Chương 153: Book 3 Chapter 31 - Fighting The Boss

"Kill him!" Elsa screamed to the tier 4, making it clear what her intentions were. The lights in the room winked out, likely Elsa's doing, as she was a battle-hardened warrior, and knew how to use her magic sense to fight blind. Victor assumed the tactic was supposed to catch him off guard, but it was lessened by the dozens of spells that immediately followed. The tier 4 wasn't especially strong, and Victor wrapped mana shields around the man to contain whatever spells he was weaving.

Elsa's spells, on the other hand, appeared all around the room, from all sides at once. Fire poured out from behind him in a non-stop fashion, incredibly hot and potent. The floor beneath his feet began to twist and writhe, snaking its way up his legs to trap him in place. Or maybe he was sinking into it, the more he thought about what was happening. Stone spikes formed on both of his sides, spearing in to pierce him simultaneously.

Elsa herself shot forward in a blur, stone gauntlets forming around her fists, red-hot with heat. She pulled her fist back to strike. It all happened in less than a heart-beat, and the tier 4 was still waving his first spells together. Victor's domain sense helped him see it all and make sense of it, in the same amount of time it took Elsa to put it together. Victor wasn't a warrior, but he knew danger when he sensed it. He did the first thing that came to mind, and teleported out of danger.

Elsa's stone-covered fist whooshed through the air where his head had just been, and she whirled around in surprise. Victor had teleported directly behind the tier 4, who was just barely finishing his first set of mana constructs, half a dozen ice bolts that he launched toward where Victor had just been. They collided with the mana shields Victor had wrapped around the man, shattering on impact. Victor's mana shields barely shuddered.

In that single heartbeat, when everything happened so fast, Victor began to realize a few things. The thoughts flew through his mind even as he teleported, giving him perfect mental clarity by the time he finished appearing behind the tier 4. The first thing he realized was that his domain offered benefits that he hadn't realized before. It was actively suppressing the auras of the other two mages. Victor knew for a fact that Elsa had a full-powered aura, as strong as his own.

It was a well-known fact, one of the reasons he had been so scared of her. Earlier, when they'd met a few minutes ago, it had felt as strong as his own. Feeling it now, though, with his domain pressing down on her, it only felt half as strong as his own. That meant he was operating at twice the capacity that she was. The tier 4, whose aura was already considerably weaker than Victor's, was also having his aura suppressed, to the point that it felt laughably weak to Victor.

At tier 4, the man was also at a severe disadvantage to Victor in terms of strength, speed, mana throughput, and mana capacity, and his suppressed aura was only amplifying that gap. Another thing Victor realized was that while some might advance to tier 6 without reaching the peak of tier 5, he had never taken that kind of shortcut. He had reached the peak of every single tier he'd passed through before advancing.

He had never felt pressured to sacrifice long-term potential for quicker access to power, a privilege extended to him by virtue of who his family was. That being said, his fear of Elsa being as strong as his had been founded on false beliefs. With his peak tier 5 strength having been worked into his personal domain, this power gap was wider than he'd imagined. Her superior skill and fighting experience likely wouldn't be enough to overcome such a gap. Even so, fighting two opponents at once was incredibly risky.

The tier 4 would be a distraction that Victor couldn't afford. As he finished materializing behind the man, he formed a mana spike, foregoing shaping it into any specific element, and shoved it through the man's defenses through his back. His shields gave way like soft sand, offering some resistance, but not much. The mana spike pierced his heart, and he crumpled to the floor without a sound.

Elsa whipped around in the same moment, eyes going wide with surprise at both Victor's sudden relocation and the death of her ally. She roared in anger, rushing at him once again. Teleporting was very mana intensive, something Victor couldn't afford to do much more. He wanted to save his mana for the unlikely event that he needed to teleport to safety, so he chose to engage her head on. As more of her spells formed around him, she also launched a mental attack.

He felt her mind spikes collide with the shell around his mind, surprised and impressed that she could carry out such a strong mental attack at the same time as her physical attacks began assaulting him. She was truly a formidable opponent. He reinforced his mana shields all around his person with his aura and his intent, hardening them with his resolve that nothing would get through.

At the same time, he parried Elsa's mind spike with a mental attack of his own, swatting hers to the side just enough for them to glance harmlessly off his mind shell. This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. He smiled. Mind magic was one area he was not scared of losing in, especially now that he'd advanced to tier 6. Elsa's spells collided with his mana shields, breaking like the ocean against coastal cliffs.

