Chapter 643: The Demons... Have Grown Stronger

Chapter 643: Chapter 641: The Demons… Have Grown Stronger

“Impressive, Elina.”

Hilia’s eyes sparkled.

“With your ability, why worry about the Beast Tide? Just stand at the entrance of the pollution source, every demon that comes up will die one by one. With more demons, the minerals they are made of could fill this crack.”

Elina’s face flushed slightly.

“How could I possibly do that? It takes some time to prepare to separate the life elements of these demons. The energy consumption for separating the demons is much greater than for separating pollution. I can only manage this for ten or so demons at a single node. If I encounter what Hilia did before, I’d be overwhelmed.”

Hilia nodded, “Alright then, I thought you could single-handedly guard the pollution source.”

“If I could handle that, would I need to come here looking for ways to solve the calamity? I might as well live near the crack.”

Elina rolled her eyes.

Hilia smiled slightly without speaking.

Elina is right; the energy needed to separate and purify pollution is about the same. With Hilia’s current ability, if the previous purification action was just to purify air pollution in a city, she guessed it wouldn’t take much magic power and could be done in a few minutes. But purifying it for the entire city would take a long time, and her state would become rather poor.

In that instant, Hilia sensed that Elina’s aura had weakened slightly—of course, this was because Elina didn’t hide it, otherwise she wouldn’t have noticed.

After dealing with all the demons, Elina raised her hand to retrieve the magic puppet and turned to Hilia, asking as if seeking credit, “How did I do?”

“Very impressive, I definitely can’t beat you,” Hilia praised generously.

Elina rolled her eyes, “Can’t you say anything else?”

“I don’t know how to flatter people,” Hilia said innocently, “Besides saying that, anything else would be criticizing.”

Elina: “…”

Hilia pondered, “If your current fighting style is to support from behind and let the magic puppet engage in close combat, then our pairing could only be with you at the front and me casting Magic from the back.”

“Can’t we do combination techniques like before?” Elina asked.

Hilia spoke frankly, “I don’t know.”

“Alright.”

“So far, there haven’t been any demons that require combination techniques underground, regular cooperative fighting styles should suffice.”

“True, although there’s none nearby, that doesn’t mean other places don’t have them…”

“Let’s get familiar first.”

“Hmm, that’s good too.”

“…”

The two began to move forward, passing through one node after another.

This time, while clearing demons, Elina didn’t use her ability to instantly strip their life elements. Instead, she attempted to cooperate with Hilia to see if they could merge their techniques.

But unless she used nature-based Magic, the special usage of the life element couldn’t combine with ice element techniques.

The ice element, which freezes everything, doesn’t blend with the life element, unable to create a dramatic reaction like ice and fire.

Life elements are even calmer than water elements and can’t form offensive technique combinations with most elements.

Ultimately, Elina was left with no choice but to use natural element Magic to combine with Hilia’s, unleashing the power of combination techniques to break through demon defenses and engage in a massive kill.

As they progressed deeper, an unknown length of time passed, and Hilia suddenly noticed that the demons ahead were different from those elsewhere.

“These demons are stronger here, aside from their physical defense strength, other aspects are approaching Tier Four strength…”

Elina frowned, “Their defense is stronger too. It seems this direction is right; where the strongest demons gather, even if there’s nothing to solve the calamity, there’s definitely something extraordinary.”

Hilia glanced at her.

“It seems the habits you had as an adventure mercenaries haven’t changed; you always look for treasures wherever you go.”

“Such a place surely has treasures,” Elina replied.

“The treasure here might be hard to take out, even if we could… perhaps we shouldn’t take it out casually.”

Hilia thought about the array situation; this array exists in the form of an underground world, each pattern forming a massive underground passage. Countless passages and small nodes construct a gigantic array.

Elina didn’t know this was an array. Even if she could speculate through the drawn map, it wouldn’t be certain.

The current direction they were heading was likely one of the major nodes of the array at the deepest part.

If it weren’t for Rose’s sensing of the core, Hilia would have thought they were heading to the core area of the array.

“Why?” Elina asked.

Hilia said, “Couldn’t you all figure it out? This… could be a giant array.”

Elina nodded, “The elder Louis guessed, based on the map we’ve drawn, the underground is indeed an array. Why didn’t they know such a massive array existed? However, we don’t yet know the array’s function; we guess it might be to cultivate pollution.”

“Cultivate?”

“Yes, after the Era of Calamity, an evil God might have built a massive array beneath the Elf Forest to store pollution from that era, absorb external pollution, and merge it with the forest’s life force to create this particular pollution.”

“Uh… that’s quite possible.”

A giant array and such an enormous amount of pollution, having such speculation is entirely normal.

According to the information from Rose, the function of the array isn’t far from what Elina described.

That’s roughly the idea.

The news from those three isn’t all guaranteed to be true.

Or perhaps they don’t even know the array’s specific function; they only know the array and the pollution amount are controlled by fragments of Haroldias’s Divine Format.

Even Haroldias’s true form might be sleeping within the array, constantly influenced by the pollution.

“In any case, if we find any valuable treasure underground, we must figure out its function no matter what. If possible, take it out and prevent the array from continuing to accumulate pollution,” Elina’s face clouded over with concern.

The worry in her brow seemed to affect her life Magic as well.

Hilia said, “Though your idea is good, take care if taking away the treasure results in the array collapsing, releasing pollution underground. If pollution source cracks appear throughout the Elf Forest, the whole world might be in for disaster.”

Elina nodded and then suddenly laughed.

“I think we might be overly worried. How could such a massive array be destroyed by us, mere Tier Four Mages?”

Hilia shook her head, “Not necessarily. Even a giant tree can fall due to a tiny insect gnawing at it. We are within the array now and might influence its integrity. Anything is possible, so it’s always better to be cautious.”

“Hmm…”

Elina nodded and looked forward.

“Perhaps we are getting close.”