Low-Fantasy Occultist

Chapter 429

Elias Hone had always acted as a pragmatist, even when his reasoning wasn’t fully clear. A master of War Magic understood better than anyone that the battlefield was a place of shifting resources, where sentimentality was a fatal flaw, and victory went to the mage willing to pay the highest price.

Watching from the safety of the pillar, Nick saw pragmatism fully manifest itself.

Hone stood near the edge of Bluetear’s blue ward, his dark aura swirling with a suffocating power that Nick recognized all too well, since it was very similar to some of his own abilities.

It’s not demonic power. He’s not foolish enough to abandon everything he’s built to a Greater Demon, even right now. But in some ways, it would be easier if he had.

The man had abandoned his staff, extending his empty hands toward the lifeless body of the traitorous Archmages, the last of whom had fallen just moments earlier. The air between Hone and the corpses began to warp as a necrotic siphon took hold.

The robes covering the corpses seemed to sag as the bodies beneath them rapidly dried out. The lingering mana, fading vitality, and remnants of the men’s souls were violently torn from their resting place and pulled across the floor in a visible stream of dark-violet energy.

Hone caught that stream in his palms, compressing the stolen energy into a highly unstable sphere.

It was an uncontrolled reaction, a spell born of desperation meant to turn several lifetimes of stored Archmage-level mana into pure, untainted annihilation.

The pressure inside the room surged as the overwhelming concentration of dark mana pressed against the Tower Master’s wards. They started to emit a high-pitched whine, and the translucent barriers bent outward as they struggled to contain the growing singularity.

"Hold your fire, Tholm," Bluetear’s voice carried over the deafening hum as he connected even more deeply to the Tower.

His face was a mask of calm control, yet the enormous amount of refined mana flowing from his coils into the genius loci to sustain the containment ward was astonishing. The blue lines of his magic thickened, adapting and shifting to handle the stress of Hone's growing spell, but the dark sphere was expanding too quickly.

The monstrous spells being summoned reminded Nick of the battle he’d witnessed between Marthas and the Daughter of Fate in the Green Ocean’s dungeon. However, while that had been a clash of faiths—more like two beasts locking horns with only the strongest emerging victorious—this was much more refined.

I suppose this is why Archmages are banned from fighting. Besides their incredible amount of mana, it’s their pure skill that poses the real threat. In their hands, any magic becomes possible, and even simple spells can be turned into something truly dangerous.

And that was exactly what was happening. Hone’s spell was undoubtedly part of the necromancy school of magic, but it hadn’t come about through countless experiments and deep exploration of the darkest arts.

No, it was very similar to Nick’s [Vitality Drain], but taken to an impossible level thanks to the incredible control and knowledge the Archmage possessed.

“He’s trying to force our hand," Bluetear said without a hint of strain, though his eyes remained locked on Hone. "A disruption will ignite it prematurely, and striking him down without proper containment will result in disaster.”

Nick doubted Tholm hadn’t already known that much, given the grim look on his face. It seemed more like an explanation for his benefit, though he didn’t understand why the Tower Master would bother with that at this point.

As things stood, if the sphere detonated before Bluetear could fully isolate the blast, the shockwave would shatter the wards, vaporize the seventy-seventh floor, and unleash unimaginable destruction on the lower levels of the Tower and the city of Alluria below, likely turning a chunk of the city into a necropolis.

But while Hone’s skill was undoubtedly impressive, Tholm had been his rival for a long, long time, and there was a reason they were considered equals despite their different specialties.

He reached into his spatial storage and drew a handful of long, silver spikes inscribed with ancient runes, driving the first spike directly into the marble floor at his feet, then teleported around the floor to plant the others in a wide semicircle around the edge of Bluetear’s ward.

Once the perimeter was established, Tholm produced a crystalline vial filled with a glowing liquid and shattered it on the floor. The liquid light surged outward, connecting the silver spikes and creating a complex, overlapping array that Nick recognized as being for purification and reinforcement.

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Basically, Tholm was strengthening both the physical and metaphysical parts of the Tower, building a thick magical buffer zone meant to absorb and ground the inevitable shockwave. It won’t completely prevent the damage, but it should give the lower floors a chance to survive and stop the city from blowing up with us.

Through it all, Hone had been watching with a gleeful expression as he perfected his spell, and once Tholm was finished, he burst out laughing. "You are building a dam to stop an ocean, old friend. Nothing in your bag of tricks is enough to stop me, not now.”

Nick watched the Archmages pour their immense reserves of power into containing and surviving the impending blast, and knew that while they were treating the symptom by focusing entirely on the catastrophic sphere, it wouldn’t be enough to stop what came after.

Necromancy wasn’t as hated just because it involved corpses. That might be true for the general public, but anyone who had learned more than the basics knew it was only a small part of what it could do.

Its true danger came with the fallout. Necromantic energies were a real pain to eliminate, and those created by the death of multiple Archmages would be far beyond what could be handled on the fly.

The Tower, still recovering from the demonic corruption, would face an even more violent taint, and nobody could predict the outcome.

