Chương 150: The Glass Trap

Suddenly, in the heart of the seismic cyclone Vargas had created, Okonnor stopped evading. He stepped back in a sharp motion, and rather than attacking with his swords, he drove both green blades into the clay earth before him and cried out in a voice carrying the echo of a thousand ancient souls: [Ancient Forest Art: Absolute Emerald Prisons].

In immediate response to the commander's call, hundreds of massive roots, each as thick as the trunk of an aged tree and coiled like the muscles of a giant serpent, erupted from directly beneath Vargas's feet. These were no ordinary plant roots. They were covered in extremely sharp, poisonous thorns radiating a dark green light that absorbed mana.

The roots wrapped around Vargas's golden armor at lightning speed with tremendous force, attempting to crush him inside his precious plate like squeezing a lemon, and lock his movement down entirely.

"Do you truly believe these weeds can hold and stop an Imperial General?!" Vargas snarled with contempt, even as the roots constricted against his body to the point of making the metal shriek. He did not panic, instead, a dark brown and very dense aura detonated from the center of his body, and his Faded Gold armor began to radiate with the heat of its magical vibrations. He roared in a voice that shook the sky: [Rank Override: Supreme Earthquake Pulse].

The thick roots exploded and shattered into small fragments like nothing more than dry straw before the force of the crushing vibrational pulse Vargas discharged from his body.

The shockwave produced by this energy eruption spread in every direction and reached the position where Dex and Lumia were sheltering, forcing them to immediately duck and press themselves to the earth behind a massive boulder to avoid the sweeping atmospheric pressure that nearly shattered their eardrums and tore the boulder itself from its moorings.

"They are truly on an entirely different level. This is pure madness," Dex murmured in a low voice, clenching his newly restored fist, feeling the fresh pink skin against which his eyes had not yet grown accustomed.

"Every simple movement they make in this fight consumes quantities of mana that would annihilate an entire army of C-rank fighters in seconds. This is a battle that drains the planet itself." As he watched, Dex began to feel something strange. A small warmth, like the spark of a match hidden in a snowstorm, had started forming and pulsing at the center of his chest. His phoenix core, which had gone completely dark, was beginning to awaken from its coma.

The healing nectar he had drunk had not merely restored his flesh, it had cleaned and reopened the blocked and burned mana channels. And now, with its naturally ravenous fiery nature, the core had begun drawing scattered mana from the surrounding air, air thick with dense energy produced by the colossal magical collision between the two generals, and storing it as tiny drops of liquid mana.

"Lumia, listen to me carefully. I need just one minute, a single minute for this chaos around me to create the right opening," Dex said with complete seriousness, his piercing eyes tracking Vargas's movements with the precision of a seasoned prisoner studying the simplest habits and details of his cell for any crack of escape.

"Okonnor possesses absolute speed and superior skill, but Vargas possesses absolute defense thanks to that infuriating golden armor. That armor isn't merely hard metal, I've been watching it. It functions as an absorber of kinetic and magical shockwaves, grounding them into the earth. As long as his feet are in contact with the ground, Okonnor cannot penetrate it even if he strikes him a hundred times."

"What exactly are you planning to do, Dex?" Lumia asked with deep anxiety, looking at his arms that had only just healed.

"Your body hasn't fully recovered yet for advanced fire magic, and your core barely holds enough energy to light a candle!"

"I'm not going to attack him with direct fire force, that would be stupid suicide," Dex replied with a pale smile full of the cunning and craft he had learned in the darkest of places.

"Okonnor doesn't need an attack from me, he needs a gap. A tactical gap that makes Vargas lose his balance for a single moment only, long enough to break his armor's grounding connection with the earth. And the healing nectar has just given me enough physical strength and a small measure of mana to perform my usual dirty move." On the battlefield, Okonnor had begun to feel the true pressure of the fight.

Vargas was a tireless monster, and every blow Okonnor evaded left behind seismic destruction that made movement and maneuvering on the ground more difficult with each passing exchange. The space available to him was shrinking. Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. Vargas realized his opponent was losing maneuvering room and decided to finish things with a blow that could not be evaded.

