Chapter 241 : Chapter 241
Chapter 241: Out of Danger
“Radiant Glory: Starrealm Guidance!”
Ilyss uttered the final incantation as though it had cost her every last ounce of strength—and life itself.
Hummm—!!!
An immeasurable, boundless power descended.
In that instant, everyone felt the space around them turn blurred and distorted. The familiar cave walls, the scorching air currents, the terrifying thunder of collapse...
Everything rapidly faded and stretched into streams of radiant color, as though they had been cast into a river made of starlight, or as though some supreme existence had lightly plucked the strings of fate itself.
There was no sound. No jolting. Only a weightless, dreamlike sensation of crossing an endless distance.
It lasted perhaps an instant.
Or perhaps a very long time.
When the starlight faded, when the distortion of space vanished, and the solid sensation of earth beneath their feet returned, they discovered that they were no longer in that dark, scorching underground cavern on the verge of destruction.
What greeted their eyes was a barren, unfamiliar mountaintop strewn with jagged boulders and low, scrubby brush.
The night wind blew sharply, carrying the scent of grass, wood, and dust, scattering the lingering smell of sulfur and charred flesh.
Above them stretched a vast, deep-blue sky filled with stars, with a cold crescent moon hanging high overhead and casting down its pale radiance.
They had escaped.
From the deepest part of that hellish ruin, they had been brought in an instant to some desolate mountaintop no one knew how far away.
“Cough... cough... urgh...”
Ilyss could no longer hold herself up. She dropped to her knees, bracing both hands against the cold stone as violent coughing tore through her body. Every cough seemed to wrench at her internal organs, and dark blood mixed with tiny specks of starlight spilled from her mouth.
The radiance around her faded completely. The long, pointed outline of her elven ears drooped helplessly, then rapidly disappeared, becoming no different from a human’s once more. But the aura around her had withered to an extreme. She looked so weak and depleted that it seemed a single gust of wind might scatter her away.
“Ilyss!” Vera hurried over to support her, her gray-green eyes filled with unprecedented shock and worry.
Everything that had just happened—the starlight, the pointed ears, the spatial transfer—had made it unmistakably clear that Ilyss was not human, and that the power she had used was both forbidden and ruinously costly.
The cold, rough feel of stone seeped through their clothes. The night wind carried the taste of dust into their mouths and lungs, replacing the scorching sulfur and charred stench of the underground.
The chill of the surface world at night, instead of comforting them, only made the survivors feel a strange unreality.
They had truly escaped.
From that magma hell that devoured everything, from the deepest reaches of the collapsing Elven ruin, crossing an unknown distance of perhaps hundreds or even thousands of miles in a single instant, only to appear now on this utterly unfamiliar, deserted mountain summit.
The disorienting aftereffects of teleportation and the violent dizziness had not yet completely faded.
Vera was the first to force herself to her feet. Her gray-green eyes swept rapidly across the surroundings. Jagged rocks cast clawing shadows in the moonlight. The low brush rustled in the night wind. As far as she could see, there was nothing but the black silhouettes of endless mountain ridges and the deep sky above them, studded with cold stars.
There did not seem to be any sign of magical beasts nearby.
For the moment, they were safe.
“Cough... cough... urgh...”
The sound of violent, suppressed coughing shattered the silence of the night.
Ilyss had collapsed to her knees on the cold stone, her body curled in on itself, her fingers digging desperately into the loose gravel.
She coughed as though her lungs were tearing apart. Dark red blood, still flecked with traces of silver starlight that had not yet fully dissipated, spilled from between her fingers and from the corner of her mouth, dripping onto the pale stone below in a horrifying sight.
The cost of using Starleap and Radiant Glory: Starrealm Guidance was now revealing itself upon her body in cruel full measure.
It was not merely Mana exhaustion.
It seemed to have damaged the very root of her life.
There was no trace of starlight left around her now, and the distinguishing feature of her pointed elven ears had already vanished. Yet the nearly transparent pallor of her face and the air of life draining from her faster and faster were far more alarming than any obvious external change.
“Ilyss!” Suppressing the thousand questions and shocks raging inside her, Vera rushed to her side at once and carefully steadied her swaying shoulders. A soft pale-green glow lit her fingertips as she tried to use the gentlest possible wind-element Mana to soothe the violent chaos inside Ilyss’s body.
It was like pouring water into sand.
It did almost nothing.
