Chương 264

Uther's hand slowly dropped, and his eyes hardened as the previous geniality vanished like a blown-out candle.

"Such a pity," he sighed, turning his back on them. He picked up the glass dropper from his velvet-lined tray, extracted an iridescent bead of black fluid, and let it fall into the hairline fracture he had carved into the Crucible root. He had lost interest and was returning to his original purpose.

"Dispose of them." The guards reacted at once, as if they'd been waiting for the order. Alchemical rifles were raised, their internal mechanisms whining as hyper-accelerated rounds were chambered. Valentia braced himself, his jaw set in grim defiance. Pauline's shadows flared outward in a desperate defense against the inevitable. Asteria stepped in front of Orion, preparing to shield him from the coming barrage even as silver light coalesced around her hands.

Their power was muted here because of Uther's interference, and Orion had little doubt their resistance would not last long. Even if, by some miracle, they managed to defeat the guards, the Alchemist was simply beyond them. Still, he wouldn't give up. The CC warmed as he ran thousands of calculations, trying to forge a defense against the incoming projectiles. It never got the chance to finish. The rifles never fired.

The fae-like glow around them was abruptly extinguished, swallowed by a sudden pressure that folded the very fabric of space inward. The alchemical rifles clicked uselessly, and only because Orion had been studying them so keenly did he see what happened. Their kinetic potential dropped to zero. A vertical tear opened in the empty air between the two groups. Unlike Asteria's spatial manipulation, this was clearly no portal.

Reality itself seemed to flinch, pulling back to make room for an entity too mighty for the physical plane to hold comfortably. The High Priestess of the Lunar Sanctum stepped through. Seraphina wore layered robes of deep sapphire and ash-gray, adorned with bead-like constellations that drifted slowly across the fabric, mapping the night sky with impossible precision. Her mouth and chin were concealed behind a delicate silver lace veil, leaving only her piercing topaz eyes visible. She did not draw on the Field.

The Field obeyed her. The ambient mana of the Heartwood, previously suppressed by Uther, surged toward the High Priestess in a violent tide, bowing to the most powerful witch of the Cyril Magocracy. At that, Uther finally turned around. The boredom was gone. His mechanical eye whirred, the lens dilating and contracting as it tried to parse data. For the first time since meeting the Alchemist, Orion saw genuine wariness crack his composure.

Uther took a slow half-step back, his gaze fixed only on Seraphina, as if everything else didn't exist.

"Fascinating," he murmured, intrigued. He tilted his head as the amber light traced the constellations on her robes.

"The reports I received were deeply flawed. They classified you as a powerful witch, yes. But you… You have touched the ceiling, haven't you?" What does that mean? Did he not expect her to be tier five, or is he saying she's stronger than that? What ceiling? Seraphina's topaz eyes locked onto the Alchemist, regarding him as a mere annoyance. When she spoke, her voice resonated directly in the minds of everyone present, as inescapable as an ocean tide.

"You spread poison through my domain, Uther Katzaet," Seraphina intoned, the silver lace of her veil barely shifting.

"Worse, I can see that you seek to bind and corrupt the song of the earth for your purposes."

"I merely seek to cure a systemic disease," Uther countered heatedly, even as his hands slipped into his coat pockets.

"You hoard power you do not understand, ascribing to divinity what is merely greatness. But do not worry, I will find the answer soon, and we shall all be unbound."

"Your path ends here," the High Priestess declared. The clash between them occurred in the space between heartbeats, operating on a level of magic Orion could barely perceive, let alone calculate. Uther withdrew his right hand from his pocket, flicking his fingers in a sharp pattern. At his command, the universe's fine-structure constant trembled within a thirty-foot radius of the High Priestess. The air warped, turning an impossible shade of magenta as the atmosphere's molecular bonds began to unravel.

Seraphina's eyes flashed with blinding silver light. What she did was impossible to explain, as too much happened at once, but Orion could still glean that she'd rejected his control of the Field and imposed her own. If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. Stars materialized around them, reflecting off one another and the universe beyond, in an infinite call only the High Priestess could comprehend. The two opposing truths collided.

The dimensions fractured. Orion gasped, falling to his knees as the pressure threatened to crush him. Asteria thrust her hands forward, channeling mana at an incredible rate to maintain a translucent silver dome that kept them from the crossfire. Valentia knelt beside them, shielding his eyes even as he muttered under his breath, building another layer of protection. Despite their incredible power and recent successes, neither of the two dared to step into the fight.

Through the dome, Orion watched the universe break, his mind straining to comprehend. The air shattered like glass. Shards of reality spun wildly, reflecting alternate permutations of the grove. Gravity lost its constancy, pulling upward, then sideways, then nowhere at all. The deafening grind of tectonic plates filled the air, completely drowning out the roots' hum. Uther's alchemical decay met Seraphina's light, and the resulting friction tore a hole in the visual spectrum. Colors inverted.

The white roots turned pitch black, while the shadows blazed with blinding luminescence. Orion's adamantine glasses spat out a continuous stream of critical error warnings. The math was incomprehensible, even for someone like him, and he was forced to abandon his attempts, lest he burn them and himself through. His mind already ached from what little he'd gleaned.

