Chapter 70: Silver Calamity · Pseudo
The shattered remains of the giant were still drifting through the domain like fragments trapped in slowed time.
Charred armor plates spun soundlessly in the violet glow of the tide, reflecting jagged streaks of purple light. What had once been a towering man was now nothing more than glittering wreckage and scorched dust.
Gray stood frozen.
Broken breaths hissed through his teeth. His fingers twitched, but no command came. Fear had already crushed everything else inside him, leaving behind only the instinct to tremble.
That man had been one of the Polar Merchant Guild's true elites, a moving fortress, a symbol of brute power in the Inner City.
And yet in front of that silver white figure, he had not even managed to resist.
He had simply broken apart.
Bone Engraving's fingers loosened. The dark gold staff slipped from his hand and landed crookedly in the blood soaked mud. The eerie green light in his eyes had dimmed into something hollow and lifeless.
"This level of spell... this level of control..."
His voice shook.
"Is this what a real mage looks like?"
As a necromancy type caster, he understood better than anyone what absolute suppression meant. In front of Hodell, he no longer felt like a master of death.
He felt like a child standing outside the Corridor of Truth, blinded by a brilliance he could not comprehend.
High above the battlefield, inside the monitoring chamber, all discussion abruptly ceased.
Silence spread through the room like a disease.
Far away in the Wasteland, Homan remained hunched over his crystal feed, fingers dug so deep into the armrest that the leather had split. The red wine in his glass had spilled long ago, soaking into the expensive carpet in a dark red stain that looked unpleasantly like fresh blood.
He stared at the silver white figure on the screen and felt cold rush from the soles of his feet to the top of his skull.
"What in the world is that?"
His voice had gone hoarse.
"Who can explain to me how he forced open a domain in an environment like this?"
Fear, regret, shock, and raw terror churned inside him, then gradually gave way to one last emotion.
Relief.
Relief that he had not chosen to openly offend this monster.
Beside him, the supervising official was faring no better. He had been calm all the way through the first half of the match, but now his expression had finally cracked. He hammered the console with both hands, trying to force the array to collect stable readings. Due to the violent fluctuations, several data streams on the projection screen were already overlapping into gibberish.
"Six thousand... eighty five hundred... twelve thousand..."
His voice rose sharply.
"The upper limit triggered an alarm!"
Sweat slid down his temple.
"With energy intensity at this level, how is his body not collapsing?"
Then he turned his head and glared at Homan's image in the crystal feed, fury and panic twisting together in his face.
"This is the uncontrollable variable you were talking about?"
He nearly spat the words out.
"The Merchant Guild's elite team looks like three children holding sticks in front of him!"
At the bottom of the subsidence pit, Hodell was already walking toward the last two.
Step by step.
Each footfall made the field heavier.
Bone Engraving was the first to break.
With a shrill, almost animal scream, he tore open his own chest. Nine bone talismans burst out in a spray of dark blood and transformed into a net of corroded black chains.
[Necrotic Chains: Imprisonment]
Hodell's gaze behind the faceplate stayed glacially calm.
He lifted one finger and tapped his own wrist.
At once, a layer of high frequency thermal energy spread over both forearms like a transparent blade.
The chains wrapped around him.
The next instant, he struck.
His movements were clean and economical. He did not try to overpower the spell. Instead, he sliced straight into the most fragile energy joints, burning holes into the structure at the exact points holding the construct together.
Hiss.
The black chains, so sinister only a heartbeat ago, began to snap one section at a time. Foul smoke rose from them, and their necrotic aura collapsed under the heat.
Gray moved the moment he saw that happen.
He already understood there was no retreat.
In this field, running was pointless. Begging was pointless. The only thing left was a final charge.
His body turned into a streak of dark gold light as he hurled himself forward.
It was his deadliest move.
It was also his last.
Hodell pivoted with a slight tap of his foot.
Inside the domain, his movement was almost insulting. Gray's desperate lunge passed by in a shower of sparks, grazing White Crow's armor and leaving not even the faintest mark.
Hodell sidestepped once, borrowed the opponent's momentum, and turned with him.
"This is where it ends."
His hand slipped into the storage slot built into White Crow's arm.
Another sphere slid neatly into his fingers.
Unlike the last one, this one held a bead of pale incandescent white at its center. It was not fire in the traditional sense. It was the compressed interaction of kinetic destruction and thermal annihilation, refined and packed so tightly that the air around it seemed to recoil.
The moment Hodell flicked it out, the surrounding air appeared to cave inward.
The sphere carved a warped trail through space itself.
Gray's pupils shrank violently.
At that distance, he could feel the thing breathing destruction. Even before detonation, the equilibrium at its surface was already unstable enough to make his skin crawl.
"No... no, that's impossible..."
He tried to retreat.
But under the domain's swamp like gravity, his body might as well have been sinking into wet concrete.
On the other side, Bone Engraving had fully collapsed.
He no longer cared about backlash or consequence. With a desperate gagging motion, he spat out the necromantic phylactery circuit he had implanted into his body years ago, hoping to use it as a final shield.
Hodell saw the effort.
A faint, merciless curve touched the corner of his mouth beneath the faceplate.
Then he snapped his fingers.
"Detonate."
The world lost its sound.
There was no towering fireball.
No thunderous wave.
Only an absolute, sacred white.
For a single instant, the competing energies unraveled into something purer and crueler than an explosion. It was not impact. It was erasure.
Gray's priceless dark gold robe vanished first.
Then Bone Engraving's body.
Their shields, their defenses, their layered preparations, all of it came apart under the sphere's collapse. The kinetic pressure pulverized structure. The thermal burst sliced through everything that remained. Flesh, bone, cloth, metal, magic, all of it was pulled through an invisible grinder and reduced to the finest ash.
