Chương 48: Under Pressure

Ch 48: Under Pressure A hungry sword came flying toward my neck, begging for a taste of my flesh and blood. I had no time to even worry about the fact this Nozak guy was at level 213, while I was merely at level 58. By skipping the Casting Assistant entirely, I cast Haste with the power of my mind alone, forcing my body into a backward burst, my neck inches away from having an intimate conversation with that sword.

Nozak didn't even hesitate half a second before following with his own version of Haste, denying me the time to get creative with a more complex spell. I realized within seconds that I was utterly screwed this time. It had not been enough for this Grey soldier to simply turn off his armor and meet me with superior skill and a lifetime of fighting experience, but he was even keeping me locked away from my Mind Library with his relentless pressure.

No matter how fast I could access that mental space, I just couldn't afford even half a second of my eyes away from Nozak. As I kept hasting myself towards the woods, he kept following me, sometimes even being more efficient than I was with his use of mana. Where I would cast Haste twice to avoid a shrub, the Grey man would just go through those plants like a tank.

He was using his armor in the most primitive way possible, though I couldn't say anything bad about it because it was clearly working, and giving me a truly terrible taste of my own approaching death. Would that be my fate? Die in those woods alone and unseen, leaving Sahirah and my friends behind to deal with the fallout of my own decisions? Perhaps it would be. But I wouldn't bite the dust without putting up a fight. I clenched my fists, bit my tongue, and took a deep breath.

As Nozak came toward me with all his fingers already tight around the sword handle, I prepared to cast Haste again. But this wasn't just another Haste. I ignored all sideways motion, making sure the spell would only take me up. The magic circle took shape, shooting me up like a rocket. The sudden acceleration was extremely painful.

One moment I was seeing tree trunks, and the next I already had to close my eyes and brace for the tree branches and leaves that hit my whole body, the canopies scratching my skin in more places than I could count. When my eyes reopened I was still going up, several meters higher than the tree line. Still, despite my reckless use of Haste, Nozak had followed me once more.

The black armored Grey was ascending just a few meters below me, getting ready to swing that sword at me even as we both were about to lose momentum and fall to our deaths. His persistence was so fucking annoying!

"Screw you!" I raised my hand at him, another magic circle taking shape. Since there was no time for the Mind Library or the Casting Assistant, I simply used a tweaked version of a basic spell. Kinetic Push! With both of us so high in the air, the result was immediate. First, my arm took the punishment, my bones nearly breaking at the absurd amount of mana I had burned in this basic spell. I was violently pushed backward while Nozak was pushed in the opposite direction. This was perfect.

It meant I had a few seconds before my body smashed itself against the ground like a dropped egg. Disregarding the danger, I entered my Mind Library. There, I found the familiar shelves, the chair, and a large tome with blank pages already waiting for me. But what kind of spell should I draft? It had to be something simple, powerful, and more importantly... It had to be capable of killing. Perhaps the fact I was dropping toward the ground to my death was all the incentive I needed to set morality aside and focus.

And focus I did. Nothing else existed in my mind as a combination of runes became vivid in my thoughts, writing themselves on imaginary paper as quickly as my mind thought of them. Debugging? There was no time for that. Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon. Either it would work or it wouldn't. At the same time my consciousness returned to reality, the spell I had just created was already being loaded into the Casting Assistant. Still, that wasn't my highest priority right now.

My back had just hit the canopies. There were about five meters between me and the ground, and the Casting Assistant was busy with a spell that had nothing to do with saving myself from a deadly fall. I strained my mind to the limit, bypassing the Casting Assistant and casting Haste directly, shaping my mana directly into a magic circle and finishing the casting when my back was about to get smashed against the ground. Still, the sudden deceleration was far from pleasant.

All air left my lungs as my vision blurred, my back hitting the ground quite hard regardless of the successful casting. My elbows and my butt took the worst of the hit, and the only thing keeping the pain at bay was the adrenaline. That same adrenaline kept my mind sharp the moment Nozak emerged from inside a shrub, the plant exploding as the black armored Grey came flying toward me.

Still on the ground, I raised my left arm, all the runes inscribed on my left arm lifting up at once as the Casting Assistant worked in the background. It took a fraction of a second to follow the illusion's draft, and paint dozens of runes with my mana. Then I activated the spell. Nozak, seeing me on the ground pointing a glowing palm at him while nothing at all happened, only stared at me with confusion coloring his eyes.

"All of that fierce resistance only to die on the ground like a worm casting a failed spell." He raised his sword, preparing his killing blow. Yet, the steadiness of his movements crumbled before he could strike me. He staggered. He tried to resist, holding that handle with a strong grip, but suddenly he dropped his sword. He fell to his knees, trying to remove his helmet but struggling to accomplish even that.

Through all of that, I kept casting my spell, maintaining a steady aim even with my chaotic heartbeat and rushed breathing. I stood at the same time he managed to remove his helmet, staring down at what my spell had done to him. The white of his eyes was red. His nose was bleeding. And I was sure this was nothing compared to the inner wounds my eyes couldn't see.

