Chapter 403: The Scythe Falls!

The lingering obstruction of her regeneration made Pandora’s brows knit slightly.

She could not afford to disregard the enemy’s attacks.

Clearly, this time, she had to take the fight seriously.

When more black light came streaking toward her—

The trajectories of those black-light attacks appeared simultaneously within Pandora’s mind.

Her spiritual power surged to full force in that instant.

Her brain raced, and the Wizard’s formidable spiritual power forcibly calculated every one of those trajectories.

Speed, angle, spacing, sequence…

All the data resolved within a fraction of a second, as if parsed by some precision instrument.

Then… Her mighty physical body, enhanced by her Witch bloodline, allowed her to react.

She twisted aside, and a black beam shot past, less than half an inch from her left shoulder.

She arched backward, another beam skimming just beneath her jaw, streaking behind her.

She was reacting at angles that would be nearly inconceivable for an ordinary person.

The movements looked light, as if she were merely strolling through the poisonous mist, but the danger was beyond anything an onlooker could imagine.

A single miscalculation would mean some part of her body being pierced by the black light.

And once pierced, her body’s reaction speed would inevitably suffer. Under such a dense barrage, defeat would follow swiftly, with no chance of recovery.

So she could not simply dodge.

Letting the enemy attack endlessly without response was not an option.

A thought stirred in Pandora’s mind, and the spell matrix for Rank-3 Wizardry: Susurrus Mist took shape in an instant.

Dense mist erupted from around her body, spreading outward rapidly.

The gray-white fog and the dark-green toxic mist clashed violently at the point of contact, like two immiscible liquids forcibly churned together.

Unlike her previous uses of Susurrus Mist, this time the mist’s expansion met considerable resistance.

The toxins within the poisonous mist had little effect on her, thanks to her Witch bloodline, but the mist itself—a supernatural fog in its own right—exerted powerful suppression on her own mist.

Its effectiveness suffered as a result.

In the end, the Wizardry’s full effect was confined to roughly ten meters around Pandora.

Beyond that range, the spell’s power became unstable and noticeably weakened.

But even so, combined with Pandora’s powerful spiritual perception, ten meters was more than enough.

At the very least, within that range, she could perceive everything clearly.

The source of the black light, the trajectory of the attacks, and…

A certain position deep within the poisonous mist that had never once moved.

Pandora’s gaze flickered, and she quickly locked onto a direction within the mist.

And as she made those maneuvers, her light, evasive movements seemed to provoke the presence hidden in the fog.

More than ten meters off to one side of the position Pandora’s gaze had locked onto, a dim, gray light suddenly flared to life.

The light was not bright, carrying a rotting quality as it illuminated a hazy, illusory silhouette.

A skeletal humanoid stood there.

A hunched figure, staff raised high, light emanating from the gray gemstone at the top.

The gem resembled some kind of decaying eyeball, its gray light seeping outward from its core and staining the surrounding toxic mist a deeper hue.

No longer the probing, scattered black beams from before.

This time, what poured from the gem was a viscous darkness, thick as crude oil.

They coalesced in midair into dozens of skeletal hands. Their knuckles were distinct, the joints as if still clung to by rotting flesh, and they reached for Pandora from all directions.

Each of those bone hands carried a nauseating aura of death, a cold that was not merely the stench of decay but an icy chill that reached directly into the soul.

However—

Pandora lightly tapped the ground with her foot and leaped into the air.

In the next instant, her figure vanished from where she stood.

Only an afterimage remained in the air, along with a vortex of poisonous mist torn open by the violent rush of air.

The dozens of bone hands grasped at nothing. Their fingers snapped shut with a bone-grinding crack, crushing only empty air.

When Pandora reappeared—

She had already raised an enormous scythe formed from condensed shadow.

The great scythe, forged from pure shadow, radiated a cold, faint light as it hung at her side.

Its blade stretched a full two meters long—thin as a cicada’s wing, yet exuding a heart-stopping chill.

The edge held no sheen whatsoever, as if light itself were swallowed by that pure darkness.

And beneath that terrible scythe stood the Remnant Sovereign, its skeletal humanoid form built from countless remnants.

It stood deep within the poisonous mist.

Its hunched body was pieced together from bone fragments of various origins. Every bone came from a different creature: some tinged earthy yellow, others still bearing dark-brown stains of old blood.

Between the gaps seeped an unsettling dark liquid, like some half-coagulated marrow or long-rotted corpse fluid.

Its face was a void of black, with no features, only a bottomless hollow.

At that moment, the hollow was tilted upward, staring at the figure that had suddenly flashed before it, scythe raised.

On that nearly expressionless face, there seemed to pass a flicker of surprise.

The position it now occupied was precisely where the first black-light attack had originated—the very direction Pandora had locked onto from the start.

As for the skeletal humanoid a dozen meters away, staff raised high—

That was nothing more than a decoy.

Against its previous enemy, this trick had worked perfectly.

A false image drew attention and attacks, while its true body hid in the shadows, attacking relentlessly.

But this time, after only a single exchange, the opponent had already seen through the ruse.

If it possessed intellect, it would surely feel astonishment now.

But whether or not this Anomaly felt surprise, Pandora did not care.

The next moment, her scythe came slashing down.

The shadow scythe descended in an instant, its shriek through the air echoing through the toxic mist.

The blade swept across the Remnant Sovereign’s torso, nearly cleaving it in two at the waist—

But only “nearly.”

In the instant the blade passed, Pandora distinctly felt a brief moment of resistance.

The sensation that should have bitten deep into bone shifted by a hair’s breadth.

The edge had sunk in, yet at the critical moment, some force gently nudged it aside, letting it slip through the gaps between the bones.

She drew her gaze back from the few shattered bone fragments that had been cut away.

They fell to the ground with a faint clatter, then were swallowed by the toxic mist.

Her feet touched the ground, and Pandora looked once more toward the space before her.

There, staggering in a somewhat bedraggled retreat, was the Remnant Sovereign.

Within a single breath, its figure vanished beneath the shroud of the poisonous fog.

Pandora’s mind stirred.

The Remnant Sovereign’s evasion of her attack had not relied entirely on its own power.

In that instant, the poisonous fog—seemingly present only to obscure and poison—had also exerted a pulling force.

That force had been faint and brief, but it had appeared at precisely the right moment.

And it was that force which had dragged the Remnant Sovereign’s body backward by several inches, allowing it to escape the scythe’s fatal strike.