Chapter 421: Spellweaver

Avia drew a deep breath and opened her eyes, which had been half-closed in concentration. She was no more familiar with Wang Yu's power than he was himself. All she could do was wield the Chariot's might in the way that allowed her to unleash her full strength.

A soft hum resonated. A gleaming magical lens appeared above Wang Yu's right eye, identical in appearance to an ordinary Perfect Fractal lens. In that instant, the Chariot's power radiated outward through the lens. The world before Avia's eyes transformed completely.

𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

Under the perception of the Chariot, the flow of magic became visible—each filament of energy, each fleeting construction of a spell circuit, every transformation of matter wrought by magic—all of it captured in perfect detail and transmitted back to her mind.

"I'm really getting addicted to you..."

Her lips curved upward. No matter how many times she experienced it, Avia could never help but marvel at the sheer wonder and potency of this power. Unlike the Perfect Fractal's method of gathering data through magical resonance and reaction, this was something different entirely. What she saw, she could command. It was an unreasonable and absolute mode of perception.

It was far swifter and more efficient than the standard use of mana vortices. Whatever her will desired, mana itself surged to provide, drawn and driven by the Chariot's power.

By the time Wang Yu reappeared within the Endless Corridor of the material world, Selene's spells were already upon him. A rain of arcane missiles, fireballs, and energy rays swept down toward him in a storm of destruction.

He darted forward, swift as lightning. For now, he had ceded control of the Chariot's power to Avia, leaving him unable to command the void. Yet his movements were precise and assured, because the Perfect Fractal lens showed him exactly what the girl would do next.

In an instant, Avia shaped the surrounding magic into a dense, solid barrier that enveloped Wang Yu. The incoming spells struck against it in a cacophony of detonations, but the thick, stable, and absurdly resilient shield barely even quivered.

"Now, let's see where you are..." Avia murmured to herself.

The torrent of magical data gathered by the Chariot's power unfolded before her like an intricate tapestry. She parsed it swiftly, searching for the thread she needed.

"There you are."

As expected, a massive surge of magic appeared within her perception, its target precisely where Wang Yu stood. Lesser spells could never pierce the self-regenerating fortress of a barrier surrounding him. If Selene wanted to kill him, she would need to use something far more powerful.

From afar, a pitch-black scythe-shaped blade whirled through the air, slicing its way toward him. Wherever it passed, fine cracks split the very fabric of space. This was the seventh-tier spatial spell Voidrend Edge.

Spatial magic possessed the greatest penetrative force of all. No ordinary barrier could possibly withstand it.

Like a blade through a bubble, the black arc cleaved through Wang Yu's shield with effortless grace, stripping him of its protection.

In the next heartbeat, the edge blazed with condensed energy. Then, just as it swept past Wang Yu's back, a blinding beam erupted forth, lancing straight at him.

The magic used spatial rifts as a weapon, so striking through a rift from afar was a feat well within reach.

"Good. Found you."

Avia's voice was calm, almost pleased. A tempest howled into existence, seizing Wang Yu's motion mid-dodge and hurling him aside with impossible speed. The sudden gale carried him clear of the beam's destructive path.

To a knight or ordinary magician, that attack would have been utterly unexpected. But Avia, who now perceived the flow of magic itself through the Chariot's sight, had foreseen such an ambush long before it struck.

And within that long-range assault, woven into the magic funneled through the rift, she found what she had been searching for: a coordinate. The core of this pocket space—or perhaps Selene's very location.

Magic was a wondrous thing. To those who truly understood it, every ripple of its flow carried information. The spells Selene hurled from afar were built from magic itself, and therefore inevitably conveyed traces of their origin.

Few magicians could glean such information from the disturbance of ambient mana alone, and even those who could would suffer a heavy mental toll. But Avia's sight went deeper than most. She was perfectly equipped to analyze the fluctuations and reveal everything she sought.

Where the spells were cast, what form the next attack would take—she saw it all, clearly and completely. Then, through the Perfect Fractal lens, she translated those findings into a form Wang Yu could grasp.

That last beam channeled through a spatial rift completed the final piece of her puzzle. Now she possessed the precise coordinates of their enemy, who was bombarding Wang Yu without pause. The moment for counterattack had come.

"Wang Yu, run!"

