novelraw Chapter 72: Four Sentinels
Chapter 72: Four Sentinels
The Garden screamed.
Not with sound, but with pressure.
Axir hovered above a fractured valley of annihilation.
Molten scars glowed across the land where forests once stood. Craters and scorched earth were everywhere.
Charred roots thicker than highways smoldered, their rune-etched bark cracking and collapsing into radiant embers.
His level climbed relentlessly.
423
424
425
Every second was another slaughter.
Blazing Blood climbed with merciless certainty.
Each three-second tick tore vitality from his body and, in return, fed him power. Arcane flooded his veins. Agility sharpened his movements to surgical perfection. His perception expanded until individual mana currents across kilometers felt as clear as breath on skin.
Axir immersed himself in this speed and action, cutting away useless moments, controlling the flow of powers, and increasing the proficiency of the cards that were active.
The Solar Rift Glaivebow sang in his hand as he flew around, raining destruction.
Arrows no longer felt like attacks. They were punctuation marks in a sentence of extinction.
Axir stood still now. He no longer needed to move to cover the entire area as his Blazing Blood stacks neared 90.
Bow Mode remained active as his arms blurred into afterimages, firing 1000 Riftflare Arrows per second.
The trajectories of the arrows weaved through the exotic garden, leaving not a single place unchecked.
The arrows went into the smallest of caves and the deepest of chambers, killing all Normal monsters, Elite monsters, and Champion monsters with utter impunity.
The air above the forest resembled a constellation map, glowing paths etched into reality itself as each projectile followed its predesigned route, constantly marked by Axir’s brain.
Shockflares overlapped.
Gravity folded.
Entire monster herds were torn from the ground, compressed into burning singularities of flame and force, then erased.
Elite monsters lasted half a second longer than Normals.
Champions died screaming.
The Blazing Blood stacks climbed higher.
Axir’s vitality was at 11% now, his Blazing Blood stacks at 95.
[ Congratulations to Player Ace for being the first player to reach Level 500. ]
[ You have reached a lifeform bottleneck. The quest to break through will be available after 23 hours when the World of Belkris synchronizes with the other planet. ]
Axir already knew it.
’Time to end the bosses.’
Blazing Blood stacks climbed to 96.
And then, he struck all four bosses in the cardinal directions where they were resting.
The land trembled.
Four pillars of ancient power awakened across the realm.
Axir felt them before he saw them.
Sentinel Tree Bosses.
The first was to the north.
A colossal entity rooted within a floating ruin, its bark blackened and cracked like obsidian, molten sap flowing like lava through glowing veins.
[Ignivar, Sentinel of the Burning Epoch]
Axir arrived in less than a blink.
Glaive Mode.
His arms blurred as he floated just one meter behind the boss.
Several branches, faster than he could trace, entered his Mana Field’s radar, poking out of the boss’s body.
And he was swinging.
0.29 seconds until he was hit. But in those 0.29 seconds, he slashed a total of 3240 times with the current boosts. A single mistake in the motion could cost him his entire body at that speed, but Axir was locked in.
Adding the two projectiles each one of those slashes birthed, the boss was struck by a total of 9720 slashes before the glowing vines that were about to strike him missed as he escaped with Liberated Drift.
Those 9720 slashes, each of those slashes dealt 1,115,040 pure fire-based damage.
The first ten slashes already reduced the boss’s fire resistance to zero, so right as Axir vanished, a great fire lit up.
The giant Ignivar was burned by another flame and reduced to cinders.
Before the second even finished, Axir was already at the next boss.
Axir didn’t slow.
He couldn’t.
Momentum at this level was not something that could be paused without consequence.
The world folded again as Liberated Drift carried him across the Garden, space peeling away beneath his feet like burning paper.
And with it, the sky screamed.
One hundred sigils ignited behind him in a perfect arc.
Prime 9-star card, Liberated Forge Protocol.
Phantom weapons tore themselves into existence. A total of 100.
Blades. Lances. Axes. Halberds. Guns. Bows. Hybrids. Each burned with a different hue of flame, each bearing a randomly forged Flame Core, each already moving before fully forming.
They fanned out like a solar murder-host.
Axir arrived above the western Sentinel.
[Crythyl, Sentinel of the Still Winter]
The air around Crythyl was dead.
Not cold.
Dead.
Time itself moved slower near the Sentinel’s crystalline bark, frost locking moments in place. Ice leaves hung mid-fall, never touching the ground. Mana circulation stagnated, frozen into pale blue lattices.
[ You have received Dead Winter debuff. Movement Speed slowed by 10% per second while you are in the area. ]
Axir was about to kill it within one second, but the slow was already happening, so he removed the debuff.
Prime 6-star card, Darkness Eater.
Axir made this card to deal with pesky debuffs like this that were hard to remove via normal means. Moreover, Darkness Eater did not just remove debuffs.
It converted the debuff into a buff of its opposite.
Now, his movement speed would increase by 10% every second while he was in the area.
Crythyl raised a limb.
Too slow.
Axir didn’t attack.
The phantom weapons did.
A rain of incandescent steel descended.
Some cut.
Some pierced.
Some detonated.
Ashveil Edge appeared in Axir’s right hand mid-drift.
His figure and arms blurred around the boss, his speed unable to be perceived.
Axir’s perception was barely able to register the movements of the boss and its attacks, but his speed completely outclassed their perception. He was too fast.
In one second, a sun bloomed in the area from the attacks of the hundred weapons.
The Sentinel exploded.
Frost turned to steam. Its crystal barks to dust.
Time snapped back into motion violently with the explosion, enough to tear the surrounding landscape apart.
BOOOOM!
Crythyl ceased to exist.
And Axir was already gone.
Blazing Blood stacks: 97.
Axir had already moved to the next boss as the second was over, raining destruction.
With those hundred phantom weapons that would last for five seconds, just one second was enough per boss to kill them.
And in the next two seconds, if one looked from above, countless lights exploded in the south in one second, and in the next, a similar explosion rang in the east.
Verdantiel, Sentinel of Endless Bloom.
And
Noctyrr, Sentinel of Twilight Roots.
Dead.
[ The barrier around the World Tree has been removed. You may head up toward the final boss now. ]
Axir picked up the loot quickly and flew up.
Blazing Blood stacks: 98.
His vitality: 8% left.