Chapter 339: The Iron Snare

Joey's ruined corpse collapsed in a heap, his headless upper body charred to a black ruin by Cursed Fire. It broke apart into a scatter of ashen fragments on impact.

From the Seed of Eden's storage space, Avia drew a syringe filled with vivid crimson fluid. She plunged the needle into her chest and pushed the contents in. Color slowly returned to her pale cheeks. Breathing out, she pressed her hand against the Perfect Fractal lens that crowned her right eye.

Not far away, Wang Yu was once more locked in combat with Wood. The Divine Scales persisted, though not for much longer. Bloodforged fists ripped through the air toward Wood, who relied on his agility to weave and slip aside.

Wang Yu could feel his opponent's fighting spirit waning. At this range, in such close quarters, the two fighters could read the other's intent in a handful of choices: a shift in tempo, a twitch of muscle.

After Joey had perished to Avia's spell, this knight had abandoned the goal of killing them. Instead, he fought only to save himself, leaning on the brief surge of power that had elevated him to the threshold of a high-ranking grand knight.

"The alchemical legions must have reached the outskirts by now," Wang Yu thought. "This is still the heart of Skyforge City. They'd be here in three minutes at most. The only reason our enemies have time is because someone wants us dead before the machines arrive."

Astartes had warned him that the Central Assembly placed severe restrictions on using the alchemical legion against Skyborne City's own citizens. They would prefer not to employ them at all if the job could be done by other hands.

It had been about five minutes since the battle began. The city's spatial partitioning around the Council of the Arcane's headquarters was still active, and there was ample time for the legion to arrive.

And yet they hadn't appeared. Their absence spoke volumes. Their enemies meant to see them dead without ever summoning the machines' judgment.

"All the better. Best to finish them now, before they cause trouble later..."

As Wang Yu punched at Wood once more, he held back a fraction of his strength. He was fully prepared to kill Wood. The moment Joey had been finished off and Avia regained her freedom to cast at will, Wood's fate had been sealed.

A step forward; then, Wang Yu's arm swung down in a hammering blow. The lens before his eye flared. Though he had been empty-handed a heartbeat ago, a long, translucent blade of pure magic had appeared out of thin air.

Wood's pupils contracted sharply. The extended reach transformed the downward smash into a sweeping cut aimed at his neck. Snapping his right arm up, the knight summoned all his fighting spirit and interposed his bracer in Wang Yu's path.

Steel met magic, but Wood felt no impact. His gut twisted in warning.

The phantom blade shattered on contact, bursting into a cloud of mana that surged around him. Across the field, the kneeling Avia had been waiting for just this moment. Through Wang Yu's fractal lens, she seized the magic, transmuting it into the shape she needed.

Thin arcs of lightning danced across Wood's body, worming through flesh and fighting spirit alike to prickle his nerves. It was not enough to cripple a high-rank grand knight—at least, not for long.

But where hypermagic was concerned, enough mana could take down any foe. If there wasn't enough mana, she would simply have to project more. Avia cast the second-tier hypermagic spell, Thunderclap.

The moment Wood started to evade the attack, Wang Yu made a move with his free left hand. He flicked a single bullet out of the Conqueror and sent it flying forward with a snap, hurling it at lethal speed toward the lightning-wreathed knight.

Wood dodged instinctively, easily slipping past the sluggish alchemical round—sluggish to him, at least. But the lightning wasn't so easily shaken. Azure arcs leapt outward, latching onto the bullet in midair.

The Conqueror's rounds were packed with compressed mana and were dangerous enough to rupture the weapon if overcharged too quickly. But if fed directly into a spell, there was no such limit.

The instant the arcs touched the bullet, they flared and blazed red-hot. Such was the nature of hypermagic: it could absorb vast quantities of mana in an instant to become a devastating force.

Scarlet lightning roared skyward, engulfing Wood entirely. The overcharged thunderbolts tore through his fighting spirit, burrowing into flesh, ripping along blood and sinew, annihilating every organ they touched.

Wood let out a ragged scream as his body jerked and spasmed uncontrollably. Death closed in.

If Wood had been a true high-rank grand knight, not even Wang Yu and Avia together could have done more than hold their ground. Killing him would have been all but impossible.

But Wood's strength came solely from his potential, granting him the form of a grand knight without any of the mastery. The power in his limbs was not yet his own.

Blood surged from the reservoir in Wang Yu's bloodpool, replacing the ordinary blood in his right arm. Veins blazed with light as he drove his fist toward Wood's snarling, open mouth.

A dragonbreath erupted at the point of impact, pure concussive force pouring into the most vulnerable parts of the human frame.

Wood's skull exploded in a spray of blood and bone. His abdomen bulged grotesquely before he collapsed; his corpse, still wreathed in fading red lightning, flew backward and struck the ground.

He was dead, irrevocably so. Both foes who had come for Wang Yu and Avia now lay slain. The partitioned space shuddered and began to dissolve. The external array sealing them in was finally shutting down.

"Icarus and the elven wardens are over there," Wang Yu said, glancing up at the fracturing barrier above. "No need to worry. Now, it's time for what we prepared."

"Mm."

Avia nodded.

Elsewhere, Icarus beat his fully-spread wings. Strange energies flowed through the totem-like patterns across his skin, gathering at the crystal set in his brow before streaming out through his wings and body.

