Chapter 271
From the perimeter of the courtyard, a woman with a pointed hat raised her staff.
Overlapping magical formulas expanded rapidly around her, casting an eerie glow over the ruined stones. She didn't chant long, drawn-out incantations. She cast a single, highly compressed spell, but the magic instantly replicated itself. It bounced off invisible walls in the air, multiplying exponentially until the sky was filled with thousands of glowing geometric shapes, raining down toward the center.
Mumud, still gasping on the wet stones, forced his head up. His hollow eyes tracked the math forming in the air above him.
"Echo Magic," Mumud rasped, his voice rough.
He knew that magic. His teacher, Braham, had supposedly rendered Echo Magic completely obsolete by inventing Enhanced Magic. It was written in the history books. Braham had already surpassed the record of echo magic through his new formulas. But the structure this woman was weaving was completely different from the old records. It wasn't obsolete in any way. It was leagues ahead of anything noted in history.
The woman paused her casting for a split second. She glanced down at the ruined courtyard.
She saw Mumud. She saw the dense, incredibly stubborn threads of Magic woven using Willpower that were actively weaving through his own ribs to keep his fragile human organs from collapsing entirely under the Absolute’s pressure.
She blinked, breaking her focus.
"Are you casting magic like a dragon?" the woman asked, sounding genuinely baffled. "Where did a human learn to use Magic like that?"
Mumud didn't have the breath to answer. He just wished he was sitting in the dirt with the displaced civilians.
In the center, the loud man swinging the giant sword stepped in to cover Ken's retreat.
He swung his heavy blade. A massive wave of pure sword energy erupted, tearing a trench through the cobblestones and forcing Lucious to take half a step back to avoid having his suit further ruined by the displaced air.
In that brief pause, the swordsman glanced around the courtyard to assess the survivors. His eyes locked onto Piaro.
His face scrunched up in total confusion. He recognized the distinct, refined sword energy of a Sword Saint radiating from the kneeling man. It was unmistakable. But he also smelled the scent of nature.
"Why does a Sword Saint smell like a potato field?" he complained loudly, deflecting a casual counter-attack from Lucious. He looked closer, seeing Piaro's missing arm and the hand plow gripped tightly in his remaining hand. The earthen, agricultural resonance mixed with the sword aura made absolutely no sense to the Tower member.
The swordsman didn't have an internal filter. He was notorious for talking too much, even in the middle of a life-or-death struggle.
"Hey, Jessica!" the man yelled, pointing his giant sword at Piaro. "Why does this one-armed farmer feel further along the path of a Sword Saint than our former Pioneer, Kraugel?"
He scratched his head with his free hand. "Do you think our current Pioneer, Rudra, knows this guy?"
The woman with the pointed hat snapped her head around.
"Biban, you idiot!" Jessica screamed, her spell flickering from her sheer frustration. "Shut your mouth! You do not leak Pioneer data to strangers!"
"Oops," Biban muttered, wincing. "My bad."
Piaro ignored his bleeding stump. He didn't care about the yelling. He kept his eyes completely locked on Biban's sword.
He watched how the senior Sword Saint moved. He saw how Biban manipulated the empty space around the heavy blade, effortlessly weaving the massive metal through Lucious’s defenses. Piaro tracked the exact angle of Biban's wrist and the subtle shifts in his weight. He saw how Biban didn't fight the air resistance, but cut through the very concept of distance.
The farmer's breathing slowed. He silently absorbed the true method of using the Sword Saint ability to cut everything. A brief moment of enlightenment washed over his tired mind, reframing everything he knew about striking. Piaro realized he had been thinking of his plow and his sword as two separate tools striking the same target. But Biban's blade didn't just strike the target; it struck the space before the target. If Piaro applied that logic to his farming, he wouldn't just till the dirt; he would till the space above the dirt.
He adjusted his grip on the hand plow, internalizing the lesson.
Rudra wasn't watching Biban or Piaro.
He ignored the banter between the newly arrived fighters. He kept his red eyes fixed entirely on Lucious.
His 50% stat penalty made him useless in a brawl of this speed. He couldn't just swing his way out. He didn't have the momentum, and any skill he tried to cast would be suppressed by 99%. He needed a different angle. He needed to understand the mechanics of the monster in front of him.
"[Legendary Sage's Eyes]," Rudra muttered quietly.
His mana pool began to drain rapidly, fighting against the suppression field just to keep the ocular skill active. The world turned into a chaotic mess of colorful, overlapping formulas. The physical forms of the fighters faded, replaced by glowing lines of pure energy.
He could barely watch how Lucious had caught Ken's fist. He kind of saw the flow of mana inside the Devil Monarch's body. He saw how Lucious effortlessly balanced opposing energies, Divine and Demonic perfectly without a single casting delay or internal conflict.
Rudra analyzed the pathways. The Demonic Force wasn't overriding the Divine Energy; they were coexisting in a state of suspended animation. It was a perfect vacuum. When Ken's strike entered that vacuum, Lucious hadn't blocked it with force; he had simply inverted the vacuum to expel the foreign energy back to its source. It was terrifyingly efficient especially when he increases the effect of the counter attack.
He searched the swirling colors for a gap. If he could understand how Lucious manipulated the opposing energies, he might find a way to forge a new skill. He needed to break the Absolute’s Aura, and to do that he needed to create a skill by learning from the one who created it.