Frankly, Nick doubted that Hone himself knew. Too many powerful spells had been thrown around, and unstable energies filled the magical structure from top to bottom.

It’s just as likely to destroy everything for a hundred miles as it is to bring forth a new God of Death.

Yet, even necromancy wasn’t all-powerful. Like all magic, it followed certain rules, and while they were not necessarily logical, they existed.

So Nick focused [Empyrean Intuition] and looked beyond the blinding, dark light of the sphere, past the flexing blue walls of the containment wards, and concentrated on the flow of ether, analyzing the structural mechanics of Hone’s magic, and saw it.

As expected, the spell wasn't just a vague stream of energy flowing from the corpses to the War Mage but a highly structured, metaphysical tether. It looked like a thick, ugly umbilical cord of necrotic mana, pumping the stolen life force and soul energy directly into the sphere.

The Archmages couldn't attack Hone because disrupting his concentration would break the delicate balance holding the sphere together, causing it to explode. But the sphere was still expanding, and it hadn't reached its maximum size.

The longer they took to develop a defense, the stronger it would become, making the resulting clash even more unpredictable.

Closing his eyes to concentrate, Nick tried to think of something he could do. He knew he couldn’t hurt Hone, and he definitely couldn’t contain a blast that was currently threatening to overwhelm the Master of the Tower himself.

His trick with [Blasphemy] wouldn’t work either; though the necromantic magic was borne of the soul, it wouldn’t attack only through that avenue. His physical body was just as much in danger, if not more.

But unlike Tholm and Bluetear, he was not a Mage. He was an Occultist, and with that came a wealth of knowledge and experience that told him there was a path for him.

To reach the tether with his magic, he would have to step out of the safety of his position and expose himself to the ambient pressure of three overlapping Archmages casting powerful magic, a hostile environment capable of crushing a lesser mage into paste.

Despite knowing how foolish that was, Nick didn't hesitate. He had come up here to see the fight through, after all, and he was sure Bluetear knew he was here and was counting on him to do something.

Reaching deep into his soul, he called upon [Worldcraft], drawing on his knowledge of what might happen if the necromantic magic were unleashed upon the leyline beneath the Tower.

For a moment, the World didn’t respond. There was no demon to fight, and death was simply part of the natural order, but Nick didn’t despair and simply added more details to his request, providing examples from ancient texts and the perversion that had come from the master healer back in the Sunlands to show just how wrong things could go.

That seemed to do the trick, and the World flooded Nick’s channels with its golden power. It anchored his soul, giving him the conceptual weight needed to withstand the oppressive environment, and Nick used the new energy to tightly layer [Crest of the Thunderbird] over his skin, then wrapped the conceptual sludge of the [Mire] around his mana coils, creating a dense double-layer of internal defense.

Holding the Shard of Human Ambition in front of him, he stepped out from behind the pillar into the open room, crossing beyond Bluetear’s outer wards.

Immediately, the ambient magical pressure tried to crush him. His golden shield flickered wildly, hissing as the raw power ground against it.

His bones groaned with the effort needed to move, and the air was so thick it felt like breathing water. A piercing pain shot through his freshly healed leg, nearly forcing him down to one knee, relying entirely on the Shard to keep from collapsing flat on the floor.

He clenched his teeth, tasting copper as a blood vessel burst in his cheek, but he ignored the sensation, focusing entirely on the necrotic tether connecting the dead Archmages to Hone.

As expected, Hone had not left his fuel line unprotected. Nick’s enhanced vision revealed a tightly woven layer of defenses spiraling around the tether, designed to automatically deflect any incoming interference.

A typical cutting spell, even one cast by Nick, would simply slide off the Archmage’s defenses.

Fortunately, he wasn’t so limited. Focusing his mind on the concept of Pride, Nick harnessed the arrogant certainty that his magic, regardless of the level difference, had the right to override the laws established by his opponent.

"[Hubris' Reach]," he whispered, his voice completely drowned out by the deafening roar of the room, shaping the spell like a blade, and encasing the entire construct in the golden authority of the World.

Once he was sure he’d done all he could, he released it.

The blade zipped across the room. It was tiny, barely a streak of golden light that left a faint trail in the ether that should have, by all rights, failed to do much of anything.

In fact, it was so weak compared to the great powers being thrown around that nobody bothered to look his way. He was a gnat in the middle of giants fighting, in their eyes.

As the blade struck the tether, Nick almost expected a flare, something to show that Hone’s magic had somehow overcome the principles behind his own. But what followed was a tearing sound that rumbled through the ether.

The desiccated bodies of the traitor Archmages, nearly degraded and no longer held together by the siphoning magic, crumbled into piles of fine dust.

Between Hone's hands, the sphere of annihilation suddenly faltered. Deprived of the continuous flow of fuel it needed to sustain its critical instability, the dark energy collapsed inward, shrinking rapidly as its internal matrix failed.

Hone’s eyes widened, and he immediately started feeding it his own mana, stabilizing the spell again.

Really, all that Nick’s intervention achieved was a brief distraction, as the necrotic energies he’d gathered were already more than enough.

But that distraction was worth more than gold, and Bluetear didn’t miss the opening.