Chapter 148: Undodgeable

The first Cast Jaxir fired after his breakthrough didn’t feel anything like the ones that came before it. Silver-blue mana tore away from his staff fast enough to leave a thin streak hanging across his vision, while hair-thin tendrils stretched outward from the bullet and brushed against the mana moving through the cavern.

He felt the wind curling around the Willow’s leaves, the moisture suspended inside the mist and even the pressure building ahead of the next water beam before his Cast reached any of them.

The mana bullet changed with every touch. It narrowed when the wind pressed against its left side, accelerated through an opening between two rotating leaves, then hooked toward the Willow’s trunk once it sensed the defensive current shifting to intercept its original path.

The Cast struck before Jaxir consciously finished deciding where he wanted it to go.

[-52]

Jaxir’s grin widened while two water beams ripped across the lake toward him. He slipped between them and fired again, watching those faint silver-blue threads spread from his Cast like feelers searching through everything around them. One bullet climbed over the leaf storm while another slowed before reaching it, waited for the defensive current to shift toward the first, then snapped forward through the opening.

[-49]

[Critical Hit!]

[-103]

"Oh, that’s fun."

The Willow responded by folding its branches inward and whipping its leaf storm through the entire space around its trunk. Jaxir could feel the wind before the leaves followed it now, and his next three Casts twisted through separate paths, one riding the outside of the current while the others dipped beneath it and accelerated through pockets where the pressure weakened. The Witch adjusted, only for Jaxir’s mana to feel that adjustment and change again.

[-51]

[-55]

The battle that had felt like a contest of reactions only minutes earlier began tilting into something else. Jaxir wasn’t simply seeing the Willow’s spells faster.

Every Cast gave him another look at how the creature worked, feeding little pieces of information back through the thin extensions of Light Mana before breaking apart. The Witch could change its defense, but every change taught Jaxir something new.

Water gathered beneath his left foot, and Jaxir stepped away before the beam even formed. Another built behind him, followed by a third near the path he should have taken to escape the first two, yet Jaxir turned in the opposite direction and sent a Cast curling behind his shoulder without looking. It slipped through a gap in the leaves that hadn’t even opened yet when he fired.

[Critical Hit!]

[-101]

Jaxir laughed as the shot landed squarely where root joined trunk. The Willow shifted its defensive current half a beat sooner the next time, and Jaxir’s Cast widened itself against the pressure before twisting through from another angle. Every exchange made the next one easier.

Then, somewhere in the middle of another spray of mist, Jaxir realized he knew exactly what the Willow was going to do.

His grin stretched wider.

The Witch hadn’t gathered mana yet, but one of its roots had already tightened against the island while water pressure changed around another. Jaxir moved before the first beam appeared, fired toward the location its leaf storm would need to defend next, then changed the path of a second Cast to punish the opening that defense created. The Willow followed the sequence exactly.

[-53]

[Critical Hit!]

[-105]

Jaxir barely needed to think about dodging anymore. He knew which roots fed the water spells, how much the lake shifted before each beam appeared, which branches controlled the strongest currents of wind and how the leaves responded when the Witch needed to protect a particular side of its trunk. He knew the thing almost as well as he knew his own casting.

The Willow seemed to realize it too and its branches stopped moving.

The lights scattered across the cavern began pulling toward the island again, thousands of pale motes turning the darkness overhead empty as they gathered above the Willow. Jaxir watched the same white-gold sphere that had nearly emptied his mana pool begin forming for a second time, then shook his head with scolding expression one might give a child.

"I don’t think so." He clicked his tongue.

Bind spread from him before the sphere finished forming.

Dark restraints crawled across the island and split into dozens of thinner shadows, each one following the Willow’s root network so precisely that the black lines disappeared beneath the shape of the roots themselves. Jaxir had spent more than ten minutes watching mana enter and leave through that network, and now that Light had illuminated every little relationship for him, he finally understood what those roots had been doing from the beginning.

The Willow read the lake through them, feeling pressure and movement across the water while pulling what it needed into itself. Some roots drew heavily while others regulated the flow, maintaining a balance that let the Witch use enormous amounts of water without drowning its own internal mana pathways.

Jaxir tightened Bind around half of them and the Willow’s gathering light flickered.

Jaxir changed the restraints instead of simply squeezing harder. Several roots became almost completely sealed while the others were held open, forcing everything the closed channels should have taken into the remaining pathways until water and mana surged through them faster than the tree could regulate.

One half of the Willow began starving while the other drowned.

―

Bind Lv25 > Bind Lv31

―

"There you are."

The weakness hadn’t existed before.

Jaxir had made it.

Fracture sank into the Willow immediately afterward, not spreading across the entire creature like Jaxir might have tried that before, but following the exact damage Bind had introduced. Crimson cracks raced through roots swollen with too much mana and split across the dry channels on the opposite side, turning an imbalance into structural failure before the Witch could correct itself.

―

Fracture Lv27 > Fracture Lv32

―

The gathered sphere overhead collapsed as the Willow’s control broke apart. Motes of light scattered through the cavern again while the leaf storm lost its shape, falling in loose spirals across the lake instead of forming a proper shield. Jaxir stared through the rain of leaves and layered Wither over everything he had already done.

Crimson lightning cracked through the Willow’s trunk.

[-218]

Another bolt followed the poisoned flow down into its roots, finding the places Fracture had torn open and driving deeper instead of wasting itself against healthy bark.

[-227]

The Willow tried to pull water through another root and gave Wither a fresh path into its body.

[-241]

Jaxir started walking.

Each step carried him farther into the lake while Casts screamed past his shoulders, silver-blue trails weaving between falling leaves and striking whatever weakness his Light Mana found. The Witch threw water toward him in broken beams, but Jaxir shifted before each one appeared, never interrupting his advance toward the island.

[-54]

[Critical Hit!]

[-109]

Crimson lightning struck again while Fracture widened beneath it.

[-263]

By the time Jaxir stepped onto the moss-covered island for the first time, the Willow’s branches were hanging without purpose and its once-perfect flow of mana had become a mess of competing currents. Water flooded some roots while others cracked dry, Wither poisoned every attempt to restore balance, and the beautiful lights overhead reflected off a lake covered in drifting leaves. Jaxir stopped several meters from the trunk and raised his staff.

"You like undodgeable attacks, right?"

His smile was almost cheerful.

Mana gathered at the end of his staff, then continued gathering until the Cast became larger than his body. Jaxir let Channel take hold and fed it without restraint, pulling out Grand Mana Potions one after another whenever his reserves dipped, while the silver-blue sphere grew until its light swallowed the island. The Willow disappeared behind it.

Jaxir kept going.

The Cast expanded past the crown of the tree, its outer edge rolling with thin silver-blue tendrils that tasted the broken mana throughout the Willow and adjusted the spell around everything they found. Dense where the trunk remained strong, narrow where Fracture had opened paths, heavier where the roots tried to brace, the enormous Cast shaped itself into exactly what the dying Witch least wanted it to be.

Jaxir released it.

BOOM!

The silver-blue light swallowed the Willow from root to crown.

[Critical Hit!]

[-9,846]

―

Drowned Willow Witch

HP: 0/36,000

―

[Your Root Abilities have exceeded your Level by four entire Tiers. You have been awarded the Title "Grand Archmage"]

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