It took less than a blink.
When the white light faded, both men were gone.
No scream.
No corpse.
Only a drifting haze of scorched residue.
[Battle ended. Based on the difference in number between the enemy and yourself, you have gained an additional 21 Trial Points.]
[[Extreme Trial]: Current Progress 782/1500]
[Kill confirmed. Points: 235]
Then the first tide wave ended.
A deep silence descended over the pit.
A few broken scraps of metal clinked against the ground. In the stillness, the sound felt unnaturally loud.
In the monitoring room, the silence had become oppressive.
The supervising official slumped back into his chair. The monitor crystal slipped from his hand and shattered against the floor. On the main display, the waveform representing Hodell's energy field had briefly gone blank during the detonation.
That meant the eruption had interfered with the observation array itself.
"How..."
The supervisor looked almost sick.
"How did he do that? That wasn't ordinary flame output. That wasn't even something fire element manipulation should be able to achieve..."
"That wasn't only fire."
Homan's eyes stayed fixed on the projection.
His expression had changed again.
The fear remained, but now it was layered with something colder and deeper.
Awe.
"That sphere is not normal equipment," he said slowly. "The technology behind it has to come from a major force. Something classified. Something far beyond anything sold in the Wasteland."
He licked dry lips.
"And if the sphere can still be explained away as advanced gear, then that domain cannot."
His voice turned quiet.
"That is not merely a mage's power."
He stared at Hodell's figure, the silver armor retreating through the fading field like a ghost stepping out of a nightmare.
"That is a miracle."
The crystal link on his desk flared. Several Merchant Guild executives appeared in the feed, every one of them pale and silent.
Homan did not waste a second.
"I advise you to revoke all further assassination attempts against Mr. Pale."
He drew a hard breath.
"In fact, begin preparing the items for the wager agreement."
"He is no longer our prey."
Each word that followed was deliberate.
"He is now the Polar Merchant Guild's partner."
Below, at the bottom of the subsidence pit, the purple tide slowly flowed away from Hodell's boots.
White Crow stood as clean as ever, washed by the radiance of the field. Only the faceplate reflected the terrified faces of the survivors hiding nearby.
"He's a devil..."
One outlaw, his prosthetic legs half destroyed, clawed desperately at the rock wall, trying to force himself into a crack far too narrow to hide a human body.
"Gray is dead... Bone Engraving is ash... the Merchant Guild's agents didn't even last a minute... that wasn't a spell, that was a calamity..."
Not far away, several mercenaries crouched together so tightly their shoulders overlapped. They covered their mouths, afraid even the sound of breathing would draw his attention.
The weak were collapsing.
The strong were worse.
In a far corner of the pit, an outlaw known as Broken Blade gripped his heavy weapon so hard his knuckles turned pale. He had once stood among the top fifty on the death list. Once, he had believed himself close to the peak of Shadow Valley.
That illusion had been pulverized tonight.
He stared at the space where Hodell had just fought and found his throat completely dry.
"A domain like that..."
His grip tightened.
"If he closes the distance, my armor means nothing."
A long pause followed.
"What kind of monster did they let into this Ranking Festival?"
Hodell ignored all of it.
He brushed imaginary dust from his cuff and felt the source energy within his body circulating calmly. Neither the character summon card nor the compressed energy sphere had drawn from his own reserves. In that sense, they were truly artifacts among artifacts.
He glanced at his interface.
The battle itself had only triggered a D rank encounter. Ordinarily, he would not have given such a mission a second glance. But the special reward linked to an [Incredible] evaluation still stirred a certain curiosity in him.
His total experience had already broken through two million.
Once again, his choice had proven correct.
He had never bothered with the half baked subclasses that littered Liuli Star's progression tree, things like [Executioner], [Outlaw], [Executor], or [Agent]. They sounded impressive, but in practice they were small branches that slowed true advancement.
Pure kills still felt the best.
Of course, if the level gap grew too wide, the return on bullying the weak dropped sharply. Eventually, the system reduced the gains to almost nothing.
That was unfortunate.
He exhaled slowly.
"The Trial Points are still too few."
As if responding to his thoughts, the twelve neon spires overhead shifted color.
Purple turned to a smothered, warning red.
Hum!
A low tremor rolled through the sky.
The air, which had only just begun to settle, started vibrating again. The accumulated liquid at the pit's bottom, mixed with blood, ash, and broken tissue, rippled outward in concentric rings.
The second wave was coming.
It was only a Level 2 tide.
Under ordinary circumstances, that would not have meant much to the stronger survivors.
But after the first wave, after the bloodshed, after the damage to armor, barriers, and bodies, a Level 2 tide was more than enough to become a death sentence.
This time the purple energy did not descend in walls.
It condensed into countless droplets suspended in the air, each one carrying enough pressure to punch through damaged protective layers.
"The second wave!"
"Find cover!"
"My barrier hasn't recovered yet!"
The screaming started again.
Then the tide fell.
Wherever the droplets landed, flesh burst open. Those whose defenses had already failed simply dropped where they stood, consciousness extinguished instantly beneath the renewed flood of violent energy.
Hodell stood at the edge of the oncoming storm.
The second tide crashed against White Crow and scattered into blue violet sparks. Silver armor met purple rain, and for a brief moment he looked less like a man than a walking omen.
He listened to the panic.
He felt the restless energy saturating the battlefield.
Then he shifted his weight, tapped lightly with one foot, and launched himself forward.
Like a silver bolt.
Like a blade of moonlight cutting into a flood.
He plunged straight into the rising purple tide without the slightest hesitation.
This time, what the survivors would hear next would not be the tide.
It would be the footsteps of the reaper.
.....
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