Chapter 235: The Real Witch
“I... I still have money! A lot of money! Doesn’t the Velt family need resources? I’ll give them all to you! And Magic Tools too! I know the locations of several of the Second Prince’s secret treasure vaults!” Randall’s voice had turned shrill and grating from the extremes of terror and desperate hope. All kinds of emotion flickered across his face—pleading, flattery, and the last vestiges of dying madness buried deep in his eyes. “Spare me! Please! Ryan! We were classmates! For the sake of us entering the ruins together! I swear I’ll disappear from now on! I’ll never show my face before you again! I swear it! I swear it in the name of magic!”
He looked as though he was about to fall to his knees, but his stiff body and the scroll in his hand, on the verge of activation, left him trapped in a grotesque, twisted posture.
Ryan watched him perform in silence.
At last, a faint ripple stirred in the crimson-gold depths of his pupils—not hesitation, but weariness with the spectacle before him.
“You talk too much,” Ryan said. His voice was calm, but it made Randall’s soul tremble more than any roar could have. “It seems your master really does enjoy listening to dogs bark.”
The instant those words fell, the teleportation scroll in Randall’s hand finally erupted in a blaze of silver light.
Violent spatial fluctuations twisted around him, wrapping his body completely.
“Hahahaha! You can’t kill me!!” Randall’s face instantly twisted with wild joy and the ecstatic relief of survival, mixed with bottomless hatred. “Ryan Velt! Just you wait! His Highness the Second Prince will never let you off—ugh?!”
His mad laughter and curses choked off in his throat.
Because Frostbite Dragon’s Kiss in Ryan’s hand had already moved.
There was no astonishing speed. No dazzling magic. It was only a simple, plain, utterly unremarkable straight thrust.
And yet, along the path of that thrust, the violently fluctuating silver light of teleportation met it like snow meeting its natural enemy, silently melting away and retreating.
The spatial protection granted by the scroll was no more meaningful before Frostbite Dragon’s Kiss than paper.
The sword point pierced effortlessly through the thinning silver light, then struck the dagger Randall had hastily raised to block, still wrapped in wind-and-lightning Mana.
Clang! Crack!
The dagger broke at once, its fractured edge dimming as the wind-and-lightning Mana attached to it burst and vanished like a punctured bubble.
Then the sword point continued on without the slightest hindrance and drove straight into Randall’s wide-open mouth.
“Ghk... urgh...” Randall’s wild joy and venomous hatred froze completely, replaced by boundless terror and agony.
His eyes bulged as he lowered his head in disbelief, staring at the section of azure blade that had gone in through his mouth and come out through the back of his neck. There was little blood, because the extreme cold had frozen the wound and the surrounding vessels and nerves in an instant.
The light of the teleportation scroll went out completely. It became nothing more than a dull, lifeless scrap of paper that fluttered to the ground.
Ryan turned his wrist and flicked upward.
Riiip.
A horrible sound, like frozen flesh being torn apart, scraped against the ears.
Randall’s head was split diagonally upward from the chin. Most of the top half of his skull, along with the brain matter inside it—still carrying fear, calculation, and unwillingness—was lifted by the azure blade, trailing a spray of blood mist and ice crystals that froze almost immediately.
What remained of his jaw and neck drooped limply downward.
The headless remnant of his body swayed once, then toppled backward against the stone wall before slowly sliding down, leaving behind a dark red streak across the rock that froze even as it formed.
Ryan flicked the sword once, knocking the red-and-white residue from the blade. Frostbite Dragon’s Kiss remained as cold and immaculate as ever, as though it had just severed a piece of dead wood.
His crimson-gold eyes did not linger on Randall’s corpse for even a second before turning calmly to the four who remained—Marcus, Olaf, Shiloya, and Kallen.
These four had long since been frightened out of their wits by the succession of clean, brutal, and grotesquely inexplicable deaths they had just witnessed.