“Don’t move! You’re badly hurt!”
With great difficulty, Ilyss shook her head, as though trying to say something, but all that came from her lips was another mouthful of dark blood glittering with star-specks.
The light in her violet eyes dimmed like the last flame of a candle in the wind.
Then her eyes closed completely, and her body sagged backward, utterly unconscious. Vera caught her just in time.
Lillian was kneeling on the ground as well, carefully lowering the still-unconscious Eleanor from her back so that the girl’s head rested on her lap.
Eleanor’s face was pale, and her breathing was weak, but relatively steady. Clearly, the teleportation itself had not caused her further injury. She was simply still unconscious from severe wounds, total exhaustion, and the earlier mental shock.
But the one who worried them most—
was Ryan.
He lay not far from Ilyss, his face deathly white, his lips drained of all color, his chest barely rising at all.
His clothes, already torn beyond recognition, were stained with his own blood and that of his enemies, and in the moonlight the sight was especially stark. His eyes were tightly shut, his brow furrowed with lingering pain. He lay there motionless, like an exquisitely carved statue that had lost its soul.
The gray-blue eyes that had only briefly returned earlier were now closed as well. No one could tell whether any trace of that mysterious golden light still remained within them.
Worse still, the Azure Tempest—the one who had taken on the form of the great bird and carried them all to safety—had also lost all trace of its divinity.
The instant the teleportation ended and the starlight faded, its large and magnificent blue form rapidly shrank and dimmed. Once more, it became that tiny blue fledgling no larger than a palm, with dull feathers and tightly shut eyes. It fell weakly from the air and landed beside Ryan’s cold hand. Its little head tilted to the side, and its breath was even fainter than Ryan’s, as though it too might vanish at any moment.
That small blue figure lay nestled at the side of its unresponsive master’s hand, terribly fragile beneath the cold moonlight.
“Ryan!” Rex threw himself to Ryan’s side at once, reaching out with trembling fingers to feel for his breath. At last his fingertips caught the faintest, weakest trace of air, cold and intermittent. “He’s still breathing! Barely!”
He hurriedly checked Ryan’s chest and face for more bleeding. There was none. But the sensation that the flame of his life might gutter out at any moment was enough to make even this tower-like man’s eyes redden.
“My lady, hurry and look at Ryan!”
Lillian had already scrambled over on hands and knees, tears filling her ice-blue eyes as she fumbled frantically through the small pouch at her side, which had already been greatly emptied.
“I only have a little beginner-grade healing potion and some wound ointment left... It’s not enough...”
The supplies they had started with were never abundant, and what little they had brought into the ruins had already been almost entirely exhausted in the chain of desperate battles.
Vera gently laid the unconscious Ilyss flat on the ground so she could rest against a relatively smooth stone.
She drew in a deep breath and forced herself into calm.
The revelation of Ilyss’s identity, the shocking nature of the magic she had used, and the severity of her condition had all shaken Vera deeply, but as the only one present who still retained relative clarity of mind and some freedom of action, she had to take responsibility.
She went first to Ryan’s side and crouched beside him, carefully observing him.
She did not rashly attempt a healing spell.
She had no idea what state the strange power within Ryan’s body was in, and randomly pouring outside Mana into him might easily make things worse.
She placed two fingers lightly against the side of his neck, feeling for his pulse and the flow of Mana within him.
What reached her fingers was a pulse so weak and chaotic that it seemed to appear and disappear at random.
What frightened her even more was that Ryan’s body now felt utterly empty.
Not only had that vast, ocean-like Mana from earlier vanished without a trace, even the basic reserve of Mana that an ordinary low-tier mage should possess could no longer be sensed. It was as though every scrap of power within him, along with his very vitality, had been drained away by something.
Only around his heart and both shoulders did she sense an extremely faint pulsing, as though some complicated structure still slumbered there in silence.
Then she examined Eleanor and Ilyss as well.
Eleanor’s condition was comparatively clear. Severe injuries and total depletion. What she needed was rest and medicine.
But Ilyss...
Vera’s brow tightened.
Ilyss’s condition was even worse than she had feared. The backlash from that secret art seemed to have damaged her foundations. Ordinary potions and low-tier healing magic would likely amount to no more than a drop in the ocean.
The night wind howled across the lonely mountain.
The moon cast its cold radiance over the five people who were unconscious or gravely injured. Of all of them, only Vera, Rex, and Lillian were still awake.