Chương 166: Chapter 150: I Have Kept the Faith

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 38 — 10: 55 AM [Location]: The Crown of Ovelia · Grand Masters Main Arena · Royal Rosas Team Bench The reset protocol cleared the Permafrost Tundra's deployment zones. Above the central dome, the terrain roulette spun and locked. [Selected Terrain: Sector 3 — Toxic Miasma Swamps.] The swamp was a sprawling, suffocating nightmare. Rotting vegetation. Bubbling pools of corrosive mud.

A thick, bruised-green fog rolling in dense, slow sheets over stagnant water, reducing visibility to near zero. It was a decaying graveyard of a biome, designed to punish precision and strangle everything clean. The heavy gates of the Greed Umbrella tunnel ground open. Flandmira walked out into the rot. Her immaculate silver-white fitted robe and the flawless, light-catching clarity of the [Prism Queen] looked actively, offensively wrong in this environment.

She stood in the bubbling muck like a cut diamond dropped into a sewer: completely out of place and entirely unbothered by the incongruity. The colorless diamond on her ring finger and the crystal scepter were the only things in the entire arena still catching the light. Across the murky expanse, Tasia stepped out and looked at her. The referee hovered above the center of the swamp. The countdown sphere formed. The fireball dropped. The ward shattered. Flandmira stole the first frame. Tasia didn't panic.

She planted her boots in the mud and began painting her shields. [Stoneskin · Empowered] snapped into her epidermis, immediately resonating with a freshly cast [Soul Armor · Empowered]. Using the sheer mechanical violence of the [Chain Casting] metamagic feat, she forcibly sutured both high-tier defensive matrices to a foundational [Greater Mage Armor].

The three layers fused together with the precision of a macro drilled ten thousand times, triggering a composite physical-and-magical resistance protocol that Hathaway's developer brain classified instantly. High-Resist Mage Shield. The fundamental survival doctrine of a reactive caster: you're behind on initiative, so you buy survival. But while Tasia was building her fortress, Flandmira was taking the entire map. [Gallery of Mirrors] (Tier-5, Illusion/Evocation).

Instantly followed by a Witch-exclusive metamagic feat: [Spell Rebound]. The technique was borderline criminal. It forcefully cannibalized the residual mana of the just-completed spell, violently stealing time from the casting engine, allowing an identical formula to manifest in the very next frame without cooldown penalty. The crystal core of the [Prism Queen] erupted. Thousands of palm-sized, perfectly polished crystal lenses condensed out of the humid, toxic air in a single breath.

They spread like an aggressive, sudden galaxy of stars, displacing the purple fog, filling a one-kilometer radius with suspended geometric precision. In the heart of the dark, rotting swamp, the crystalline array was the only source of light in the entire arena. Beautiful. Clinical. Completely incompatible with the rot it had just colonized. Hathaway's hands found the armrests, her internal processor burning through the implications at full capacity. She completely changed her build.

Against Alucard, Flandmira had operated as a precision turret. Fixed position. Locked coordinates. Concentrated fire. But Tasia's entire combat geometry revolved around fixed coordinates. Mark a point. Fire from it. A coordinate is a singular point in space, her developer brain processed, a cold spike of awe spreading through her tactical circuits.

But if you turn every cubic inch of the arena into a continuously refracting optical medium—if you weaponize the concept of space itself—the question of 'where is the coordinate' becomes mathematically meaningless. She is not building a turret. She is deleting the targeting system. Before Tasia's final shield layer had fully settled, the array opened fire.

A [Energy Storm · Empower: Escalate] tore through the mirror network, amplifying and fracturing across a thousand lenses, converging on Tasia from angles that simply shouldn't have existed. But inside that storm, invisible in the light noise, Flandmira had slipped a second cast. [Reverse Gravity] (Transmutation). Targeted not at Tasia's body. At the patch of swamp directly beneath her right boot. Tasia stumbled. Half a step. The precision of her footwork fractured for exactly that fraction of a second.

And in that fraction, Flandmira triggered an area command. [Transmutation: Arcane-Martial Shift]. The [Energy Storm · Empower: Escalate] lost its elemental properties entirely. The raw arcane energy hardened into pure, concussive physical force just before impact. Tasia's elemental resistances were legendary. Fire, ice, lightning: they barely registered. Physical kinetic shrapnel was a different stat category entirely. Flandmira had bypassed the Dragon Empress's racial armor and gone straight for the gap.

Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. The converted storm slammed into Tasia. The kinetic violence tore through the foundational [Greater Mage Armor] in a microsecond. The [Soul Armor] shattered. The [Stoneskin] crumpled. The remaining concussive force hit Tasia's body directly. In the bench area, Hathaway went dead silent. A thin line of crimson at Tasia's collarbone. Beneath the torn collar, the silver dragon scales were exposed.

Hathaway knew the metrics. Those were the same scales that had eaten Maximized Tier-8 plasma point-blank and walked away with nothing but a microscopic hairline scratch. But right now, under the kinetic impact, three of those immaculate silver scales had buckled, spider-webbed with bleeding fissures. She read the stat sheet, her developer brain said. And then she wrote a custom execution script. Tasia raised her head. She didn't bother tracing the incoming fire. She simply opened her mouth. [Greater Shout].

She synchronized the vocalization with a dense sonic transmutation, layered four elemental damage types into the soundwave, and ignited the [Elemental Surge] feat. The roar hit the mirror array. It didn't shatter the crystal. Tasia understood the matchup: shattered mirrors produced shards, and shards were still a refractive medium. You didn't break Flandmira's tools. You deleted them. The multi-elemental shockwave swept through the right flank of the array and erased half the lenses down to the atomic level.

