Chapter 269 B4 Chapter 25 - Archmage

Vivi filled her body with ether, and mid-air, activated Momentum Leap.

Her control still wasn’t perfect, flinging out of balance a little, but she flew in the direction she’d aimed. The roof of the barracks. Hitting her feet there, Vivi launched herself into motion once again, descending the mountain scarily fast. Even with five thousand ether, she felt like she’d pass out from the speed.

The floor approached so violently, Vivi couldn’t help but burn a few thousand extra. She slammed into the stone, leaving a crack underneath.

She still had a whole city to run through, finding herself on a highway of sorts. A canal of lava divided it into two, running perfectly smoothly through the middle. It must have been artificial, with bricks guiding the lava straight down the middle.

Vivi burst into movement again, tenements passing on both sides. Most people outside at this hour were soldiers, all running to the sides when they saw Vivi flying past at inhuman speeds.

Momentum Leap didn’t literally allow her to fly. It required her to hit the ground before it could be reactivated. But if she used it repeatedly to fling herself forward, she found that to be by far the fastest method of flying past the streets—so much so that when the canal suddenly shifted, she had to slam her feet to brake before she slid down.

The magma mound rose from the lake it emerged, casting lava to the streets around it. Vivi saw little figures run out of the tenements in a desperate rush. The first building fell when it swung its hand, cutting a building in half with little effort. A missile hit it in the forehead, between its eyes, and it merely slapped it away, continuing on its path.

Vivi pushed more ether into Momentum Leap. The skill wisp burned; she felt it physically resist the amount of ether being forced into it. But she kept moving. The mound got closer and closer, until the sheer size of it covered the streets below it.

She entered the line of soldiers standing afar. A few held crossbows with regular arrows, not even bothering to fire. The ones with runic arrows were trying their best to aim for its eye.

“Hey!” a man who looked like a commander, wearing a black uniform filled with medals, called at Vivi. “Who are you? This isn’t a place—”

Vivi flared out her aura of ten thousand ether, ascension skill active. That should be a good way to prove she was exactly in the right spot. We should be close enough now, she thought and summoned the slingshot launcher.

“Hopefully this is enough to harm it,” Vivi said.

Sliding the missile in, Vivi attached the enhancement string and pumped ether into every necessary rune. The commander watched, confused, while Vivi aimed it up at the monster’s eye.

“Cover your ears!” she yelled. Her voice turned heads in her direction, but nobody covered their ears.

She pulled the trigger anyway. The explosive snap resounded across the street, and suddenly, everyone’s hands found their ears.

The mound turned its head just as Vivi fired, but she still landed straight between the eyes, in its forehead. A deep crack spread from its forehead, bits of obsidian crumbling out. Ether surged out rapidly. The hole didn’t quite shine through; the missile had probably gotten stuck in its head.

Vivi bit her lip. That could have been a fatal wound, but not immediately. It merely enraged the monster. It swung its arms, thrashing the rubble of the destroyed tenements around it.

Vivi pulled another missile from spatial storage. She’d probably need to fire every single one she had. She began loading the second missile.

Suddenly, Lucius froze.

Something wrong? Vivi asked, but kept arming the launcher.

Until she felt it too, and froze on the spot.

Flying in the air behind the monster was a new ethereal presence. Not a huge wyvern or anything that felt like a monster. The presence came from a tiny, human-sized figure. Yet the concentration of ether overpowered everything else in Norfolm Vivi felt.

Turning her head up, Vivi spotted its source. A flying figure in a robe, glowing with white wisps of ether, clearly ascended to the tens of thousands, well past the ordinary numbers Vivi often reached. In its hands was a giant staff.

The archmage, whoever this was, flew directly above the magma mound. Vivi and Lucius could only watch in awe as the staff pointed down, and a discharge of ether came out.

An ordinary discharge. Not a skill, or anything fancy, just a discharge of ether.

It burst through its head. The crack Vivi created shone white as the archmage’s spell burned the creature from the inside, wisps of the discharge pushing out through the crack. Its eyes turned white, before losing all colors.

In under five seconds, it died, collapsing as a clump of obsidian in the rubble it had created. The nearest soldiers ran off. Vivi’s mouth hung open.

The archmage floated down. He collected the ether from his kill without even looking at the monster. Instead, his gaze was straight on Vivi.

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Who is that? she yelled in her head.

“I don’t know; maybe Shilman Fried!”

Getting nearer, his presence radiated the same feeling she’d felt when Anthony had first stepped onto the runesmithing competition in Shivenar—when she was first presented with an overwhelmingly powerful aura. Over time, Anthony’s aura had stopped feeling scary.

This mage raised the bar tenfold—so much so that his clothes themselves were shaped with flowing wisps of ether. The white robe didn’t seem to have any fabric at all, consisting entirely of a thick layer of wisps. And not leaky ether; the wisps flowed calmly within the robe’s texture like ether guided the ether roots in an inside-carved runesword. The robe must have offered protection, though it still looked mostly cosmetic. A coating directly on skin would have worked better as armor.

His face was normal enough, with long horns and a heavily scorched face and cracked, even rougher than Lortel’s. He had sharp orange eyes, but his forehead was wrinkled, and his white hair seemed to be made of ether, filling a bald head. From his neck down, his body glowed, coated with ether.

His black staff was a solid object, but it was larger than Vivi’s slingshot launcher and taller than the man himself. Its shaft was lined with runes. The tip was more like an open cup to shoot ether out of.

