Chapter 676 - 562: Forbidden Technique

Chapter 676: Chapter 562: Forbidden Technique

The backlash from forcibly casting one spell after another made him cough up a mouthful of blood tainted with Magic Elements.

"You possess extraordinary Power... The High Tower appreciates collaborators like you! That woman’s Sacred Artifact? We can share its secrets! Even... even her, if you want..."

He dangled temptations, offered lures, and even tried to appeal to baser lusts.

Schmidt spoke rapidly, tossing out one potential bargaining chip after another.

His light blue eyes stared intently at Roland, trying to catch a sliver of hesitation or uncertainty in those cold, gilded vertical pupils.

But there was nothing.

Only a bottomless indifference, and the absolute Concentration of someone precisely calculating the next angle of attack.

It was as if his words were nothing more than meaningless background noise.

"Don’t push me!"

Schmidt’s voice was finally laced with irrepressible anger and a sharp note of desperation.

"If you kill me, the High Tower will never let this rest! You’ll be designated a top-priority target and face an endless hunt! You and everything you hold dear..."

Roland’s response was an even faster, more vicious side kick that slammed into the left arm Schmidt had barely managed to raise in a block.

"CRACK!"

Despite the protective ward, the crisp sound of bone fracturing still echoed from his already injured left arm.

Schmidt let out a muffled grunt, the intense pain nearly causing him to faint.

His last shred of hope was utterly extinguished.

Negotiation, temptation, pleading...

All words were laughably pale and powerless before this enemy, who believed only in actions and results.

He understood.

His opponent didn’t care what he said, didn’t care about the High Tower, and didn’t care about the consequences.

His sole objective, right here, right now, was to utterly erase him from existence.

The madness of being cornered, mixed with the final, defiant pride of a powerful Caster, exploded in his chest like boiling venom.

Deeper still, something entirely different—darker and more fundamental—was awakened.

This was not the rigorous Arcane Magic of an academy Mage, but a far more sinister and unscrupulous Power belonging to the High Tower’s lineage of Wizards.

"If that’s how it is... then have a taste... of what it’s like to be betrayed by reality itself!"

Schmidt let out a hoarse, distorted roar, his face twisting into an expression that was a mixture of pain, madness, and a kind of blasphemous ecstasy.

He stopped defending, stopped dodging. He violently plunged his remaining right hand into the mangled wound on the left side of his chest.

It wasn’t self-mutilation. He was offering his own vital blood and chaotic Life Energy as a sacrifice. His fingers twitched and spasmed unnaturally, tracing patterns that completely defied conventional gestures for casting Magic, their movements filled with blasphemous intent.

In an instant, his light blue eyes were consumed by a murky, dark purple, a color that seemed to be the dregs of countless negative emotions.

It was no longer just veins bulging beneath his skin. Now, countless fine, twisted black lines appeared, writhing like living creatures and emitting a nauseating stench of sulfur and decay.

A bizarre Array that could not be explained by any known theory of Arcane Magic or Elemental Runes forcibly tore itself into reality, with his broken body at its center. It was a thing of asymmetrical spikes, reverse-flowing vortexes, and self-consuming structures.

There were no stable fluctuations of Magic Power. Instead, there was a sense of "hollowness" and "dislocation" that made one’s very soul tremble. It was as if the space, time, and even the fundamental physical Laws of that area were being forcibly twisted and rewritten by an alien, malicious will.

Behind a distant reef, Ellis’s gray-blue eyes were fixed on the bizarre Array as it formed, his pupils dilating from extreme shock and a certain, indescribable fascination.

His lips trembled slightly as he muttered to himself, his voice so low it was almost inaudible.

"No... this isn’t any Spell Model on record. The Energy structure is completely inverted. The core seems to be... drawing on the Caster’s own pain and will for Destruction? This method of construction... this forcible interference with the Laws of reality... It’s simply..."

His words caught in his throat. His face was a mixture of Fear and disgust, and yet, there was also a longing that even he hadn’t recognized—one hidden deep in the soul of every Caster: the secret desire to touch forbidden knowledge, to master a power that transcended all conventional frameworks.

He even forgot the danger, subconsciously leaning forward slightly to try and analyze the structure of the Magic before him, which defied all logic.

"Ellis! What are you staring at?"

Holland’s gruff roar exploded in his ear like a clap of thunder.

The seasoned Priest couldn’t decipher the specifics of the Magic, but his Perception of evil and danger was as keen as a bloodhound’s.

The blasphemous, twisted, and purely destructive premonition radiating from the Array made the hairs on his neck stand up, while the divine senses deep in his soul screamed warnings.

He didn’t hesitate. One hand gripped Ellis’s arm like an iron vise while the other snatched the anxiously watching Bronson. With a startling burst of Power, he dragged them both in a frantic retreat toward the higher reefs behind them.

At the same time, he roared at the top of his lungs toward Roland in the center of the battlefield.

"Rudolph! Fall back! Something’s wrong with that thing!"

But in the center of the battlefield, Schmidt’s "Magic" had already been pushed to its peak.

The process was so swift, the casting so instantaneous, that even Roland hadn’t been able to interrupt it.

There was no great roar, no explosion of light. Instead, a deeper, more unsettling "silence" descended.

Within a radius of several dozen yards centered on him, all sound—the crashing of the waves, the whistling of the wind, even the faint clamor in the distance—was instantly devoured as if by some invisible, giant mouth.

The light didn’t dim, but it began to undergo a bizarre "refraction" and "fracturing." The scenery within view was like looking through a shattered, greasy lens; edges warped, and colors became murky and strange.

Then, the change began.

It wasn’t freezing, nor was it an explosion. It was a kind of "corrosion" on a more fundamental level.

The reef beneath Schmidt’s feet didn’t shatter or crystallize. Instead, like a wax statue under a blazing sun, it began to "soften" and "flow."

Its color rapidly faded from deep black to a sickly gray-white, its texture becoming like that of rotten cheese.

When the flowing seawater touched the edge of the invisible Force Field, it didn’t freeze. Instead, it instantly lost all its vitality and transparency, turning into a viscous, gelatinous, dark green sludge that gave off a pungent, fishy stench.

The very air seemed to gain weight and toxicity, condensing into bizarre, visible droplets of mist that had an oily, iridescent sheen.

A few unlucky seabirds caught within the area didn’t even have time to cry out. In mid-flight, the outlines of their bodies rapidly blurred and faded, like pencil lines being smudged away by an eraser.

They ultimately dissipated without a sound, not leaving so much as a single feather behind, as if they had never existed at all.

What was more terrifying was the distortion of space itself.

The scenery within the affected area began to stretch, compress, and fold as if in a funhouse mirror.

One could even see a reef existing in two contradictory locations at once, while a section of the sea bizarrely "rose up" to form a gravity-defying wall of water.

All manner of chaotic, illogical fragments of light and shadow and distorted scenery flickered and overlapped within the zone, like images from a broken film projector, frantically assaulting the sanity of any observer.

It was like a small-scale "ulcer on reality," birthed from forbidden knowledge and the Caster’s own self-sacrifice.

It forcibly twisted, corrupted, and would ultimately bring Annihilation to the very foundations of everything within its range.

Matter, Energy, the structure of space, and perhaps even the flow of time itself.

This was by no means the "understanding and application of Rules" pursued by orthodox Arcane Magic. This was the naked, malicious "destruction and rewriting of Rules"!