. They swung swords at each other, pelted both sides with arrows, and generally wreaked havoc as they tried their best to kill each other. Allira’s shadows started to lt away, as if they were snow thrown into a volcano. Perhaps Allira couldn’t maintain both her shadows and her illusions at the sa ti?
As Alice was thinking about that, she saw a wave of dissolving shadows leap into the soldiers of both sides. The illusions who had been inhabited by shadows froze for half a second, and then shifted. A mont later, they looked far more aware of their surroundings than before - and far, far more pissed off at the presence of the Society Immortal.
A mont later, nearly thirty [Archers] turned towards the Society Immortal and fired a wave of arrows at him.
The man flew out of the way, then whirled towards Allira again, ignoring Alice.
Only for Ethan to snap into place behind the man and slam him with a barrage of kinetically-powered objects. Alice glanced at the three near-Immortals who had tried to kidnap her, and realized that they were now dead. Ethan had finished cleaning up this part of the battlefield.
The Immortal tried to dodge out of the way of Ethan’s storm of attacks, but now he was actually struggling. Allira’s shadow soldiers and Ethan’s barrage of attacks created enough pressure that the man didn’t have any ti to focus on Alice at all. Alice focused, trying to visualize the man’s flight patterns and target him. She needed a perfect opportunity.
Nearly twenty-five seconds later, the opportunity appeared. The Immortal ducked out of the way of another wave of heat blasts from Ethan, and Ethan used that mont to pull out his father’s old sword. The Immortal, seemingly realizing what the sword was, dodged much more heavily than usual, placing him right into the path of a wave of Allira’s arrows. The man knocked those away with Kinetic magic, but all fifty-seven of his magic tendrils were occupied. Alice decided to take a risk and go for it. She opened a portal right in front of herself - with the other end of the portal right next to the Society Immortal. She shoved a mana tendril through the portal, and into the Society Immortal, before she shoved every drop of anti-magic mana she had remaining into his body.
For a brief mont, his Perks fizzled out. The man’s unnaturally smooth flight patterns cut out.
Ethan swung the sword, and a blast of heat burned away nearly half of the man’s body. Rainbow mana flashed through him, trying to regrow his body - and ran into Alice’s anti-magic mana. The rainbow mana pushed through it a quarter of a second later, but that was enough ti for Allira’s soldiers to nail him in the eye with an arrow. Sohow, he was still alive after that, but he teleported right in front of Alice.
Alice’s eyes widened as the man glared at her, the arrow in his eye and the missing lower half of his body widened in hatred and madness. Then, unexpectedly, he laughed, bitterly.
“I thought so. Take it. I won’t let it go to waste.” He reached into thin air, and rainbow mana flickered. A book appeared in his hands, and he stuffed it into Alice’s hands.
Then, Ethan appeared right in front of the man and unceremoniously beheaded him.
Alice breathed a low, heavy sigh of relief, as she glanced at the statue, which had stopped moving after Ethan escaped. She looked at the other dead near-Immortals of the Society. She glanced at the [rcenaries], who Allira was now helping mow down the other Society Mages. Nearly two thirds of the [rcenaries] had been wiped out, but with two Immortals helping them out, there was practically no chance that they would lose. She turned back to the Society Immortal - presumably, the leader of the shadowy organization.
Was he… really dead?
Part of her expected him to reach out towards her again. Perhaps to get up and attack her, snatch her before Ethan and Allira could rescue her. Or perhaps the real Immortal’s body would step out from behind another secret passage, and reveal that they had only killed his body double… or sothing. Or perhaps the book he had handed her would explode, or open up a portal and drag her away. This had to be a trap.
Right?
Even backed by an actual Immortal, the Society mbers had seed at least sowhat outmatched. This couldn’t be it, could it? Had they… really just decapitated the Society leadership?
Alice used organic mana to start ripping apart the Society leader’s headless corpse. There was no sensation of mana resistance. The headless corpse just collapsed. She glanced at the book again, and thought over his last words.
I won’t let it go to waste.
As confusion filled her mind, she finally realized that there was no denying the reality in front of her. The Leader of the Society of Starry Eyes was dead, and with him, most of the leadership had followed to the grave.
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