A clean, localized annihilation of matter. The arena settled into a grinding, suffocating rhythm. Flandmira leaned into the optics. The toxic fog, which normally hindered precision, was also an excellent diffusion medium for light. She stepped deeper into the surviving array and used the swamp's murk to bend her own silhouette, generating severe visual displacement across dozens of mirrors simultaneously. Her physical location and her apparent location stopped being the same coordinate.

She's dissolving into the terrain, Hathaway thought, watching the optical ghosting. Tasia's answer was absolute, ruthless discipline. She didn't chase the light. She looked at the map and marked the chokepoints: the coordinates Flandmira had to pass through to maintain her firing angles. The trap didn't follow the prey. It waited for the prey to step inside. Then Tasia activated those coordinates. Not offensive spells. Dense, aggressive mana noise flooded from every marked point simultaneously.

A continuous, hyper-saturated broadcast of arcane static. The toxic fog, which had initially helped Flandmira, now became her prison. The thick miasma caught Tasia's jamming signal and scattered it across the prism network. Flandmira's [Targeted Casting] passive, dependent on clean optical feedback for coordinate locks, stalled out, drowning in error signals it couldn't parse. Her tools were intact. Her tools were simply useless.

In the bench area, Hathaway stared at the screen, her developer brain undergoing a complete, catastrophic bluescreen. They are doing the exact same thing, she realized, her hands gripping the armrests. They are both building turrets. They are both marking the battlefield. They are both trying to overlay their own targeting UI onto the exact same physical space and turn the terrain into their weapon. It's a mirror match. The resource war tilted.

Flandmira tried to rebuild her lenses, but Tasia was consuming board space faster than it could be restored. The crystal network was bleeding. The artillery installation was shrinking sector by sector. When the last viable cluster of lenses finally dissolved under the arcane noise, Hathaway expected Flandmira to retreat. Find cover. Attempt a reboot. Play for time. Flandmira stepped forward. [Dimensional Jump] chained seamlessly into [Blink].

The transition from stationary artillery to hyper-kinetic rush was a masterpiece of mechanical execution: flawless, exquisite, zero hesitation between the decision and its expression. She bypassed the fog, the rotting trees, the mud, and materialized at absolute zero distance, directly inside Tasia's personal space. Tasia had a [Disintegrate] fully chambered. The moment Flandmira appeared, the emerald annihilation beam fired. The beam struck. The figure shattered into glass. A [Mirror Image].

In the single, fractional tick, the real Flandmira materialized half a step to the left, the [Prism Queen] raised in her grip. You do not walk a crystal scepter into a Grand Masters arena unless— Her breath caught. This is a group stage match, her tactical processor noted, completely failing to reconcile the math. Not elimination. Not finals. Greed Umbrella is comfortably ahead. If it were me, would I burn Star Orbit for a single exchange in a group match? No. Never.

The broadcast camera caught a tight close-up of Flandmira's face. She didn't look cornered. She didn't look desperate. She looked utterly, profoundly serene. A woman crossing the final line of a race she had decided, somewhere long before this arena, to finish. A verse from a very old book, from a very different world, drifted up out of Hathaway's memory.

"I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith..." Flandmira drove her mana into the fractured core of the [Prism Queen]. The legendary crystal scepter detonated in her hands. She is not leaving this for whoever comes next. [Photon Sniper Array · Full Burst]. [Metamagic: Maximize]. As the scepter pulverized into luminous dust, the millions of suspended fragments formed a single, hyper-dense, point-blank refraction lens.

Hundreds of high-frequency radiation streams, pure invisible gamma rays, were caught by the dying shards, focused and converged into a singular, apocalyptic torrent of annihilation aimed directly at the center of Tasia's forehead at zero range. For the first time in the tournament, something moved through Tasia's grey eyes. [Tyrant's Grace] snapped open at her side. Hathaway's internal monologue went deathly quiet. One. She knew what that book was. A coming-of-age gift from Tasia's two mothers.

They had violently compressed the cores of twelve high-magic planes simply to manufacture the raw material for its blank pages: each one reserved for a spell she hadn't learned yet. The family had calculated for a full century of unchecked study. If she ever ran out, they would simply hunt down a thirteenth plane and refill it. Two. Three. The silver dragon-claw insignia erupted with a blinding radiance.... ten. Ten blank pages of the legendary grimoire spontaneously burned to ash in a fraction of a second.

The sacrificed planar material erected an absolute spatial barrier just as the gamma ray burst made contact. The collision was entirely silent. The sheer energy yield deleted the concept of acoustic output. The shockwave tore outward. The toxic miasma flash-incinerated across a massive expanding sphere. Swamp water boiled away. Rotting vegetation vaporized.

When the light faded, a vast, perfect cylinder of clear blue sky was burning down through the center of the arena, punched clean through hundreds of meters of poisonous fog. Flandmira was gone, claimed by the resurrection stone before the light finished dying. Tasia stood alone in the center of the clearing. Breathing heavily, her posture hunched. The exposed silver dragon scales along her neck and jawline were violently charred, bleeding from dozens of new micro-fissures.

Smoke rose from the scorched, ruined edges of her combat jacket. Around her boots, the ash of ten burned grimoire pages drifted down through the still air. Black snow. In the bench area, Hathaway sat motionless, watching the burned paper settle. Flandmira had permanently detonated her entire legendary scepter just to make Tasia burn ten pages she hadn't yet had cause to fill.

A doomed player, Hathaway thought, the gaming voice quiet and certain in the back of her head, who forced a destined winner to pay the cost in blood.