He leaped extremely high into the air, so high that his armored body blocked the moonlight filtering through the thick smoke clouds. Airborne, he gripped the war axe with both hands, and the black blade began to swell in a frightening and terrifying fashion as dense earth mana was pumped into it, until it resembled a meteoric mass of rock falling from the sky. The moment he named the technique, the atmospheric pressure rose to the point of suffocation.

Okonnor understood with a single glance that any attempt to dodge or flee this blow was impossible, the circle of destruction that would result from this meteor's impact would annihilate everything living within a full kilometer radius. Okonnor did not flee. He stood firm in his place, closed his eyes for a moment, and gathered every last drop of his life energy and magic into a single, solitary arrow which he set against his long bow's string.

The arrow blazed with such dense green light that it nearly burned the bone bow itself, and had begun absorbing life energy from the surrounding trees to feed itself. [Absolute Execution Arrow: Soul of the Great Forest]. Both of them, the monster and the elf, stood on the verge of releasing their most powerful and most violent attacks. This collision would determine not only their fates but the fate of the entire forest.

And in that precise moment, while every eye was fixed on the sky and the bow, Dex appeared from behind the rubble of boulders. He did not launch a great fireball, and he did not shout defiantly as heroes do in stories. Instead he used his oldest and most fundamental skill, the precise control of magical threads, augmented by the few small drops of fire mana he had just recovered. Dex did not target Vargas plunging from the sky, that would not scratch his armor.

He targeted the earth, specifically the calculated landing point where Vargas would come down with all his weight and the momentum of his strike. Dex pumped all of his heat in a sudden and extremely concentrated burst into a single small spot of muddy soil at the predicted landing point beneath Vargas's foot.

The superheated and tightly focused heat caused no explosion, instead it melted the sand and mud in a fraction of a second, converting that spot into a thin sheet of perfectly smooth, completely frictionless liquid glass. As Vargas plummeted with his legendary meteor strike, certain of crushing his enemy, his right foot, his primary pivot point, made contact with the sudden glass surface Dex had crafted with calculated cunning. In that instant, friction disappeared entirely.

The General's heavy foot slipped dramatically and rapidly, and his perfect balance was lost. The path of the enormous axe deviated by a small fraction of a meter due to the sudden disruption of mass. In a street fight, a slip might mean a bruise, but in combat at A+ rank, where the energies surpass imagination, a small fraction is the difference between life and death.

The meteor strike that was going to crush Okonnor and reduce him to dust slammed into the ground directly beside him, producing a terrifying seismic explosion that hurled everyone away and sent boulders flying like shrapnel. But, Okonnor had already released his great green arrow in the very moment Vargas's balance had broken. Okonnor's green arrow, charged with the fury of nature, pierced Vargas's shoulder with lethal precision.

The golden armor, which had lost its connection and its grounding to the earth when it slipped on the glass, could not discharge the arrow's immense magical energy. The ancient wood penetrated the legendary metal and drove itself deep into the General's flesh. Vargas staggered back with a scream of pain he had not known in decades, and a mountain-shaking rage, blood, crimson, staining the Faded Gold armor that had lost its luster.

"You filthy human rat! You again?! I will tear you apart piece by piece!" Amid the thick dust, Dex rose slowly, his body still trembling from exhaustion and the pain of spending his meager mana, but his eyes blazed with an unbreakable defiance and undisguised contempt. He stepped forward to stand beside Okonnor, and beside them both Lumia, who had recovered her strength and had begun opening multiple defensive spatial portals around them in preparation for any suicidal assault.

"Your control is finished, and your grand performance is over, Vargas," Okonnor said in a quiet voice that nonetheless dripped with threat, wiping a thread of blood from his scarred face while Dex and Lumia flanked him as a united front.

"Now, you are bleeding, your armor has been breached, and your cannons are ash. The three of us against you." Vargas looked at his shattered army that had evaporated with the first explosion, at his cannons reduced to scrap, then at the grievous wound in his shoulder that pulsed with paralyzing pain. He then shifted his gaze to the trio standing steady before him. In that moment, the arrogant Imperial General understood a bitter truth: this battle was no longer a "quick cleanup operation against rebels."

It had become, for the first time in his entire military career, a desperate struggle to survive.