"The 'Shade of Death' will cast a curse of 'undeath' upon all Khaenri'ahns,"
Coppelia's gaze seemed to pierce through time, landing on some distant, painful future. "Many who survive will live lives worse than death during those long years."
She paused, seeming to give the other party a sliver of space to think. Finally, she said:
"Columbina's future is not that."
"Heh."
Just as Coppelia finished her last sentence, Lessing let out an extremely short, self-mocking laugh from his throat.
It appeared that the path of persuasion was no longer viable. The gentle smile on his face receded like the tide. Without the slightest hesitation, he raised his left hand, palm spreading upward.
A ball of gloom-blue light emerged in his palm. His five fingers immediately grasped at the empty air, making a "seizing" gesture.
He intended to use the partial Spatial Authority he had stolen from Columbina to teleport the Eternal Moon Essence within Coppelia's body directly into his own hand from across the distance!
The instant Lessing raised his hand, Coppelia reacted almost synchronously. She slammed her center of gravity low, while simultaneously drawing energy violently from the Eternal Moon Essence in her abdomen.
Massive amounts of Lunar Force were instantly converted into various elemental energies. An orange-yellow Geo shield rose abruptly before her, like a solid city wall.
And in the very next moment after the shield formed, a purple Electro arc, as thick as a bowl's mouth and hissing as it jumped, tore through the air. With a speed the naked eye could hardly catch, it shot straight toward Lessing's face!
She chose Electro precisely because its attack speed was faster than other elements!
Just to be safe, she condensed a fireball with roiling orange-red light inside it at her side, ready to follow up with a second strike at any moment, intending to use a violent "Overload" reaction to thoroughly blast the area where the target stood into smithereens!
"Boom!"
That lethal purple Electro arc was intercepted with precision less than half a meter from Lessing by a longsword wrapped in leaping red and black flames!
The Electro arc collided with the flaming longsword, exploding into a cluster of blinding purple-red energy turbulence before both annihilated each other.
A tall, white-haired woman, holding that flaming longsword level in her right hand, stood before Lessing like a phantom. On her shoulders, between strands of her hair, tiny red and black flames danced silently.
Ikhtiyar!
As soon as the interception motion ended, her body shot forward like an arrow from the string. Carrying the sword, she rushed toward Coppelia, the sword tip tracing a deadly straight line, intending to split Coppelia in two and extract the Moon Essence!
Coppelia knew full well she was absolutely no match for this woman in close-quarters combat. A strong wind suddenly generated beneath her feet, carrying her body as she slid rapidly backward, attempting to open the distance. At the same time, she swung both hands backward, and energy orbs mixing Pyro and Electro bombarded the rock wall behind her!
"Bang! Crash—!"
The hard rock wall shattered and collapsed in the elemental explosion. The originally cramped sandy cavern was forcibly expanded into a larger space, filled with flying gravel and dust.
Coppelia took advantage of the momentum to manipulate the airflow, rolling up the shattered rocks of various sizes from behind. She turned them into hundreds of sharp-edged "cannonballs," wrapped them in fierce gale winds, and shot them forward in a torrent!
Not only that, but during the flight of the rocks, she precisely infused them with different elemental energies—Hydro, Pyro, Cryo, Electro—turning every single rock into an unstable miniature elemental bomb, their power increasing steeply!
Facing this storm-like attack, Ikhtiyar merely gave a cold harrumph. Her forward momentum stopped abruptly, her feet rooting into the ground like nails. She wielded her sword with her right hand, her wrist turning rapidly, transforming the blade into a screen of light wreathed in red and black flames.
The clinking and clanging of impacts merged into a single continuous sound. All the rock cannonballs shooting toward her, regardless of size or what element was attached, were precisely knocked away by that seemingly simple longsword. Not a single one could cross the boundary one foot in front of her.
In the rear, Lessing had taken this opportunity to retreat dozens of steps quickly, stopping at the edge of the cavern. His left hand, glowing with gloom-blue light, was empty—the Eternal Moon Essence had not appeared.
This meant that the suppression of Columbina and the theft of her Authority had loosened; the control of the ritual formation had weakened. There was neither surprise nor annoyance on Lessing's face, as if he had long anticipated this.
He did not attempt to snatch the Moon Essence from a distance again. Instead, he crouched down, spread the five fingers of his right hand, and pressed them firmly onto the sandy ground.
A circle of complex runes, composed of pitch-black energy as viscous as asphalt, instantly emerged from the ground beneath his wrist, slowly rotating around his arm.
*
Another location in the experimental base.
The Khaenri'ahn war machines here—the "Field Tillers" and mechanical serpents—had all turned into scrap iron emitting black smoke, messily piled up and blocking several main underground passages, with parts scattered all over the ground.
