Chapter 338: The Sacrificial Blade

Wood wiped a blood-slick hand across the wound in his chest. The sharp tang of iron flooded his senses. He was badly hurt. For now, the Divine Scales was bolstering his body, but once his potential expired, this injury could very well strip him of the power to fight.

The pain came in surging waves that gnawed at his nerves—yet rather than cloud his mind, it honed his thoughts to an icy clarity.

The knight before him, Wang Yu, was no longer an opponent he could hope to fell while his Divine Scales remained active. The problem wasn't so much the force of his explosive blows, but rather the shockwaves Wang Yu's body triggered the instant it was torn or battered.

Those concussive bursts couldn't be ignored, and the wounds he could inflict while enduring them weren't enough to keep this unnervingly fast-healing opponent down. Prolonging the exchange would only see the precious seconds of the Divine Scales being wasted.

As Wang Yu came thundering toward him, Wood pulled a small, blast-scorched-but-still-intact pouch from his belt. From it he drew a vial, smashed it against his chest, and gripped a finely wrought magitech talisman between his fingers. As the potion began knitting flesh together, the talisman flared to life.

Earth surged. Twisted spires of stone erupted from the ground, rimed with creeping frost as cold radiated outward, spreading toward Wang Yu in a bid to freeze the very earth beneath his charge—to pin this "walking bomb" in place.

But before the frost could reach him, it halted. The glaze of rime shattered into mist.

Wood glanced down, startled, to find the talisman in his hand grotesquely warped, as if crushed by some invisible fist into a lump of scrap.

Wang Yu's fist did not strike him, but rather the ground before him. The impact blasted a crater into the earth, the force radiating outward in a shockwave that rattled Wood, tearing past his hastily pivoting body and threatening his footing.

Wang Yu spun around, his armored leg sweeping straight toward Wood. Bright light glowed from the gaps in the armor as the high-energy blood in his veins surged with a blow primed to detonate on impact.

Wood caught the leg on his forearm. The explosion never came. Riding the force of the sweep, he used strength and agility well beyond Wang Yu's to divert the strike with deft precision. Their limbs met, but the impact bled away before it could trigger a blast.

A sidestep, a grab—this time, Wood seized Wang Yu's leg and hurled him bodily away, avoiding any risk of being caught in his explosions.

He flung aside the twisted talisman. Naturally, it had been wrenched apart by the Chariot. Against Wang Yu, most magitech was better left unused; the closer he was, the more likely it was to be destroyed before it could even activate.

The inexplicable loss of the talisman only solidified Wood's decision. He still had other potent magitech tools, but if this strange interference could happen again, trading blows with Wang Yu was a fool's game. The real path to victory was to join Joey in taking down the magician, Avia, before overwhelming the knight together.

Wood broke into a full sprint, ignoring the pounding footsteps behind him.

Wang Yu, slowed by Overcharge's backlash, which had also stripped away his magical buffs, couldn't keep pace. The gap between them was widening.

Ahead, Joey and Avia's battlefield seethed with chaos: a storm had churned dust into a towering ochre tornado that swallowed up a vast expanse of space.

Avia's eyes were fixed on Joey via her Perfect Fractal lens through the shifting haze. She seeded the whirling storm with earthen traps, constructs that would erupt into stone shrapnel if disturbed, while using her modest skill as a knight to keep her distance.

Meanwhile, Joey pressed forward into the duststorm, his dagger whirling at blinding speed. Each stroke flared with fighting spirit, shredding the stone traps hurtling toward him before they could strike.

His gaze locked on Avia as he inwardly counted the seconds. Within his blade, fighting spirit coiled. He was awaiting a single perfect moment to strike and kill his opponent, no matter the cost.

It came swiftly. A flicker at the edge of his vision—Wood, closing fast, having shaken off the other knight. Joey understood instantly that his plan was for them to combine forces to kill the magician.

He took a deep breath. Without hesitation, he drove the dagger into his own left shoulder. Black flame erupted from the wound, crawling across his arm until it consumed the limb entirely, leaving behind nothing but smooth skin where the shoulder ended.

This was Joey's potential, Sacrifical Blade. For a set period of time, he could give up part of his body in exchange for a strong boon. What he needed most at this moment was magic immunity.

The buffeting winds slackened against him as the borrowed power seeped into his body. Raging air currents fell quiescent in the form of docile streams upon touching his skin; the stone traps bursting from the storm crumbled to dust against him.

"Come, pesky magician. I'll kill you," he murmured. A one-armed phantom, Joey tore through the storm, rushing straight for Avia.

The instant Wood arrived, his fighting spirit surging into the dagger he had drawn. The energy condensed, solidified, and swept outward in a dazzling arc of light, cleaving through the tornado as it sped toward Avia.

Avia frowned in focus. She could already sense the change in Joey, though she had no idea how he had achieved such a feat. Given his magic-immune state, the danger he posed had multiplied. Still, she wasn't merely a mage. She was also versed in wizardry.

