novelraw Chapter 204: The Six-Point Synaxis
Chapter 204: The Six-Point Synaxis
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Ignotus, Lykos, and Merlin were a blur of coordinated chaos, driving the Fire Demon, Wit, backward through the winding tunnel.
Ignotus’s sword flashed with precise, gravity-infused cuts, while Lykos and Merlin bracketed the Demon in alternating blasts of annihilating cold and searing heat.
Wit was strong and furious, but the pressure was relentless.
"He’s too fast!"
Mer shouted, blasting a gout of fire that Wit deflected with a wing of molten rock.
"Keep the heat up!"
Lykos yelled back, launching an [Ice Lance] that Wit swatted aside.
"I’ll try to stop him from dodging!"
Eris struggled to keep up, racing across the uneven stone floor behind Ignotus’s boots.
As they pushed deeper, they saw the source of Ulv and Aur’s earlier concern. Crude banners, smeared with black blood and Arcane, hung from the ceiling.
"These are seals..."
Ignotus noted, not even slowing down.
"They’re siphoning the Greater Demon. Don’t touch them!"
Wit hissed, trying to pivot and destroy the Arcane now that it had found itself in a corner, but the speed of the three attackers gave it no quarter.
Just as the tunnel began to widen, allowing Wit precious room to maneuver, a low, rumbling earthquake shook the passage.
Gaia burst into the wide passage from a side tunnel, followed by Nora.
"Move!"
Quickly, Gaia slammed her fist into the ground.
A [Stone Wall] erupted right beside Wit, squeezing him toward the main group.
Nora’s eyes glowed as knives flew from her hands, not aimed at Wit, but at the corners of the cavern, filled the edges of its vision with lightning.
The pressure immediately quadrupled.
Wit, now surrounded on three sides, had to retreat aggressively, its flames flickering under the combined assault.
It blasted a massive cone of fire backward, forcing the five students to scatter and allowing it to shoot back down the main tunnel. Only for it to run straight into a wall of pure ice.
Ulv, riding a [Glacial Glide], had slammed into Wit.
The wolf’s sword connected with the Demon’s back, sending a shuddering impact through the room.
Wit was thrown forward, stumbling.
Before it could regain its footing, a silver flash snapped out. Aur, launching herself from Ulv’s shoulder with an [Air Dash], whipped the Demon’s thigh, detonating an air pocket.
Boom!
The blast sent Wit spinning and crashing into the far wall.
Ignotus, who had slid past the chaos, slashed his sword across the Demon’s chest and didn’t even stop.
"Finish the bastard!"
He pointed his sword down the tunnel where Aurelia and Ulv had emerged.
"I’ll deal with what’s ahead!"
Wit pulled itself off the wall, blood and cooling magma dripping from the wound.
It stared at Ignotus, its face contorted in a mask of incredible fury.
The utter belittlement—being dismissed as a distraction—was too much.
"GRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"
Wit roared. The sound tore through the dungeon.
Its flames went from orange to a blinding, incandescent white, and its mass swelled, its strength surging by several magnitudes. At this moment, it was holding nothing back.
The Demon was now an unstable bomb of fire.
"YOU WILL BURN!"
Ignotus merely chuckled, gave a slight wave to his confused cat, who was fighting to keep traction on the stone floor, and then, in a blink, he was gone, going deep into the tunnel.
"That idiot! He just supercharged him!"
Lykos roared in fury.
"Focus, my Lord!"
Ulv bellowed back.
"Forget him, he’s too hot-blooded to fight defensively. Let us focus on killing the Demon!"
The six students formed a semicircle. Wit, blinded by rage, charged the nearest threat: Lykos, the source of the cold it hated.
Its speed was terrifying, a red streak of pure heat.
Ulv moved to intercept, initiating [Glacial Glide], summoning slick ice beneath his boots, and instantly accelerating into the path of the raging Demon.
He hit Wit with the blunt of his sword, forcing a lateral deflection.
"Gaia!"
Wit roared, trying to pivot on the ice, but Ulv didn’t let him, slamming his foot down on the ice with a thunderous THUD.
A freezing shockwave erupted, instantly locking Wit’s feet to the rapidly freezing ground.
Before the Demon could burn free, Gaia acted, slamming both hands onto the stone floor and channeling her strongest restraint.
"Bedrock Embrace!"
Massive, stone arms erupted from the earth, wrapping around Wit’s legs, chest, and arms, locking it into the spot.
Simultaneously, she used Earth Melt on the area surrounding its immediate body, turning the stone into sinking, unstable quicksand to stop it from using static force to break the bedrock.
Wit was trapped, but its internal heat threatened to boil the quicksand and melt the stone arms.
Merlin knew containment wouldn’t last.
She knew what she had to do.
"Cover me!"
Reactivating her Synaxis, her body pulsing with power.
Aiming to destabilize Wit, she unleashed a colossal, overcharged [Fire Tornado.]
It spun furiously, engulfing the restrained Demon in a vortex of intense heat and pressure.
Wit shrieked, forced to commit all its internal power to maintain its augmented body against the conflicting pressure of fire and cold.
This was Aurelia’s cue. Using [Air Dash,] she flashed into the chaos.
Circling Wit, she rapidly detoned three air pockets right next to the Demon.
The air pockets didn’t cause that much damage, but they released explosive bursts inside the massive Demon’s heat field, causing fractures in its concentration and violently jarring its inner channels.
Wit was screaming, boiling, freezing, and rattling apart all at once.
Nora saw the perfect opening.
With Wit’s focus shattered, she moved for the kill.
She zipped through the perimeter, using her cohort’s attacks as cover.
Nora threw a volley of Lightning-imbued knives. Each struck the cracks in Wit’s body, instantly discharging electricity into its internal systems. The lightning bypassed its heat shield and short-circuited whatever it was made up of.
Wit went rigid, unable to fight or defend, its powerful flames flickering rapidly.
Raising both hands, Lykos channeled all of his remaining power.
"Glacial Fall!"
Instead of raining it down, he focused the ability into a single, devastating point.
A colossal arrow of ice coalesced instantly above the struggling Demon.
The massive Ice Arrow struck true, guided by Nora’s earlier precision strike.
It drove through the Demon’s shattered body, extinguishing the core instantly.
The sound was less of an explosion and more of a catastrophic implosion, as the Demon’s life force was immediately snuffed out.
Gaia’s stone arms shattered, Merlin’s fire vortex dissipated, and the freezing shockwaves receded.
Wit was felled, leaving behind nothing but a smoking, charred crater in the stone floor.
Lykos dropped his staff, panting heavily.
"He was right..."
He rasped, looking at the crater.
"He was absolutely right."
Ulv looked down the tunnel where Ignotus had vanished.
"Yeah. He usually is."