Magical Soul Parade

Chapter 376: What’s His Secret? (II)

"Go down and attack the Error Bearer! Leave this dragon to me. I will handle it alone!"

The Soul Transcendent didn’t hesitate, recognizing the logic. He turned his attention back toward the grand wall far in the distance below, though he left his undead, purple-hued dragon in the sky to assist Casmir’s pursuit.

As the group cleared away, a massive, white-hot beam of energy descended from the clouds above, nearly catching Casmir off guard. He warped his way out of the trajectory easily, his eyes snapping upward.

As it would seem, Ryuga wasn’t just fleeing into the stratosphere, he was actually using his superior altitude to launch counterattacks.

The serpentine dragon had turned his bearing back down toward the pursuing forces, belching a continuous stream of white-hot flames packed with enough energy to resemble miniature explosions wrapped into tight, compressed orbs.

Dozens of these glowing orbs filled the sky, falling toward the earth like a storm of collapsing stars.

Casmir’s expression turned ice-cold. The attacks weren’t actually targeted at him. Instead, they were raining down on the slow-moving necrotic dragon that was still struggling to ascend from the lower atmosphere.

While the undead abomination possessed that terrifying authority to absorb and hollow out the soul energy of anything it physically grasped, it was still fundamentally inferior to Ryuga in terms of raw physical speed and baseline metrics.

Ryuga understood this limitation perfectly. The black dragon was maintaining a wide berth, deliberately putting an immeasurable distance between itself and the abomination while bombarding it from afar with heavy, high-density beams.

And these are all Preceptor-level attacks too, Casmir thought, a knot of disbelief tightening in his mind.

He waved his hand, projecting a spatial barrier that vibrated through the air to intercept the falling orbs, scattering their coordinates and causing them to safely implode on themselves high in the sky before they could reach the necrotic dragon below.

But for a single soul mass to keep discharging Preceptor-level attacks with this frequency, Finn’s central reserves had to be bottomless.

At this point, Casmir felt like he was repeating the same realization over and over again, but the math simply didn’t add up. There was supposed to be some give.

There should have been a visible sign of exhaustion or a drop in soul density on Finn’s main body after such a massive, continuous expenditure of energy across multiple high-tier summons.

It made absolutely no sense that the Errant was still fighting at peak efficiency on the wall.

Then suddenly, Casmir’s eyes widened to their limits.

Something small but incredibly odd entered his spatial perception. He noticed a micro-detail in the pattern of Ryuga’s movements through the sky.

Although the black dragon had tried to make its flight paths look entirely natural and uncoordinated, Casmir’s well-trained, ancient eyes picked up the anomaly.

High in the upper atmosphere where the air was at its thinnest, there was a specific, stationary coordinate in space. If a person wasn’t actively looking for it, it looked like a completely irrelevant patch of empty sky.

But Ryuga was deliberately steering the entire aerial conflict away from that single spot. His blistering movements, his flaring aura, and the explosive orbs he was discharging were all carefully nudged to ensure not a single stray attack ever crossed into that specific zone.

The moment Casmir realized the pattern, a sharp glint returned to his eyes. He immediately latched onto those coordinates and executed a long-distance spatial jump, burning a significant portion of his remaining soul energy to cut across the sky.

The moment he materialized at the destination, the mystery dissolved completely.

Right there in the freezing upper atmosphere, entirely camouflaged, was a massive aerial beast. Packed onto its back were dozens of Anaelle, all wearing their signature bone-white masks. They were drumming in perfect synchronization, their bodies writhing in a ritualistic dance as they chanted evocative phrases in their native tongue.

A wicked grin cut across Casmir’s face, and he almost wanted to smack his own forehead in realization.

"So he is using these petty creatures as a battery to constantly top up his reserves," he muttered aloud.

There were about forty or so Anaelle stationed high in the clouds, riding on the back of an avian creature that seemed specifically evolved only for total sensory camouflage.

It was a pure, live beast, not a soul mass, which was exactly why its presence hadn’t triggered the Soul Transcendent’s passive awareness. And on top of that, it was positioned so high up that even Casmir hadn’t felt any spatial disturbances from the area until he actively looked for the gap in Ryuga’s defense.

Assuming he hadn’t chosen to come up here to fight the dragon himself, this hidden reserve would have remained completely untouched for the entire duration of the war.

For an Error Bearer who had once wielded a portion of divine authority, even in a material world that did not naturally support the mechanics of faith, there was still a baseline level of spiritual power he could extract from these fanatical believers.

The continuous stream of devotion was acting as a passive fuel source, constantly replenishing his soul mass energy from afar.

Casmir knew the amount of energy generated by forty primitives wasn’t enough to fully power someone like Finn. In fact, he reckoned the energy he gained from them was negligible in the grand scale of things, but it was still a consistent, lingering stream.

The fact that he went through the trouble to hide them all the way up here, out of reach of any attack but still close enough to maintain the optimal connection, meant what he was getting from them was probably enough to keep at least one of his active summons operational without draining his personal reserves.

Casmir raised his right hand immediately, his fingers curling as he channeled his remaining space magic into a single focus.

He released a massive downward slash of compressed spatial force. The attack erupted from his hand like a wave of cutting, distorted reality that promised to shear through anything in its trajectory.

He intended to wipe every single one of them out in a single strike, cutting the Error Bearer’s battery line before he could shatter the rest of the wall.