Chapter 492: A Disappointing End

Hayley took that opportunity as she planted her foot forward and pulled her right fist back.

"Cannon Style..."

Then she punched forward and her fist struck Kylarod directly against his exposed torso.

BOOOOM!

A tremendous shockwave erupted from the impact as the force plowed straight through Kylarod’s amorphous body, distorting his torso.

The shockwave burst from his back and tore through the landscape behind him.

The demon staggered. But he could proceed with a regenerating, Hayley was already moving again.

She swooped past him and her claws flashed across his neck which separated his head from his body.

Hayley landed several meters away and followed through with a triumphant roar.

Behind her, the skull-faced demon’s body remained standing for another second. Then it collapsed.

The team was exhausted, burned, bloodied, and battered from the prolonged fight.

But Kylarod was down.

They had finally won.

——

As for Nathan’s battle against Lucius...

Neither of them had managed to establish a decisive advantage.

Their fight stayed even.

Nathan had, however, found a way around one of Lucius’s illusion magic.

He already learned that the High Mage’s illusions could deceive all five of his ordinary senses and even interfere with his magical perception.

Additionally, trying to determine when an illusion had been cast was proving almost impossible as well.

Nathan had found no obvious pattern to its activation, and the effects could be applied subtly enough that he sometimes had no indication his perception had been altered until an attack had already reached him.

So he stopped trusting his own perception.

Instead, Nathan relied on the souls under his control.

Hundreds of them were scattered throughout different parts of the battlefield, observing the fight from different positions and sharing what they perceived with him.

Lucius’s illusions could alter Nathan’s perception, but the souls spread throughout the battlefield were not necessarily caught within the same illusion affecting him.

That distinction gave Nathan what he needed.

The several souls watching from outside the illusion’s influence revealed where the real spell was actually approaching from.

Nathan began fighting through their eyes instead of his own.

He blocked some with defensive spells. Others he evaded entirely. And whenever an opportunity presented itself, he retaliated.

Lucius faced a different problem.

The High Mage possessed Multicasting, allowing him to maintain as many as five different spells concurrently.

Against most opponents, that would have provided an overwhelming advantage.

But against Nathan, five spells were not always enough.

Nathan commanded more than two thousand souls. And while Lucius could destroy their manifested forms, blast them apart, or temporarily disperse them with his magic, he wasn’t actually destroying the souls themselves.

Given enough time, their forms would simply gather again and there were too many for Lucius to address individually.

Whenever he attempted to cast larger spells against Nathan, dozens of souls could swarm the construct from different directions and interfere with its formation.

Some even approached from directions his current spells could not adequately cover.

Lucius was repeatedly forced to divide his attention across an unreasonable number of targets.

Whenever the pressure became too great, however, he had another solution; Light magic.

The High Mage could temporarily convert his movement into brilliant flashes of yellow light, allowing him to traverse limited distances at extraordinary speed.

So when hundreds of souls would be converging upon him, a yellow flash would erupt and Lucius would reappear somewhere else entirely before the encirclement could close.

But Nathan’s numerical advantage came with its own problem; Mana.

Nathan did not possess Ethan’s inexhaustible reserves.

Controlling his souls, casting spells, defending himself, entering the Astral Realm, and continuously fighting a High Mage of Lucius’s caliber were steadily consuming what remained of his magical power.

Lucius, meanwhile, possessed considerably greater mana reserves and an enormous advantage in magical versatility.

Nathan had numbers.

While Lucius had mana, mobility, and an arsenal of different magical disciplines.

Nathan could overwhelm the number of spells the high mage could simultaneously maintain, while Lucius possessed enough versatility and raw magical power to prevent Nathan’s numbers from producing a decisive victory.

Their respective advantages continued canceling one another out.

And eventually, the battle reached a genuine stalemate as neither had managed to overcome the other.

Then a familiar voice suddenly carried across the battlefield.

"Enough."

Both men reacted. Nathan’s souls stopped advancing and Lucius halted his next spell.

Above them, Morgana descended from the sky, one hand raised as she brought their battle to an end.

She descended toward a point where Nathan and Lucius were suspended several meters apart in the sky.

She then stretched her right hand toward the High Mage and Lucius immediately began losing his form.

His body melted into a mass of black flesh before flowing through the air toward Morgana and gradually being absorbed back into her.

Nathan’s eyes widened. "No."

Morgana glanced toward him.

Nathan stared at the disappearing mage. "No, no. The fight wasn’t done yet."

Morgana turned fully toward him, an irritated glare appearing on her face. "You were going to lose."

Those words seemed to have struck at Nathan’s core as he stared at her in disbelief.

Morgana continued. "It might seem as though neither of you had the advantage, but all that means is your battle had become one of attrition."

She paused. "And in that regard, you lose to my puppet."

Nathan said nothing. He wanted to argue, but he already understood what she meant.

Morever, this was the Demon Queen here. He still very much feared her.

Lucius possessed an enormous reserve of mana to begin with. And as one of Morgana’s puppets, he was not fighting solely on his own power.

Morgana was sustaining him. Her magic backed his continued existence and supplied the power necessary to keep him fighting.

Nathan could not compete with that indefinitely.

His own reserves had already been steadily diminishing throughout the battle.

The battle might have appeared even from the outside.

But time itself favored Lucius.

Morgana then turned away from him and began flying upward.

Then she stopped. Without looking back, she said, "You may have brought all these people here in preparation to fight dragons..."

Her gaze moved slightly over her shoulder.

"But it seems even you came here woefully unprepared."

Then she flew away.

Nathan remained suspended in the air, staring after her in disbelief.

His hands slowly curled into fists and his jaw tightened.

He wanted desperately to reject what she had said. But that was exactly why the words infuriated him so much.

He couldn’t.