Loud, violent, but ultimately fruitless in its attempts to break through. Even as her spells and mental assault died at inception, she arrived in person, once again swinging her gauntleted fists at his face. With her aura suppressed, his aura pressed down on her more than she could resist, and he could tell that she was moving at reduced speed. Victor was old, but he didn't feel old. His tier 6 body was muscled and ready for action.

He likely had hundreds of years left to live, meaning that his current age put him somewhere in the early prime of his tier 6 life. Unpracticed though he was, he was able to duck and dodge around her attacks just in time as they whizzed by his face and torso. He wasn't a fighter, and didn't really know the right way to throw his weight into a punch. Dodging Elsa's attacks was about all he could do on the physical front, but that wasn't really his specialty. Victor was a mage, through and through.

He had lived and breathed magic and magical research for many decades now. He responded to her onslaught by setting up a few attacks of his own, all in the span of two heartbeats. A legitimate, although small, thundercloud materialized above Elsa's head, locked on to her position. Small as it was, the electrical buildup inside the storm was quite potent, and lightning began targeting her person, even as the air in the storm coalesced into a torrential downpour on her head.

At the same moment, Victor imprinted runes on the floor in the center of the room to enchant the very floor they stood on. Infusing mana into an enchantment was ridiculously ineffective cost-wise, so making a powerful enchantment on the spot was an absurd idea, when he needed his mana for other things. That being said, he didn't need the enchantment to be powerful or long-lived, it was just a distraction. The floor became sticky, making movement less effective.

Victor hovered a millimeter off the ground the instant he activated the runes, escaping the trap himself. Elsa's movements and kicks slowed down even more as the floor trap kicked in, at the same moment that lightning began peltering her mana shields. Victor was able to evade her strikes a bit more easily now. In addition to those two attacks, he continued launching mind spikes at her, acknowledging that although her mental defenses were sound, it was likely more of a distraction for her than it was for him.

A heartbeat after he trapped the floor, he also summoned a stone maze into existence, filling the entire room with his own mana, then shaping it into stone walls. Only he knew the layout, and it separated the two of them momentarily. She immediately tried to break through the walls, but that was a battle of attrition he would win every time. He was stronger, had a larger mana capacity, a stronger effective aura, and a personal domain. The mana in the room belonged to him.

He started realizing a few more things about his domain at that moment. His domain had been able to completely take control of Zoey's mana the moment Victor willed it, back when she'd shown him what she was capable of. His domain gave him control of reality around him, including the mana others had shaped into spells. That hadn't quite been the case for the spells that Elsa and this tier 4 had crafted.

He could still feel the mana, as well as some sense of ownership and authority over it, but his ability to take control of it was hindered by their auras. Elsa's more so than the tier 4. It seemed the strength of an opponent's aura governed how effectively they could infuse their will into their mana constructs, limiting his own ability to wrest the constructs from their control.

He also realized, to his own chagrin, that he never would have discovered any of this without having engaged in this fight, or one like it. Some things could only be learned by experience. His journey through tier 6 was long, and he had decades of growth ahead of him, but he wondered how much longer it would be if he stymied his own learning by not pushing himself in some ways. How much more could he have learned if he had engaged in a bit more contest as a tier 4 or tier 5?

He hadn't really sparred with anyone since his academy days, many decades ago. He had been so focused on his research that he had likely missed many important lessons even about his own aura at those earlier tiers. He was a researcher at heart, and wouldn't give that up for anything, but he now realized that maybe he didn't need to shy away from conflict as much as he had in the past.

If anything, this fight was teaching him things about his own domain that would help him in his future research and artificing attempts. Elsa hammered his stone maze with spells, splintering walls and breaking through them. Victor continued retreating to new areas of the maze, forming new walls to replace the ones she destroyed. The room was small though, and he didn't actually have that much room to flee.

Both of them could sense the other with their magic sense also, meaning that Elsa was constantly heading in his direction.

"You coward!" she shouted, blasting through another wall.

"You attack me in my own home, kill one of my clan members, then run? Face me! After I kill you, I'll tear apart House Yountal until there's nothing left but dust. I'll make Shian watch as her entire house burns to the ground and she loses everyone she cares about." It had only been a few seconds since the maze was created, and as nice as the reprieve was, he knew he needed to face her again. Her threats affected him more than he thought they would.

He imagined Shian, Zoey, Dustin, Jaden, and the others at Shian's estate as she spoke. He cared about them, just like he cared about Shian. He had been so wrapped up in his research for so long that he hadn't made time for friends. He hadn't realized how much he missed it until he began interacting with them all. Shian especially treated him like a friend, like a normal person, instead of the scary high-tiered monster that most people saw him as. He didn't want to see her get hurt. It was time to end this fight.