Chương 491: Chapter 489 – The Central Chamber

The null zone in the ruins was not the first one Damion had encountered. He remembered well the first one he found inside a Realm Breach when he was still at Silver Spire Magic Academy. That one had been a goblin breeding ground. The null zone had been set up to prevent the Ice affinity Demonic Beasts in the Breach from being able to do anything and thus be used as fuel to power whatever mechanisms the goblins deployed to raise their young.

The outer barrier of that null zone had been indistinguishable from the outside. Damion had only realized he was inside it after he had passed through and saw that the snow was not falling. This null zone was different, or perhaps his increased affinities and magic powers allowed him to perceive the barrier more easily. Ahead of him the null zone read as a blank slate. True Sight revealed nothing beyond the barrier to him, nor was he able to perceive anything with aura detection.

The path forward he would have to go alone. Taking out his tablet, Damion reviewed the data gathered by Mage Parivar's auto-mapper in the short moment the null zone had been deactivated to allow the Alfar to Portal out. The path to the central area was fairly simple. Because of the null zone, there were no Demonic Beasts, and it appeared that the Realm Breaches in the area had been collapsed as well, that or the Alfar had moved them out of the area beforehand. Though Damion was not sure they would have done so.

It would have been a monumental undertaking, both time-consuming and dangerous. Simply turning on the null zone would have driven away the beasts and handled the Breaches. As Damion traced the path he planned to follow to the heart of the ruins he noticed something odd. On the map he was working from, which was the final signals Mage Parivar's auto-mapper received before the null zone reactivated, he did not see any signals for the Alfar. This disturbed him greatly.

Attacking Sostrad was meant to lure the Alfar forces away, but he expected at least a few S Ranks with one of the Matrons at SS Rank to remain. Not until his eyes reached the center of the did he see a signal and when he did his eyes bulged. There, where Damion suspected the enchanted seal to be, he saw a single Alfar signal which read as SSS Rank. Numerous questions and possibilities ran through Damion's head. Unfortunately, he was short on answers for any of them. In the end it did not matter.

The Alfar remaining was SSS Rank, however, in less than six hours, which was about the time it would take him to reach the core area, so would he. Just one upgrade remained to be applied by the Magic System and that would propel Damion into the realm of SSS Rank. The only question now was, how strong was the Alfar SSS Rank. If Alfar had reached an extremely high magic power as an SSS Rank he might just have to purchase even more magic power upgrades from the System.

Before activating a domain spell, Damion cast Portal. They had already prearranged that Mage Fletcher would serve as an intermediary. Once the null zone was down, there was a good chance the Alfar would send reinforcements to the seal. If they did, then the Iblis and the humans would need to as well. For this reason, Mage Fletcher was waiting for Damion's Portal. She stepped through, taking note of where she was and reviewing the auto-mapper data for a moment before she opened her own Portal back to Ardnet.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. There she would wait until the auto-mapper told her the null zone was down. Once it fell, she ready herself to open a Portal back to the ruins. If the Iblis or any of the expedition forces Portaled back to Ardnet, she would open a Portal for them to the ruins so they could rush to Damion's aid.

"I'll see you all in a few hours," Damion told Mage Veers and the others as he activated his Shadow Domain and walked forward. He had spent a fair amount of time trying to decide which of his domain spells he should use to make his way to the seal. Ice was his strongest and the affinity he was most familiar with, but it was also more easily detectable and thus avoid attacks.

Frost Over was a great spell and allowed him to freeze multiple enemies or even a very agile enemy, but it was much less effective against strong foes. Shadow Domain, however, was more versatile. With Summon Shadows and Shadow Mastery Damion was sure he could strike at his enemy from multiple and unpredictable angles. Every shadow would become his weapon, and he doubted the Alfar would be ready for such an assault.

If Damion found that his Shadow affinity was not up to the task of handling this hidden Alfar powerhouse, then he would just have to resort to his final card. The Time affinity he had managed to acquire from Mage Harris gave him a hidden advantage, but not an unknowable one. Be it an Iblis, an Alfar or a human true mage, they each could use any affinity. The key factor was magic seals. Without the knowledge of spells for a particular affinity, just having access to it was pointless.

The SSS Rank Alfar was certainly going to be strong, but what types of spells they could use would be the real determining factor of victory or defeat for Damion. If the Alfar could only use spells of the basic affinities, Damion was sure he could dominate the fight with his use of Shadow and Time affinities. But what if the Alfar could use spells of something like Void?

From observing the Iblis and by revisiting past experience and reports of the Alfar, Damion had learned why their magic was often considered weird or unusual by humans. It was because they would mix affinities with spells. This approach to magic was something most human mages had never attempted and those that did had lackluster results. The reason was simple, those human mages were ones with multiple affinities that they had to train individually, not true mages.

Because of their split cores they could never make full use of their magic power and thus could never show how powerful multi-affinity spells could be. Even now, as he slowly headed to the heart of the ruins, it was Damion's first time considering such spells. He had on numerous occasions cast spells of different affinities at once, but never a single spell that made use of several affinities. Just imagining what the magic seal for such a spell might look like began to make his head hurt.

While it might have made his head hurt, it was also a good exercise for him to work on while he headed to this final confrontation. The distraction kept his anxiety in check and kept the fear of the unknown away as he moved toward the goal the Magic System had for him. That goal, that had greatly shaped his life and decision making, even before he realized it, left him wondering just what would happen to him once the seal was lifted? What about the System?