Chapter 1567 Accursed Mongrel
Chapter 1567 Accursed Mongrel
Light died along the line. Mana died. The dome’s radiant territory met the expanding seam and was cleaved in two, the halves flickering once before collapsing inward and dissolving into motes that scattered across the field.
[Radiant Dominion] shattered.
The ambient pressure vanished. The amplified mana that had been grinding Alexios down evaporated, and the Warrior King stood in the open air with blood on his face and burns across his armor and murder in his eyes.
He lunged at Myrasyn, designating the woman as his first target before dealing with Quinlan.
The elf queen’s green eyes widened. The distance between them closed in a single step that covered ten meters, and his blade was already descending in a killing stroke aimed at the crown above her brow.
“He kept this hidden?!”
She’d fought him multiple times. Catalogued every technique, measured every swing. [Worldcleaver: Erasure] was nowhere in her records. He had held this back for a thousand years, through centuries of skirmishes and border wars, through every time they’d crossed blades, and never once had he been desperate enough to use it.
“[Solar-”
She started casting. Her staff came up and light gathered between her hands, the beginnings of a binding forming in the space between her palms.
Morgana landed in front of her.
Quinlan’s wind hurled the puppet queen between Myrasyn and the descending longsword, Morgana’s body sliding across the scorched earth and stopping in a heap at the elf queen’s feet.
Alexios’s blade stopped.
The killing stroke froze two feet from Morgana’s skull. The tendons in his wrists bulged from the effort and his arms shook, the momentum of a blow meant to cleave an elven queen arrested by the sight of his own wife crumpled on the ground before him.
“Accursed mongrel!” He was beyond furious. “Have you no honor?! You already have the Sovereign of Light on your side! Fight me properly!”
“But I am~?” Quinlan mused.
Alexios tried to sidestep. His legs drove left, angling around Morgana’s form to reach Myrasyn from the flank.
Too late. She finished the spell.
“-Binding]!”
Light coiled around his arms, his legs, his torso and wrenched Alexios sideways.
He stopped and dug in, gritting his teeth so hard the grinding was audible.
Still standing. Still holding his sword.
But fifteen meters further from the man he wanted to kill.
Quinlan watched the king for a moment before reaching deeper into Morgana’s channels.
The [Molten Cascade] had been crude. He’d pushed too much mana through pathways he was still learning to steer, and the result had been raw force without elegance. Level 74 reserves were wasted on a spell that a Level 50 caster could have produced with better aim.
Morgana’s channels could do more. Much more.
He flexed her fingers. Water mana answered in a volume that made his breath catch.
He looked at his own stone-and-ice hands. Lightning flickered through the cracks between the plates.
Quinlan had a theory.
He could dual-cast on his own. He’d done it plenty of times and it worked great, amazing even. But splitting his own pathways between different elements meant each one ran at less than full output, the channels forced to divide their capacity like a river forking into two streams.
Two bodies changed the math.
If Morgana’s channels handled water at their full Level 74 output while his handled lightning at full capacity, neither element was diminished. No split, no fork. Two rivers running parallel, each one at maximum flow, converging on the same target at the same time.
‘Let’s test that theory.’
Alexios cleaved through another light attack and shouted at the Royal Guard, who’d been standing frozen all this while.
“Attack him!”
The guard captain’s grip tightened on his greatsword. “My king, Queen Morgana is-”
“Use your damned heads!” Alexios roared. “Surround him from every angle! He can only use Morgana as a shield from one angle at a time!”
The guards broke formation. The elite men and women in enchanted plate fanned out from the defensive circle, shields raised, weapons drawn, angling to approach Quinlan from multiple directions at once. The tankers took point. Mages began chanting protective wards across the line.
Quinlan chuckled.
Morgana’s hands rose. Her broken mouth opened and blood sprayed from her lips as the muscles contracted around syllables she hadn’t chosen.
“[Tidal Surge].”
Water erupted from between her palms. A flood. Level 74 reserves detonated through channels that Quinlan steered as fluently as his own, and the volume was staggering. Water exploded outward in a low, spreading surge that blanketed the ground in every direction, ankle-deep and climbing, racing across the scorched earth faster than a man in plate armor could backpedal.
The tankers reacted. Shields went down and barriers flared to life, the protective wards catching the water’s leading edge and holding it back from the front line.
But the water was only the beginning.
Quinlan stopped holding back.
Every channel in his body opened at once. He shut down fire, ice, wind, earth, and magma, closing and sealing every other pathway. For the first time since he’d learned to wield seven elements simultaneously, he poured everything he had into a single one.
Lightning answered.
It erupted from his core in a torrent so dense his veins lit up beneath his skin. The stone-and-ice hands blazed white. [Synchra]’s crimson plating flared as arcs of electricity jumped between her joints and crawled across her surface, and the air around Quinlan ionized until the ozone was thick enough to taste from twenty meters away.
His entire body glowed. White light bled through the gaps in his armor, through the cracks in his prosthetic hands, through the visor of his helmet, and the electrical output was still building. Every pathway that had ever carried fire or ice or wind was carrying lightning now, all of them funneling into a single output that made the hair on every soldier’s backs stand on end across the entire field.
He pressed both hands to the surface of the flood.
The discharge was instantaneous.
Lightning met water and the world turned white. A wall of electrical force ripped through the spreading surge in every direction at once, branching into a thousand paths that followed the water’s spread across the ground. The surface of the flood lit up like a second sun, the current so dense that the water itself began to boil where the charge was thickest, steam erupting in geysers that mixed with the blinding light and turned the field into a white inferno.
The leftmost tanker held. His barrier caught the current head-on and the enchanted plate grounded what slipped through, boots sparking against the electrified surface as every ward he’d stacked flared white and held. The soldiers behind him survived because he did.
The center tanker held for two seconds. His barrier absorbed the first wave, cracked on the second, and shattered on the third. The charge hit his armor and the enchantments activated, redirecting the electricity through his gauntlets and into the ground, but the sheer volume overwhelmed the runes. He dropped to one knee as the current locked his muscles and the light behind his eyes went out.
The fighter standing in his shadow took the current the instant the barrier failed. He seized upright, locked rigid, sword still raised in a guard that would never come down.
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