Chapter 466: Sage Alistair

The passage beneath the circular chamber descended far beyond the original foundations of the ruins. Whatever had once existed below had been torn apart by centuries of shifting earth, leaving broken stairways, cracked pillars and enormous roots that had forced themselves through ancient masonry.

The Deepburrow Obsidian Crawler had opened a path through one collapsed section, and after Iris reinforced the damaged ceiling with Earth Magic, the five descended nearly two hundred feet before Rowan raised his hand.

He crouched beside a fracture running across the passage and touched the black residue coating its edge, his expression tightening as he rubbed it between his fingers.

"Something large passed through here recently," Rowan warned, studying several deep grooves carved into the stone. "The Crawler came through afterward, but these marks aren’t its claws. Whatever made them was dragging something heavy."

Mina shifted her shield forward while Lucan drew his sword, but Iris was staring at the walls rather than the tracks. Mana shimmered faintly between the stones, flowing downward in thin streams, and the deeper they went, the stronger the pull became.

The passage eventually opened into an enormous underground cavern, and Sage understood immediately why the creature had left such strange tracks.

Half the cavern had once belonged to the buried structure, but some ancient collapse had torn open the surrounding earth and exposed a natural chamber beyond it.

Thick roots descended hundreds of feet from the forest above, hanging between ruined towers and broken bridges like ropes from a gigantic ceiling.

Pale crystals protruded from the walls, yet most had been drained until they were dull grey husks. In the center lay dozens of carcasses. Some belonged to creatures Sage didn’t recognize, including an enormous six-legged reptile with a crown of bone around its skull and a winged centipede nearly thirty feet long.

Others had been reduced to armored skeletons. Rowan’s gaze moved from corpse to corpse before settling on a trail of crushed crystal leading toward the darkness.

"These weren’t killed recently," he said, keeping his voice low. "Something has been feeding here for weeks."

Iris stepped beside Sage and raised one hand. A blue Magic Circle blossomed before her palm, its layered runes turning slowly as she whispered, "Water Magic: Moonlit Current Perception."

Moisture gathered from the cavern air into hundreds of suspended droplets before spreading through the darkness. Iris’s eyes narrowed as each droplet carried information back to her, but barely three seconds passed before every bead of water on the eastern side vanished simultaneously.

She recoiled, and Sage caught her shoulder before she lost balance.

"Something destroyed the spell," Iris said, disbelief crossing her face as she stared into the darkness. "Not physically. It released enough mana to disperse every droplet at once."

Rowan immediately drew his sword and moved ahead of Iris while Mina planted herself beside him. Lucan shifted toward the opposite flank, his earlier humor disappearing as the cavern floor began trembling beneath their boots.

The darkness erupted. A colossal creature crashed through a ruined stone tower and landed among the carcasses, sending fragments of masonry across the cavern.

It resembled a monstrous salamander only in the broadest sense, its body more than sixty feet long and covered in overlapping plates of dark crimson crystal.

Six thick limbs supported its weight, each ending in claws that sank into stone, while a crown of translucent mineral horns surrounded its flattened skull. Beneath those crystals, orange light pulsed through channels under its skin like molten metal.

Rowan stared at the creature’s enormous body and immediately noticed the irregular crystal growths protruding from its spine.

"That’s a Cindermaw Geode Salamander," he said, disbelief entering his voice. "But it shouldn’t look like that. They’re 4th Order Elite Beasts, and they don’t grow anywhere near this large."

Iris studied the mana pouring from its body and answered with a grim expression, "This one has been absorbing whatever is happening beneath Greyfen. Its mana has exceeded the normal limits of its Order."

The Cindermaw opened its jaws, and the cavern turned orange. Rowan shouted for everyone to scatter as molten fire erupted from the beast’s throat in a torrent broad enough to swallow a house.

Mina raised her shield instinctively, but Sage stepped past her before she could anchor herself.

A crimson Magic Circle wider than his body appeared in front of him, followed by a second and then a third, every ring packed with intricate runes rotating at different speeds.

"Fire Magic: Solar King’s Aegis."

A wall of golden flame erupted across the cavern. The Cindermaw’s torrent collided with it, and the resulting explosion ripped stone from the walls and sent a pressure wave roaring through the chamber, yet Sage didn’t move.

His Divine Grade Mana Veins flooded the spell with mana so effortlessly that the three Magic Circles only grew brighter. The incoming inferno separated around the barrier before being consumed entirely.

Iris stared at him. She had known Sage was a 4-Star Master Mage. She had felt his mana before and understood that his reserves were abnormal, but knowing something theoretically and watching him casually overpower the breath of an enhanced 4th Order Elite Beast were very different things.

"That barrier should have consumed an absurd amount of mana," Iris said, unable to hide her astonishment as the golden flames dispersed.

Sage glanced over his shoulder and answered, "It did."

Iris waited for him to elaborate, but Sage was already looking back at the Cindermaw. His breathing hadn’t changed. His mana presence hadn’t noticeably diminished.

For a Mage accustomed to calculating the cost of every large spell, that was considerably more disturbing than any explanation he could have given.

The others prepared to move, but Sage lifted one hand and stopped them.

"You’ve fought enough. Let me handle this one," he told them, stepping forward as the Cindermaw shattered the ground beneath its claws and charged.