The moment the words left her lips, a glowing set of spatial coordinates appeared before Wang Yu's eyes. Arcs of gravity magic wrapped around his body. The void energy Avia summoned let him sprint across the empty air as if he were running on solid ground.

The pull of gravity shifted, then aligned perfectly with his direction of movement. In that frictionless, resistanceless space, his speed climbed ever higher, until the spells raining down from every direction could no longer catch him.

Gradually, Wang Yu's position began to shift relative to the infinite corridor around him. He was drawing closer, at a terrifying pace, to one of the corridor's distant "walls."

Ordinarily, even with the boost of his Void Engine, Wang Yu could not have broken free of this space's constraints. The reason lay in its peculiar nature: the corridor itself tracked his every motion and continuously adjusted its own position in response.

Because of the corridor's colossal size, its speed of adjustment was amplified accordingly, so much so that no matter how fast Wang Yu ran, he could never close the gap.

Yet what had been an inescapable trap to him was, in Avia's hands, a mechanism she could exploit with ease.

A ripple of space burst outward from Wang Yu's body, spreading in all directions. In the next instant, the entire corridor lurched—not to mirror his movement as before, but to move against it.

The result was immediate. The distance between Wang Yu and his target began to shrink at a dizzying rate. The corridor, deceived, was now hurtling in the opposite direction.

To adjust itself, the corridor had to lock onto his spatial coordinates. That was why not even a Gate of Phases could free him—the corridor always recaptured his position. But to Avia, the corridor's entire process of analysis was laid bare, blatant and obvious.

With casual precision, she obscured Wang Yu's true coordinates from the corridor's perception. Deprived of its target, the labyrinth could no longer move of its own accord. With a few further adjustments, she transmitted false coordinates in Wang Yu's place.

Acting on bad data, the Endless Corridor veered in entirely the wrong direction. In a single heartbeat, the "wall" separating it from Wang Yu halved in distance.

Even when Selene noticed the error and froze the corridor's movement, it was far too late. It moved at an immense speed, and the closing gap was irreversible.

Avia's spell flared to completion. A shimmering doorway unfolded before Wang Yu as he charged onward. Without hesitation, he plunged through.

The corridor might have been sealed against spatial manipulation, but the Gate of Phases was a high-priority spell, and the interference keyed to magical flow simply couldn't affect a caster with the power of the Chariot, which forcibly rewove magic itself.

"Found you."

"There you are."

Avia and Wang Yu's voices overlapped. As he burst out the other side of the gate, Wang Yu shattered the restrictions imposed by the Endless Corridor. Not far ahead hovered Selene, hands raised to cradle a miniature construct identical in design to the vast labyrinth itself.

"It seems you're even more remarkable than I thought," she said calmly. "That mastery of magic—does it belong to her? Fitting. Perhaps she truly is the perfect one for it... with or without your little peculiarity."

Her eyes flicked toward him. Her palms closed; the miniature labyrinth vanished. The tremendous power sustaining the corridor poured wholly into her as she prepared to meet Wang Yu's charge.

Magic roared. A metallic mountain materialized above him, forged of solid steel and wreathed in violet lightning. Crushing gravity seized him at once, dragging him down with irresistible force.

Wang Yu didn't resist. He allowed the mountain to pull him in. Dozens of explosive spheres of pure mana hovered in the interior of the mountain, their unstable cores on the verge of detonation. One step closer, and he would be annihilated.

"Wang Yu, cut it!"

Avia's voice echoed through the air. In that same instant, a sword of living flame materialized at his side. He seized it without hesitation.

"Of course."

He swung. The fiery blade traced a blazing arc, swelling as it moved until it no longer resembled a weapon at all, only a titanic column of fire that dwarfed even the iron mountain before him.

This was the power of the Chariot that Avia had unlocked: Spellweaver.

In this state, the Chariot supplied total magical liberation: the power to weave any spell without relying on the spiraling flows of ordinary magic. Rather than guiding magic through attraction, it commanded it outright, making possible what no conventional incantation could achieve.

Through a chain reaction of magic influencing more magic, she forcibly drew every trace of energy from the surrounding space to forge an overwhelming attack. Under normal spellcraft, such feedback would tear the spell apart—the "hilt" of the sword would have broken under the strain.

But the Chariot's power was a hilt that could never break. All nearby magic was consumed, devoured whole, and condensed into the impossible blade in Wang Yu's hands.

Thus was the unclassified spell World-Devouring Flame unleashed.