Chương 154: Book 3 Chapter 32 - Volcano Box

Victor dropped the stone walls all at once. Elsa blinked in surprise, then rushed his position. She was holding a massive, red-hot war hammer that she'd been using to bash down his maze walls. She swung it overhand and he jumped backwards. It missed him by inches, shattering the floor where he had been standing, revealing the level underneath. Elsa didn't stop the swing, bringing it around full circle up over her head again as she ran, then swinging it at an angle toward his torso.

Victor had a gravity concept, which he now used to his advantage. It was one of the pre-requisities for a tier 5 to learn how to fly, they had to first learn to understand gravity, and the attraction of their person to the planet they stood on, cementing their understanding into a gravity concept. Elsa likely had one as well, but was too wrapped up in her rage-fueled attack to counter what Victor did.

He created a gravity well just to his side, creating an instant connection from it to the hammer, which pulled the strike off course, missing him by a hair. The momentum caught Elsa off guard, and pulled her to the side also, leaving her open for a counter strike. Victor gathered mana above his open palm in a small, tightly cycling vortex, funneling as much wind and fire mana into it as he could, then released it as Elsa's chest point blank as she drew near.

It exploded as it hit her mana shields, launching her backward across the room. Victor erected a mana shield to protect him from the concussive shockwave, anchoring his own position with another use of his gravity concept. He only slid backward a few inches. As Elsa flew across the room, Victor's domain sense picked up an important detail. She had sensed the explosive projectile and its intent before it hit her, and had focused the majority of her defensive mana shields to protect her from the hit.

Some of her shields were also still reinforced above her, where Victor's little thundercloud was still pelting her with rain and lightning. Importantly, the shields at her back were less pronounced right now. The entire room was within the range of his domain, and conjuring mana constructs at one end of the room was as easy as doing it in front of his palm. That was somewhat true even at tier 5, as evidenced by Elsa's own attacks on him, but was more pronounced now that he had a personal domain.

He also had an intuitive sense and understanding of everything within his domain, almost as if his consciousness was everywhere at once inside it. That fact shined the brightest at the moment of using his domain teleportation ability, but was true at all times. His physical body was in one place only, but his mind and perception were everywhere. He moved his conscious sense of location to behind Elsa, and watched as she flew toward him, or toward where he was now perceiving reality from.

He formed two mana spikes, shaping them into steel, right in the path of Elsa's trajectory. Her mana shields absorbed the blow, but barely. He saw them crack. He formed a large, stone boulder over her as she rolled to a stop against the wall, and let it fall. Her mana shields held up again, but the weight of the stone crashed through the floor, pushing her down with it to the next level.

It didn't stop there, either, crunching one more time down to the basement level, where it impacted with her underneath it, forming a small crater. Victor had already returned his perception to his body, and was flying down through the wreckage behind the boulder. He landed on top of it, forming a metal box around himself, the boulder, and Elsa, to contain his next spell.

She roared from underneath the boulder, and it shuddered as she blasted it with an incredibly strong lightning bolt from where she lay pinned beneath it. It would have shattered the boulder, had Victor not clamped down on it with his will, keeping it in one piece. He filled the inside of the metal box with flames, pumping more and more fire mana into the inside of the box as the space heated up.

He began to feel the heat even from within his own mana shields, but continued pumping fire mana into the space, compacting it over and over to squeeze more in. The boulder began to melt from the heat. Even though it was mana acting like stone, it had the same properties as stone, and would until Victor released his hold on it. For now, he kept it as stone mana, which began liquefying into magma.

As the stone lost its integrity as a solid, Elsa was able to push up through it, screaming in pain, but still very much alive and angrier than ever. Her mana shields still held, keeping the fire mana and magma from making direct contact, but her body was red from the heat and sweat glistened on her brow from the exertion. As she stood, the liquid magma dripped off her mana shields, which hugged her form so tightly it appeared as if the magma was dripping off her body.

Her eyes shined with hatred, and she tried countering Victor's attack with ice mana of her own, letting out another roar from the exertion. Ice mana flooded out of her, but not at the same rate as Victor was able to maintain. He also clamped down on her with his domain and his aura, pressuring her to inhibit her full power from shining through. Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

As the ice mana came out of her mana channels, he also began ripping it from her control, bit by bit. It was a battle of wills, and she grunted with exertion as she tried resisting his attempts. Spittle flew from her mouth as she bared her teeth and growled at him.

"You're trash," she spat at him.