One thing was clear, though: the two monsters were manipulating the very fabric of reality, imposing their will upon it without any need for structure, foci, or chants, and the universe was tearing itself apart to accommodate both commands. Uther slid backward through the void, his slate-gray coat smoking. His amber eye sparked, bleeding a thin trail of dark fluid down his pale cheek. He had survived the initial exchange, but his expression was tight with strain.

Whatever he had planned for a possible meeting with the High Priestess was based on outdated data. He was paying for that now. Seraphina, on the other hand, seemed completely unbothered. She hadn't so much as twitched a finger throughout the entire battle, and if it weren't for the circumstances, Orion would have thought her ready for tea.

"An impressive showing," Uther shouted over the roar of spatial distortions, grinning madly.

"But the experiment is already concluded!" Orion watched for another attack on the Rules, or perhaps an alchemical trap. He'd certainly had time to set one up while waiting for their arrival—he was pretty sure, at this point, that leading them here had been his true purpose—and the thought disquieted him. If he'd inadvertently led the High Priestess into a trap meant to remove her from the games, they would suffer a blow that far exceeded even the loss of their camp.

No, even if they'd lost the entire army that fought at the Shattered Basin, it still wouldn't have compared to Seraphina's loss. Uther snapped his fingers, and the guards he'd brought along died. Their matte-black armor inverted, crushing inward with unimaginable force. The alchemical engines powering their suits detonated simultaneously, instantly converting their biological matter into a singularity of Silence.

A miniature black hole of pure alchemical corruption erupted at the center of the grove, swallowing the light and violently destabilizing the already fractured dimension. For the first time, Seraphina moved. She raised both hands, her sapphire robes billowing as she directed a stream of silver light to contain the expanding singularity before it could fully consume the Heartwood. Seizing the momentary distraction, Uther stepped back. The space behind him folded like a piece of origami, opening a tear into the void.

"We will have to continue this another time, Priestess," he promised, his voice echoing from all around. He slipped into the tear, and the spatial fold snapped shut, leaving nothing but the chaotic roar of the imploding alchemical bomb. Seraphina's eyes burned like twin suns. She clapped her hands together, and the lunar light collapsed the alchemical singularity, somehow condensing the volatile explosion into a marble-sized sphere of black glass that dropped harmlessly to the floor. It made absolutely no sense.

Everything Orion knew about physics, alchemy, and magic in general told him that thing should have gone off with power comparable to an atomic bomb. Yet there it lay, inert. Clearly, there was much left for him to learn. I'll have to review this entire battle once this is over. I might not have gained any further insight into their powers yet, and the data may be corrupted, but anything is worth digging into. He already knew that powers beyond him existed.

His father's duel for the Speakership came to mind, though then he'd been prevented from learning anything by powerful defensive magic. The Guildmaster of the Adventurer's Guild was another example of immense power. But this… It was the first time he'd ever been this close. The things he'd seen would need careful review, for he knew there was something there for him to find. Asteria's protective dome flickered and died as she collapsed to one knee, coughing up a spray of blood.

Orion immediately set aside his thoughts and caught her, his arms trembling from the sheer stress of enduring the nearby pressure. As he helped his mother down, he looked around. The fae-like beauty of the True Heartwood was ruined. The translucent roots were shattered and blackened, weeping pale sap onto scorched earth. The delicate glass flowers had been pulverized into dust. The air felt thin, stripped of its ancient vitality.

Seraphina lowered her hands, turning her gaze to the devastation, her expression unreadable. It was as if nothing could touch her. She walked slowly toward the center of the grove, where the silver-white root Uther had been treating lay cracked and dimming. The black fluid he had injected pulsed, slowly spreading like a parasite through the crystalline structure. Seraphina knelt gracefully beside the root.

She removed a single glowing bead from the constellation embroidered across her robes and pressed it into the fracture. A wave of restorative moonlight washed outward. Orion watched, breathless, as the impossible unfolded. Time did not reverse, but the effect was remarkably similar. The blackened, shattered roots knit themselves back together with startling speed. The pale sap crystallized, sealing the wounds.

New glass-like flowers sprouted from the obsidian floor in seconds, unfurling their petals to resume their quiet hum. Within moments, the grove was restored to its ethereal state. The only remnant of the battle was the black vein of corruption within the central root, which Seraphina had completely encased in an impenetrable shell of reflective crystal, locking the decay in place. Apparently done, she stood up and finally turned to them.

She looked at Valentia, who was staring at his transmuted golden staff in dejection, then at Asteria, who was wiping blood from her chin, and finally her gaze settled on Orion. She offered a slow, almost imperceptible nod. Orion lacked the energy to respond. The adrenaline that had kept him upright through the pursuit, the intellectual duel, and the catastrophic clash finally abandoned him. He slumped against a pristine root, trying to make sense of what had just happened.

So much had happened, and he felt threads slipping away because he lacked the context, context he was unaware he was missing. At the same time, he'd learned a lot. Just his discussion with Uther was valuable, and once he'd studied the battle, he was sure he would grow even more. For now, though, he was done. Exhaustion pulled at him, and even against his will, his eyes closed as darkness claimed him.