He smiled down at her. “Vivian Runeblessed, is it?”

Gravity suddenly felt heavier, as if pulling the weight of her head down. Vivi resisted it. “Yes. That’s who I am.”

Norfolm’s soldiers ran to the rubble to rescue anyone who might have still been alive there. A few stayed near Vivi, but were stepping back from the sheer amount of ether radiating from this mage’s body.

“Perfect,” the mage said. “I am glad we found you. Banishing you, in a lot of ways, was a mistake.”

He then swiped left with his hand, and a shockwave of ether shot forth at the closest man, still within eavesdropping range. He was blasted into the air, crashing armor-first into the brick wall of a tenement. He crashed straight through.

Ether amplifying his voice, the man yelled, “Clear the area! I will talk to Vivian alone! If I sense anyone listening, they will die!”

The soldiers didn’t need to be told twice, scattering off. Only one remained within the rubble, pulling rubble out from under an injured civilian. The archmage frowned.

Then he fired another, much stronger shockwave. With a burst as loud as the slingshot launcher snapping, the rubble blew to pieces. Vivi’s heart dropped.

In a split-second decision, she summoned her sword from spatial storage and activated her void core.

The clarity of the void realm cleared her of distractions, and the overwhelming power of the mage’s ethereal aura hit her unlike anything else, much stronger than the godslayer she’d defeated inside the behemoth.

If Vivi attacked the man now, she knew for certain she’d die. There would be nothing she could do.

The mage turned to her. Calmly wrote in the air with his index finger, leaving wisps on the path his finger took. He wrote in Ythar Standard, “Call off void ether.”

Dear god, Vivi thought. A fifth elevation hunter. The descriptions about them hadn’t been lies. They were powerful.

Lucius trembled in her core. The streets around her were empty of all life. The unfortunate citizens who’d been trapped inside the rubble were all blasted aside, and survivors were running as far as they possibly could.

“Comply,” Lucius said in fear. “We’ll die otherwise.”

What if we burn everything we have?

The moment that thought passed her head, as if sensing her resolve, the archamage pushed his aura outward.

He used an exalted ascension skill. A simple ten thousand wisps. Yet perfectly controlled. None escaped from his hold. He channeled each bit of ether, as if the dangers of ascension skills Vivi had learned about meant nothing to him. In turn, the ten thousand ether he wielded was exponentially more powerful than what Vivi used.

She felt it. The absolute control, and the threatening glare behind it. If Vivi chose to fight, all of those wisps would be directed at his staff with perfect control to blast her down.

The mage wrote more with his finger. “I am not here to fight. Let us talk.”

Vivi gritted her teeth. Her void core was already more than open, with hundreds of void wisps flooding into her body, while threatening to fully burst open the seal in her core. This could get difficult. She placed Dawnpour back into spatial storage.

Then she burned ether. A thousand at first, directing everything into her void core. It didn’t shut, and she was forced to burn more, pushing all of the wisps to shut her void core, more and more, until it finally shut at over seven thousand wisps burned.

Her eyesight and senses returned, and she became aware of her racing heart and the adrenaline filling her body. Her clear thoughts from the void realm were replaced with panic. Should she run or fight?

“For a seventeen year old girl,” the mage said calmly, calling off his ascension skill, “you certainly carry a lot of power. As expected, you barely know how to control any of it.”

“Who are you?” Vivi asked, voice less firm than she would have liked. “Why did you just kill them?”

“Ah… That is what upset you. I see. The lives of civilians still matter to you. My apologies. And as for my identity… can Lucius not identify me?”

Vivi felt sick to her stomach. She glanced at Lucius in her core, who was frowning. He said, “He’s most definitely Shilman Fried.”

Why does he know so much?

“I don’t know; stay cautious.”

“He says you’re Shilman Fried.”

The man nodded. “One of Freimar’s archmages. I apologize for the actions of my subordinates. Banishing you, that was. If the decision was mine, I would not have banished you. Your runesmithing could have proven to be greatly useful to us.”

He talked so calmly, like nothing at all had just happened.

“The attack on Ranewal…” Vivi asked, forcing herself to stay composed. “That was done by your allies?”

“Indeed,” Shilman said, as if proud of their accomplishments.

Throughout all the adrenaline clouding her rational thoughts, Vivi could only ask, “Why?”

He landed onto the ground, facing Vivi, the terrifying aura still staying fully active. “I consider myself to be a pragmatic mage. I am not cruel for no reason. I’ve sought you out because there is something I need from you.”

You just killed a man trying to save someone from rubble! Vivi screamed in her head.

Yet, mentioning that would probably get her killed instead. This man was clearly insane. She had to tread each word carefully. To get out of this alive, she had to get in his good graces.

“I’ve heard a lot about the slingshot launchers,” Shilman said. “At their highest power, the missiles are so powerful they can be launched up into the sky in the surface, and the missile will not come back. This is what’s important to me.”

“Are you hoping to obtain one from me?” Vivi asked.

“I’m going to obtain the strongest launcher in existence,” Shilman said. “You will build it for me. And I believe you’ll want to see it completed as well. There is a good chance we share a mutual goal.”

Somehow, Vivi doubted that. But if she disagreed, she knew she’d die in the battle that ensued. She asked, “And that goal is?”

“The fifth elevation hunters from Freimar have come to an agreement,” Shilman said. “We are going to kill Ythar.”