Chapter 9 : Chapter 9
Chapter 9.
The Aether Siphon Shield shattered.
Deep blue motes of light burst apart in midair, scattering like stars across the sky.
An invisible force swept through the carriage, and everyone inside felt a heavy pressure in their chest, as if their blood and breath had been thrown into turmoil.
“Your Highness!”
Akash staggered back to his feet.
Sylvia lifted her head and looked toward Logaris.
The man’s lips were pressed into a thin line.
The three gemstones set into his glove had dimmed considerably.
It was obvious that blocking that last attack had cost him a great deal.
“The attack came from somewhere beyond our sight,” Logaris said coldly.
“At least sixth-tier.”
Sylvia’s breathing stopped for an instant.
On a battlefield, a sixth-tier combatant was already enough to decide the outcome of a small campaign.
She did not waste time thinking further and immediately rose to give orders.
“Use the train wreckage as the center and establish a defensive line.Protect the others and withdraw them to a safe location.”
“But, Your Highness—”
Sylvia cut him off.
“That is an order!”
“The next battle is not something you can interfere in.Do not make me divide my attention.”
Akash gritted his teeth, but in the end, he still dropped to one knee.
“As you command.”
He quickly led the remaining guards and began organizing the defense.
Logaris said nothing.
He closed his eyes and quietly spread his spiritual power outward like a spiderweb, trying to catch even the faintest trace of that sniper.
A sixth-tier enemy was not something to be taken lightly.
Yet just as his perception reached its limit, a wave of cold, piercing killing intent suddenly exploded behind him.
It did not come from some distant mountaintop.
It was right at his back.
Logaris' eyes snapped open.
He had no time to think.
His body’s instincts had already driven the spell into motion.
【Fixed-Point Translocation】.
A flash of silver light.
His figure vanished from where he stood.
Almost at the exact same moment, two slender daggers glowing with an ominous dark radiance silently swept through the space he had occupied a heartbeat earlier, as if even the air itself had been sliced open into invisible cracks.
Ten meters away, Logaris reappeared.
He turned back, and his pupils contracted sharply.
A petite girl in an elaborate Gothic dress was standing atop the twisted train carriage.
She held those twin daggers in a reverse grip, the very weapons that had nearly erased him from existence.
Her face carried a trace of childish annoyance at having missed her strike.
“Oh my, as expected of Saint Arcadia’s genius professor,” she said in a sweet voice, as though that deadly ambush had been nothing more than an innocent little joke.
“You reacted so quickly.”
The girl smiled at him, revealing two tiny fangs.
“My name is Lilith.Someone paid a very large sum to invite you… to stop right here.”
“‘The Nullifier.’”
Logaris spat out that codename one word at a time, a title that made every spellcaster in the underworld tremble with fear.
A sixth-tier powerhouse who wielded the special technique known as Anti-Magic.
The natural enemy of all spellcasters.
“Logaris!” Sylvia cried out.
She clearly understood what that codename meant as well.
Without the slightest hesitation, she crossed her twin swords before her chest and prepared to charge up onto the train roof to support him.
But the moment she took a single step, a light arrow even faster and deadlier than the one before tore through the air, aimed straight at the center of her brow.
As a fifth-tier knight, Sylvia’s body had long surpassed mortal limits through endless tempering.
At the very instant danger descended, her battle instinct moved even faster than thought itself.
Battle aura erupted violently beneath her feet.
Her figure became a silver afterimage, tracing a jagged line across the ground at a speed almost impossible for the naked eye to follow, narrowly evading that certain-kill strike.
The light arrow brushed past her fading silhouette and instantly melted a smooth hole into the ground behind her.
She did not stop.
Relying on the superhuman speed of a fifth-tier knight, she raced across the open plain like a white leopard, constantly changing position and making it impossible for the distant sniper to lock onto her.
She knew very well that against an enemy like this, stopping meant death.
On the mountaintop, the man holding the giant bow clicked his tongue.
That Third Princess was even faster than the intelligence reports had described.
She was as slippery as an eel.
Elsewhere, the battlefield had been completely divided.
“This is bad.”
Facing the Nullifier, Logaris knew that any probing attack would only waste precious chances.
He did not hesitate.
He immediately began chanting a high-tier evocation spell.
“Arcane Meteor!”
The sky dimmed at once.
A massive sphere of energy more than ten meters across condensed above his head, its surface wrapped in dense lightning and radiating a terrifying pressure sufficient to flatten a mountaintop.
Lilith’s smile froze.
“Hey, hey, are you really starting this big right away?!”
The meteor screamed downward, and even the air warped from the heat.
But Lilith did not dodge.
She merely extended one slender hand clad in a black lace glove.
In the next second, the Arcane Meteor, a spell powerful enough to annihilate everything in its path, disappeared the moment it touched her palm.
It was as though it had never existed at all.
There was no explosion.
No shockwave.
Not even the slightest leakage of magical power.
“Oh dear, that scared me to death.”
Lilith patted her chest, and her smile once more became innocent and bright.
“Professor, is that all you can do?”
Her answer came in another flash of silver light.
Logaris used 【Fixed-Point Translocation】 again, appearing in midair fifty meters away.
But a black shadow was even faster than he was.
The instant he materialized, it clung to him like a phantom, the dark glow on the dagger stabbing straight for his throat.
“Running away is not a good habit, Professor.”
Logaris' expression changed.
He had never seen an assassin this fast.
He hastily raised his Magitech Gun to block.
Clang!
The dagger slammed against the barrel, spraying a string of blinding sparks.
A tremendous force surged through the weapon and numbed his arm, sending his entire body flying backward.
Damn it.
A sixth-tier Anti-Magic user… and even her raw physical strength was this absurd.
Lilith landed lightly on the ground.
She gave her dagger a lazy little shake, and a trace of boredom appeared in her eyes.
“Professor, let me be honest.
My employer only paid me to keep you occupied.
My partner is taking care of your Princess right now.
There is no need for us to fight to the death, is there?”
At the same time, Sylvia, who was still moving at high speed, suddenly felt an intense sense of unease.
The sniper fired another arrow.
But this time, the shot was not aimed at her.
Instead, it exploded directly above her head.
There was no impact.
No heat.
Only a pure white light that swallowed everything.
That extreme radiance instantly robbed her of her sight, and the high-frequency noise that followed left nothing in her ears but a harsh, endless ringing.