Marcus and Olaf stood back-to-back, every muscle in their bodies taut, yet neither of them had the slightest courage left to fight. There was only the desperate trembling of beasts facing a natural predator.
The staff slipped from Shiloya’s hand and hit the ground with a clatter. She clutched her head with both hands, her body curled in on itself as she shook uncontrollably. Kallen’s face had gone ashen, his gaze hollow, as though his faith itself had collapsed.
Ryan held the sword and walked toward them.
“N-no... don’t kill me...” Marcus’s voice was hoarse. “We were only following orders. You and I are both from the North...”
Olaf also forced out a few words. All the savagery in his eyes had been replaced by fear. “Marquis Wilier... His Lordship the Marquis won’t...”
“The fourth,” Ryan said softly, cutting them off. Their despairing faces were reflected in his crimson-gold eyes.
He raised Frostbite Dragon’s Kiss once more.
But just as the blade was about to fall—
“Aaaaargh—!!!”
Shiloya, who had been curled up and trembling all this time, suddenly let out a shriek that no longer sounded human.
Her head snapped up.
Her face, which had once been fairly delicate, was now twisted and deformed. The whites of her eyes had been completely consumed by frenzied, surging dark-red flames.
The blood vessels beneath her skin bulged and writhed like worms, radiating fire-element fluctuations so unstable, violent, and chaotic that they seemed ready to tear her apart.
The temperature around them began to climb at a terrifying speed.
The air warped in the heat haze, crackling faintly. The solid ground beneath them split into spiderweb-like fissures under the blistering heat, and a dark red glow could be seen deep within those cracks.
“Shiloya!!” Kallen cried out in horror, trying to rush toward the figure wrapped in blazing light, only to be hurled back by a burst of scorching air that exploded outward without warning. He fell hard and rolled across the ground.
“That fluctuation!” Vera’s gray-green eyes contracted sharply, and her voice turned shrill with urgency. “The elements are resonating violently! She’s drawing on them herself... A Witch! She’s a Witch! Ryan, be careful! The very tier of her Mana is swelling!”
As though to confirm her judgment, the sound that came from within that searing mass of light was no longer a scream of pain, but a malicious shriek.
Shiloya’s figure twisted unsteadily within the radiance, her eyes blazing red.
The fire around her had stabilized into an unnatural incandescent white, while dark-red flames leaped ominously at the edges.
The violent fire element was being controlled and gathered by some unseen hand, forming writhing fire serpents, spinning rings of flame, and floating burning fireballs all around her body.
Her Mana tier was rising at an explosive rate, and the pressure it brought made the entire cave feel heavy and scorching. Every breath was like swallowing live charcoal.
The power of the Witch had fully awakened.
“Good! Good! Excellent!” Marcus, still collapsed on the ground, ignored the agony of his broken arm as a wild light exploded in his remaining eye. He laughed hoarsely, “Shiloya! Kill them! Burn them all to ashes with your fire!”
Olaf struggled to his feet as well, a vicious grin spreading across his face as though he could already see Ryan and the others being devoured by the flames.
Though Kallen was badly hurt, hope had reignited in his eyes too.
BOOM—!!!
A terrifying pillar of fire more than several meters across erupted upward from Shiloya as its center, streaked through with incandescent white, dark red, and even blackened veins.
The pillar tore effortlessly through the ruined spiderwebs hanging above and smashed into the towering ceiling of the cavern, shaking down countless molten fragments of rock as though it meant to bore straight through the underground space itself.
Within the pillar, the high-heat turbulence caused by the distorted air let out a howl like ghosts wailing, and buried within it came the muffled peals of thunder—catastrophic chain reactions caused by chaotic Mana so extreme that it had begun to disrupt the balance of the basic elements themselves.
Witch.
For the first time, that word appeared before Ryan in a form so real, so violent, and so undeniable, embodying destruction itself and crashing headlong into his understanding.
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