A mental thought triggered the magitech bracelet on her wrist as an earthwall surged up before her. Hardened stone met the arc of fighting spirit; rock cracked and fissured, but it held, blunting Wood's strike.

Then, void coiled at her fingertips. Several black orbs winked into existence—the third-tier wizardry spell Dark Sphere. They spiraled through the air, twisting and veering in jagged paths toward Joey.

He had intended to ignore them, trusting his immunity—but an instinctive sense of danger made him dodge. Most passed by harmlessly, yet two or three grazed his body, flaying strips of flesh and leaving raw crimson gashes over his skin.

"Wizardry? How many tricks does this spellcaster have...?"

A shadow of frustration flickered through him. He was meant to be a perfect counter against spellcasters, yet Avia had stymied him again and again. He needed to push harder—pay any price to deny her another chance to act.

As more spheres hurtled toward him, Joey chose the most ruthless solution: unless they could kill him outright, he wouldn't bother evading. The orbs carved bloody trails across his already fragile body, blood spattering as he closed the gap with relentless speed.

Wood's support followed with a second arc of fighting spirit, flung from an angle past Avia's wall. She was forced to divert power to defense, layering it between bursts of wizardry.

Two detonations overlapped in a single heartbeat—one the crack of the Conqueror's charged shot, the other the thunderous roar of Wang Yu's dragonbreath.

A crimson beam shattered Wood's strike. The conical blast of raw force slammed into Wood himself, driving him into the ground and hurling him back, removing him from the duel for precious moments.

Freed from distraction, Avia could unleash a spell far more complex. From the void poured a flood of midnight chains, writhing like a nest of maddened serpents, coiling and snapping as they lunged for Joey.

Sliding low, leaping high, sidestepping, rolling—Joey wrung every ounce of speed and precision from his body to carve a path through the dense, writhing mass of chains. Within a few heartbeats, he had forced his way to a range far too close for comfort, dangerously close to Avia.

Now. Without a flicker of hesitation, Joey drove his dagger into his own eye. As the blade pierced the orb, black flame roared to life, devouring it in an instant until nothing remained in the left socket but a hollow void. His form blurred, his outline dissolving into smoke, as he slipped through the storm of void-forged chains unscathed—one eye traded for a fleeting immunity to void energy.

He landed scarcely three paces from Avia. The glow of spatial magic was already flaring in her hands, and his gaze caught the glint of the ice-blue feathers lining the cloak she wore.

"Planning to blink away?" he thought coldly. "Just like every other caster I've hunted—get too close and all they can think about is escape."

He drove a heel into the ground, the force hurling him forward in a burst that left a ghostly afterimage behind. A shallow cut opened across his own abdomen as his dagger aligned with Avia's throat. One slash, and her head would part from her body.

Black flames burned away a few of his organs—loops of intestine, part of a kidney—that would not cripple him in the next few moments, transmuting them into yet another ability: a localized spatial seal.

He had seen her Castling spell before, and that raven-feathered mantle was almost certainly for facilitating spatial escape. One way or another, she wasn't leaving.

The seal snapped into place. The magic in Avia's hands collapsed, space itself refusing to heed her call. Joey closed in, blade arcing toward her neck.

The Frostfeather Mantle flared, but with space locked down, she couldn't scatter into a burst of feathers. Instead, it erupted into a storm of icy quills that shot toward Joey.

As they struck, frost detonated in biting shards. An impossible cold filled the air. Yet his magic immunity smothered their power. They bound him for a single moment—no more.

The dagger kissed her throat. Hot blood fountained across the icy fragments clinging to Joey's armor. The wound was deep and surely mortal.

Against weak spellcasters, this was a lethal blow. Still, he had no intention of letting her linger alive; he would sever her spine next.

Then, something strange stirred at the edge of his instincts. The blood spilling from her wound... was wrong. Too vivid, too alive. And it was even moving, not by the pulsing surge of her heart, but in willful, self-propelled motion.

Before he could react, the blood sprang upward, shifting even as it sealed her wound. It surged into the shape of an arm that clamped hard over Joey's face. Fingers plunging into the hollow of his empty left eye with savage precision, in a fury expressed without voice.

He knew whose it had to be instantly. Wang Yu's blood was the most formidable part of his body, brimming with destructive energy and able to regenerate from just about anything.

Wang Yu had left about a quarter of his own blood in Avia's body, granting her unnatural vitality and regeneration. In times of crisis, it became her ultimate line of defense—and a weapon almost no one could anticipate.

The fingers of blood stabbed through the weakest point of Joey's skull. In the next instant, the blood inside him transmuted its stored energy into a killing surge. The flicker of a spark heralded Cursed Fire.

Flames erupted within him and across his head, so rich in power that it didn't even glow green. The fire blazed crimson from the very beginning as a storm of unbridled wrath.

Pale-faced, eyes cold as glass, Avia drove her heavy, razor-edged knife through the burning ruin of Joey's chest, impaling his heart and spine in a single, final, thrust.