But the battle had not ceased. Several white-haired men and women wielding sharp swords had joined the fray. On their bodies or in their hands, the dangerous red and black "Fire of Two Worlds" similarly leapt. They were carefully searching the passages for the invisible intruders.
They also lacked the means to directly "see" the invisible enemies, so they adopted the clumsiest but most effective method: releasing the red and black flames like living creatures to cover every inch of space within a ten-meter radius.
Once the flames in a certain area showed abnormal "scorching" traces or were consumed out of nowhere, they would slash toward that direction without hesitation. The red and black flames would surge along the sword's path, often instantly igniting the invisible Primal Construct until it turned into drifting ash.
However, the number of Primal Constructs... was so vast it seemed endless.
A considerable number of individuals had already relied on their extremely high mobility and invisibility advantage to bypass the no-longer-tight defense lines formed by these white-haired swordsmen and the remaining defensive forces, quietly infiltrating into the deeper areas of the experimental base.
They had a clear division of labor and amazing efficiency.
Part of the Primal Constructs revealed themselves near the load-bearing nodes or key passages of the base's internal structure, continuously bombarding the rock walls with concentrated high-energy laser beams. The hard rock vaporized under high temperatures, triggering small-scale cave-ins or ground collapses, destroying the internal traffic and support routes of the base, and greatly disrupting the Khaenri'ahns' defensive rhythm and troop deployment.
Another part of the Primal Constructs shuttled rapidly through the complex base structure. Once they discovered ritual formation patterns or identified those sorcerers in black robes trying to maintain or repair the formations, they would open fire without hesitation.
Gloom-blue laser beams shot out silently, evaporating fragile formation nodes or turning the sorcerers who couldn't dodge in time, along with the casting materials in their hands, into charcoal.
In the circular hall covered in metal patterns, Columbina still lay on her side on the central mat, her body curled up and motionless.
Those dangerous tree-root-like light patterns on her body had not vanished; they continued to flicker dim and bright along with the pain in her core.
Although the severe pain brought by the shattering core rose and fell like tides within her, she never gave up monitoring two things: any subtle changes in her own Authority, and the disturbances in the Ley Line environment.
Just now, the "fog" that had long shrouded the Ley Line information flow suddenly thinned considerably. She could once again "see" what was happening outside relatively clearly.
Situation update!
A small wisp of that partial Authority stolen from her... had returned. She immediately tried to mobilize her power to teleport herself, but the space within a considerably large spherical radius around her body still made no response to her call.
Still no good... She switched her train of thought, sinking her consciousness into the Ley Line network which had recovered some clarity, and "looked" outward.
She "saw" many mechanical creations made of pointed cone structures that seemed capable of invisibility. They were engaging in fierce combat with the people in the base. Some had already penetrated deep inside and were using energy weapons to destroy the rock structure. Wherever the lasers passed, the rock layers vanished like melting wax, leaving smooth and deep holes. The vibrations caused by the collapse of load-bearing structures could even be transmitted along the Ley Lines.
I can help them... Columbina calculated rapidly. That abnormal space that wouldn't respond to her had a radius of about three hundred meters. With the portion of Authority she could mobilize right now, it was enough to help.
She first locked onto the white-haired swordsmen three hundred meters away, who were burning with red and black flames and chasing the invisible machines to hack at them.
With a slight movement of her will. In the next second, these swordsmen disappeared from the underground passages and appeared on the scorching, boundless surface of the desert, blinded so badly by the sudden sunlight they couldn't open their eyes. By the time they saw their surroundings clearly, they stood dazed upon the yellow sand, one by one.
Next, Columbina turned her target to the outer periphery further away, to those invisible machines that were on standby or rushing over from the rear.
A spatial fluctuation swept past. Hundreds of Primal Constructs in their invisible state crossed the long underground distance and were collectively teleported to a position just three hundred meters from the core area of the experimental base. Exactly stuck at the edge of that abnormal space.
...
In the rear, Seth, who was commanding the Primal Construct cluster in battle, suddenly frowned tight.
He sensed that the signals of hundreds of Primal Constructs responsible for alert and reserve duties near him had all vanished in the same instant. Immediately afterward, their status feedback appeared almost simultaneously at another coordinate, far more distant.
That location was already deep inside the Khaenri'ah experimental base, extremely close to the center.
He informed Suleiman beside him of this abnormal situation in the briefest of sentences.
Suleiman's eyes moved. "It seems Miss Columbina has exerted her power. How is the enemy's troop distribution now?"
Seth tilted his head, seemingly receiving the latest information sent back by the forward detection units. A moment later, he spoke: "Central base, outside a three-hundred-meter radius, no enemy forces."
Suleiman nodded and looked toward the deep and dark passage ahead. "Then let us move closer."
____
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