A shimmering shield of countless spectral feathers enclosed the Council of the Arcane's scholars. No spell, alchemical bomb, or enchanted bolt could pierce it.

Beside the shield, the elven wardens of Liaheim loosed arrow after arrow from their living bows, each shaft punching cleanly through an invader.

Every volley aimed at the elves was burned away by lances of white light or detonated in mid-air by falling feathers of light that kept even full knights at bay.

Here, Icarus was every inch an angel from the ancient legends of Earth, holding the battlefield in the palm of his hand. The enemy could not touch him.

He was a half-step away from the realm of legend, and able to match a true legend in full force—such was an evaluation of the leader of the Council of the Arcane.

"The partition's breaking," he murmured. "Time to prepare."

In one hand, an orb of light bloomed. In the other, magic pooled, weaving the spell he would unleash in aid of Wang Yu.

The orb of light dipped, blossoming into a brilliant ring that swept outward. Every invader it touched was hurled back, blood spraying, strength gone—easy prey for the wardens' merciless arrows.

The spatial partitions shattered. The fractured space merged anew with the rest of the city, revealing that the Council of the Arcane's headquarters had been reduced to ruin.

And all around them, as far as Icarus' eyes could see, the streets of Skyborne City were packed from wall to wall with its alchemical legions.

A tide of iron sealed the ruins and its defenders in an unbreakable snare.

In the skies, alchemical airships prowled like iron leviathans. Upon the facades of towering buildings, metal spiders clung with predatory stillness. Along the avenues marched giants of steel, each footfall a drumbeat of inevitability. The moment the spatial barrier dissolved, this mechanical host began pressing inward.

On each construct, energy signatures flared to life. Compartments hissed open. Weapons of strange and terrible design unfolded from their iron frames, all trained upon Icarus and the gathered members of his guild.

"Warning," came the mechanical chorus, cold and inhuman, resonating from within the ranks. "The Council of the Arcane has committed a grave breach of the Skyborne City's Accords, engaging in interscholastic aggression within the city's bounds. Do not resist. Await judgment upon confirmation of casualties."

The scholars glanced grimly at each other. They were very familiar with the strength of the alchemical legions. Even a near-legend such as Icarus, let alone themselves, couldn't hope to stand against them. Against these creations, even a true legend would likely fall.

And the proclamation itself was meaningless. Their verdict had been written in advance; only execution awaited them.

Yet Icarus himself was calm, more so than his companions. His eyes quietly measured distance, counting out seconds, calculating whether the constructs had crossed the invisible threshold agreed upon beforehand.

He knew better than most the might of these machines. Forged with the full breadth of Skyborne City's engineering, their inner workings were masterpieces of precision, their frames wrought from the finest materials alchemy could devise. They possessed destruction on a scale few could truly imagine.

Still, he chose to believe in the ones who had won the trust of both the elves and Yaslan, who had aided them in pushing the boundaries of hypermagic, and who had shown him, with undeniable proof, that the impossible could be made real.

"Almost time," he thought, a faint smile flickering on his face. "Let me see what you can do."

He released the magic coiled within his right hand—Temporal Halt, a weakened form of true Temporal Stasis.

A peculiar wave of energy radiated from him, enfolding the members of his guild. For them, the flow of time slowed to a near standstill. The wave rolled on, spilling outward until it engulfed the approaching alchemical constructs and locked them down in the same eddies of time.

But among the legion, certain hulking, squat machines stirred, their speakers crackling to life.

"Temporal-class spell detected. Initiating countermeasures. Deploying temporal regulation field!"

Shimmering spheres of influence projected outward from their bodies. These specialists were designed for the express purpose of nullifying temporal and spatial magic.

Their fields did little save for one task: to unravel and erase any space- or time-based magic that touched them. Where they met Icarus's spell, its grip vanished like smoke.

Then, without warning, their frames shuddered violently as though seized by some invisible spasm. A heartbeat later, their energy cores detonated in perfect unison. Before Icarus's eyes, each became a blossom of flame, collapsing into charred wreckage and vanishing into ash.

His lips curved. With the counter-fields gone, he poured more power into the spell, expanding Temporal Halt until it smothered every last construct within reach.

Through it all, the world thundered.

"Damn it—this is...?"

"Don't give up, we still—wait, what—"

"Those bastards from the Central Assembly—ah, what?"

The staccato chorus of panic was drowned in a chaos of overlapping sounds: metal shrieks, explosive roars, and the grinding crash of collapsing structures.

When Temporal Halt at last ended, the scholars' minds were catapulted into the present. Their thoughts still lingered in that frozen instant when the Council of the Arcane had been surrounded by the iron tide of the alchemical legions.

Then, their memories caught up. The countless constructs of gold and steel, had detonated without cause nor warning, all at once. A force beyond comprehension had reduced the might of the alchemical Legions into a firestorm.

Red-hot metal fragments fell like rain. Shockwaves tore apart the surrounding academies. A deafening roar rolled across Skyborne City.

Icarus, his magic shielding those nearby from the blast, stood amid the destruction. There was awe in his eyes, and a hint of mirth. He shook his head slowly.

"Truly impossible. And yet, undeniable."