"You lack the spirit of a warrior!" He managed one last burst of strength, shouting, and quickly realized he wasn't hearing his own words. He touched his ears as if touching them would fix his hearing, and said, "I only die because you cheated! You fight with no honor, human!" I was certain he couldn't even hear my voice, but I still replied to him.

"I'm sorry. I can't die today. Sahirah and the others still need me." I would probably have felt much worse if this hadn't been the guy who ruthlessly killed his own people just because they fell into my illusion. He touched his own face, and tried to ask in a fading voice, "What is this..." He tumbled forward before finishing the question, falling with his face to the dirt.

I finally stopped my casting, realizing this improvised spell was equally as scary as the microwave wristbands despite being much simpler in its design. What I had created this time was just a vibration induction spell, and it was so simple that I didn't even need a mana-to-electricity module. In its essence, this spell was capable of inducing vibration in metal.

And it wasn't just any vibration, but vibration in the ultrasound range, which meant that no matter how loud it got, it couldn't be heard by either humans or the Grey. This was the only solution I found to win this confrontation, given that the microwave spell would only hurt the exterior of his armor, and a DDoS attack would only work if the armor had been active. The fact he was wearing armor only made Nozak's situation worse, exposing him to an ultrasound echo chamber, destroying his body on the cellular level.

And I knew somewhere inside that I would see his bleeding face in my dreams for a long time regardless of the self defense argument I was repeating in my head. I gave Nozak's body one last glance and forced myself to look away, finally sprinting back toward the battlefield. Yeah, how I felt about it wasn't important, and I knew I would feel much worse if something happened to Sahirah because I was wasting time.

With my mana mostly depleted and the need to save the rest for an emergency, I was forced to avoid Haste for now. Still, I activated the less mana-intensive communication spell as I ran back to the battlefield, contacting Zira and Niko for a status update.

"Fill me in about the current situation." For about four seconds, I feared I might not get a reply. But then Zira's voice reached me.

"Eric! Are you safe? We've been trying to find you for some time now."

"Sahirah," I said.

"Is she okay?" To my surprise, Niko was the one who replied.

"She needs your help!" He was talking so quickly I barely understood him.

"The Driari on top of the school kept Lord Krosak's people off her with their Mana Needles. But now they're moving the ship to use it as cover. They are going to get to her soon."

"I'm on my way." I spoke those words as I crossed the threshold connecting the woods and the school's property. Elitha's tower and the floating ship were so big that I found them right away, and I immediately saw how the ship was moving, the Grey crew positioning it in between the school and Sahirah, so the Driari couldn't protect her. And Sahirah...

She was still trapped in that illusion, Lord Krosak constantly pointing that ring at her, though thankfully her enormous mana reserve had been enough to last this long and the barriers around her body were still holding strong. When the ship's bow blocked the Driari, Zira spoke through the spell.

"There's nothing more we can do. How are we going to protect her, Eric?" I looked up, directly at the clouds and the sun, seeing a bright star still shining strong above us. My mind instantly remembered my own trump card, the spell I had created with the goal of targeting the exposed wood on that ship.

"I'll burn my very last drop of mana on one spell," I said.

"You guys deal with the fallout." I canceled our communication instantly, preserving as much mana as I could. Clenching my fists, I remembered the several hours of experimentation with mana during the development of Elitha's vision-restoring spell. The way mana could be used to bend light like glass lenses came to mind, though the application here would be very different from that precise light sensor spell.

I looked at that wooden ship, and I knew my Mind Library would definitely get erased with all the mana I would spend on this attack.

"I have very little juice left, Lord Krosak," I said to myself.

"But Navar's sun? I don't think it'll run out of energy during my lifetime, so don't get mad if I steal some of it to burn your ship." I raised my hand, reaching into my Mind Library and loading the Magnifying Glass spell into my Casting Assistant. When the spell loaded, I closed my eyes, struggling against the dizziness of reaching this deep into my mana pool as the spell activated.

When I reopened my eyes, I found a transparent mana disk hovering in the sky, wide and tilted at the right angle, with a small curvature connecting the slightly thicker middle with the thinner edges. At the same time, a glowing spot of concentrated light had appeared on the hull of the floating ship, smoke instantly rising from it. No one from the crew noticed it, too busy with the barrier for the Mana Needles and the ship relocation to realize something was wrong on the opposite side of the ship.

I felt the connection with my Mind Library fading. The contents of the library would be gone when my mana recovered, and unfortunately, that would force me to spend hours copying spells from my paper backup. But I wasn't even mad as I watched the hull catch fire. Because Lord Krosak definitely would have a harder time finding a backup for his ship's wooden hull, and the chaos a fire that size would cause... it most definitely would be enough to create an opportunity for Sahirah to escape that illusion.