"I'll rip your limbs from your body one by one!" Spikes of ice mana formed over her shoulders in rapid succession, pelting Victor's shields over and over. The intense heat in the metal box, along with Victor's superior mana shields and aura strength diminished their effect before they could impact. She rushed forward again, trying the close-range tactics one more time. The metal box wasn't very large, and a single step brought her close enough to begin hammering him with strikes.

He focused on pressing down on her with his aura, lessening the force of her blows. He grunted with each hit, but stood and took it head on, letting his mana shields absorb the majority of the impact of each strike. He didn't even dodge, instead maintaining his focus of pouring more and more fire mana into the makeshift oven he was using to cook them both inside. The stone mana had liquefied now to the point that it was no longer a slow-moving sludge, but was instead splashing like water with each of their steps.

Victor felt his hairs starting to singe inside his mana shields. Elsa's mana shields were beginning to shine, as if the heat was melting the shields themselves. She pummeled him in the ribs and face over and over, punching and kicking with the desperation of a cornered bear. Unstructured mana poured out of her, washing over him in waves. She wasn't even bothering to form it into constructs or shape it into specific elements anymore, she was just throwing everything she had at him.

It was impressive and scary, and he knew that if she was any stronger, the fight wouldn't have gone in his favor. As it was, he could tell that her shields were on the verge of giving out. He continued pumping fire mana into the box. He stood there and took the hits, feeling his ribs bruise and his face begin to swell. His mana shields absorbed the impact, distributing it evenly around his person when they couldn't take the brunt of it, but some of the energy still carried through into his body.

He had already changed the box from steel into something else. A new metal that he didn't have a name for that could resist the higher heat. He had re-arranged the structure of the metal to be more dense, less likely to give out under the high heat and pressure. Elsa roared one final time, emitting a sudden, violent burst of mana that threw Victor against the wall of the box. His head snapped back as he hit, giving him a sudden headache.

In that same moment, Elsa's mana shields finally gave out, and she erupted in a burst of white light. When the light faded, she was gone, completely incinerated in the flash. Victor paused for just a moment, reaching out with his domain sense to ensure she was really gone. She was. He stopped emitting fire mana. Interestingly, now that he wasn't fighting for his life, and Elsa's aura wasn't pressuring him at all, his mana shields were able to deal with the intense heat without any issues.

He no longer felt hot, and his body temperature returned to a perfectly comfortable level. It suddenly felt as if he was resting in a cool meadow in Spring, rather than in an oven many times hotter than an active volcano. It was astonishing how much harder it had been to focus and keep control of his defenses with everything that had been going on. Without the distractions and constant pressure from another high-tiered mage, he realized he could easily endure conditions much more extreme than this.

The same could not be said for the other people in the building, nor for the building itself. He considered what to do with all of the built-up destructive power inside the box. He could release control of the fire mana, and it would dissipate back into the environment, ceasing to be fire mana. The stone mana would cease to be magma. The box would cease to be metal. The heat that had built up, however, would not dissipate.

He had heated the very air inside the box, and releasing it now would likely burn the house around him to the ground. He teleported outside the box, keeping the heat contained inside. He released the fire and stone mana, but kept the box intact. He carved out a section of the destroyed ceiling just large enough to fit the box through, since it was larger than the stone that had originally made the hole in the ceiling. He levitated up onto the ground floor, bringing the super-heated box with him.

Scared clan members were cowering in the furthest corners of the building, away from the fighting that had broken out. They rightfully judged that a fight of that nature would immediately result in their own demise, and had stayed clear. No one intercepted his flight, and no one called out to challenge his actions. He simply levitated the box to an exterior wall of the building, where he created a small opening in the building wall.

He formed a long metal pipe up into the sky, out of mana he changed into the same dense metal that the box was made of. He then opened a small hole in the side of the box, connecting it to the metal pipe, giving the heat a way to vent upwards into the sky. The pipe he formed went up hundreds of feet, well above the roofs of the building he was in and the nearby buildings. The heat could escape gracefully into the air without causing any further destruction.

He cast a quick illusion on himself to cover up the bruising and swelling on his face. He left the box to vent, while he floated back down to the basement. The guards who had been watching Shian's cell were cowering in a corner with as many mana shields as they could muster in between them and their surroundings. Three of the four had their eyes squeezed shut, and the fourth closed his too, once he saw Victor approaching. Victor ignored them and dismantled the enchantments on Shian's cell.

He didn't want to find the right tokens that would allow him to turn them off, so he just destroyed them with his will. They weren't strong enough to resist. Once the enchantments were gone, he cleanly sliced the bars with his domain, forming a makeshift doorway that he lifted to the side. Shian was there, waiting.