Mina hesitated before lowering her shield slightly, while Rowan immediately began watching Sage instead of the beast. Lucan retreated beside Iris and gave Sage an interested look.

The creature crossed the cavern with terrifying speed for something so enormous, each stride breaking slabs of stone beneath its weight. Sage extended his left hand, and a massive green Magic Circle unfolded across the cavern floor.

"Nature Magic: Worldroot Emperor’s Binding."

The roots hanging from the ceiling convulsed. Dozens thickened violently as mana poured through them, their bark hardening until it resembled ancient iron before they descended around the Cindermaw.

The beast tore through the first three, but ten more wrapped around its limbs, neck and tail. Its momentum stopped so abruptly that the cavern shook.

The Cindermaw roared and released a wave of heat that ignited the roots around its body. Sage didn’t attempt to preserve them.

A gigantic brown Magic Circle formed beneath the creature while two smaller circles appeared around his raised hand, all three covered in densely layered runes.

"Earth Magic: Titan King’s Burial."

The cavern answered. Two enormous walls of stone rose on either side of the beast and slammed inward with enough force to produce a thunderous impact.

The ground beneath it simultaneously collapsed, dragging half its body into a deep basin while pillars of compressed rock erupted around its limbs.

The Cindermaw thrashed with enough strength to crack the walls, but Sage continued feeding mana into the spell. More stone rose. The basin deepened. Ancient masonry collapsed around the edges as the battlefield itself changed shape under his control.

Lucan slowly lowered his sword.

"I suddenly understand why he wasn’t particularly worried during our previous fights," he remarked, watching another enormous slab rise from the cavern floor.

Mina looked almost offended by the realization and muttered that Uncle Sage could have helped more, but Rowan shook his head.

"We needed those fights," he told her, never taking his eyes from Sage. "If he’d done this every time something attacked us, we would’ve learned nothing about each other."

Iris barely heard them. She was watching the Magic Circles. Sage wasn’t merely overpowering the creature with enormous mana reserves.

His transitions were too smooth. Fire had become Nature, Nature had controlled the beast long enough for Earth to reshape the battlefield, and each element was being used according to what it did best.

There was still refinement missing, small inefficiencies Iris could recognize because of her own experience but the foundation was frightening.

The Cindermaw finally broke free. Crimson crystals along its back exploded outward, shredding roots and stone as molten light gathered inside its body.

Rowan immediately recognized the danger and warned Sage, but Sage had already raised both hands. This time the mana gathering around him changed the cavern itself. Heat rolled outward in waves.

One enormous crimson Magic Circle appeared above the Cindermaw, then another beyond it, followed by a third until seven concentric formations occupied the darkness overhead. Each was dozens of feet across.

Iris’s mouth opened slightly as she felt the amount of mana being poured into them. An ordinary 4-Star Master Mage would have exhausted themselves trying to construct even one spell of that scale.

Sage maintained all seven while the Cindermaw raised its head and gathered molten energy between its jaws.

"Fire Magic: Sevenfold Sun Meteor."

The seven Magic Circles ignited.

Blazing spheres descended from them like miniature suns. The first Sun Meteor struck the Cindermaw’s back and detonated, driving its enormous body into the ground.

The second shattered the crystal armor along its spine. The third exploded against its shoulder and tore one limb from beneath it. By the fourth, the cavern floor had become a crater of molten stone.

The fifth and sixth descended through the smoke with enough force to shake the entire buried ruin, and when the seventh struck, golden fire swallowed the center of the cavern completely.

Sage immediately swept one hand downward and formed another brown Magic Circle beneath his feet. "Earth Magic: Mountain Sovereign’s Coffin."

The broken ground surged inward around the burning creature, crushing the Cindermaw beneath thousands of tons of stone before the final explosion could bring the ceiling down on them.

Silence returned gradually as dust rolled across the cavern. Where the Cindermaw had stood was now an enormous smoking crater surrounded by newly raised walls of stone, shattered crystal and rivers of cooling molten rock.

The battlefield no longer resembled the cavern they had entered minutes earlier. Sage lowered his hands as the last Magic Circle disappeared, and only then did he notice Iris staring at him with an expression somewhere between fascination and disbelief.

"You’re a 4-Star Master Mage," Iris said slowly, as though she were verifying something she already knew.

Sage brushed dust from his sleeve and replied, "Last time I checked." Iris looked at the crater, then back at him, clearly deciding that his answer was irritatingly insufficient.

Sage, however, understood what Iris had noticed. His spells were becoming larger, faster and easier to weave together than they had been months ago. Fire, Nature and Earth no longer felt like separate collections of techniques he had forced himself to practice.

During the battle, one element had flowed naturally into another, and somewhere beneath the exhilaration of casting at full scale, he had felt something inside his mana change.

It wasn’t a breakthrough, not yet, but the barrier separating him from the next stage no longer felt distant. Sage turned toward the deeper darkness beyond the ruined cavern while residual mana moved through his veins almost as abundantly as before.

Whatever waited beneath Greyfen was drawing them toward increasingly dangerous territory, but for the first time in a long while, Sage found himself welcoming the pressure.

If this expedition continued forcing him to use his magic like this, then perhaps 5-Star Grandmaster Mage wasn’t as far away as he had believed.