Chapter 300 No Way Out
"You don't expect me to come without making sure you can't leave with some petty trick, not when the stakes are so high?" Caden said, seeing the momentary panic in Alex's eyes.
Alex was confident in temporal beacon skill ability to make him teleport in and out of even the best of the barriers on elemental grade, but he also knew of its limitation and knew the skill wouldn't work if he wanted to get in or out of a barrier created using worldly law.
Alex wasn't without options, as his guardians had given him a plethora of scrolls, and he still had many cards up his sleeve that he could use before the scenario of his death even came into the picture.
'Let's see how strong a champion of sin is,' Alex thought as he took out a potion and drank it while Caden did nothing to stop him.
Alex could see from Caden's stats that he was an early fifth Rank magician, but he knew and had seen enough to know that he was not anything less of a peak-stage Elementalist.
Caden stood like a statue, not moving an inch, while Alex used the darkness embrace and, in mere moments, turned his surroundings into a pool of corrosive darkness that he used to drown Caden in his entirety.
'Sanguine Protection' 'Sanguine Annihilation'
Alex took out two scrolls and activated them one after the other, one targeting himself while the other targetting Caden, and instantaneously, both scrolls pulsed with power and a moment later started to crumble to dust.
A rune pulsing in crimson light formed above Alex, bathing him in its soothing light and creating a protective barrier around him.
Simultaneously, another rune manifested above the ominous pool of darkness, and in a matter of few seconds, a copious shroud of crimson mist began to manifest around it and swiftly expanded into the surroundings.
The crimson mist erased anything it came in contact with, and while that was happening, Alex held another dark scroll that pulsed with mana as the runes on it slowly came to life.
'Why is he just standing there like a statue and not doing anything to save himself?' Alex questioned, his unique eyes allowing him to see Caden's body getting drowned in the red mist.
Alex watched as Caden's body was consumed by the voracious crimson mist, yet the man made no effort to save himself, and that baffled Alex and sent a gut-curling feeling through him as this turn of events screamed that something was amiss.
But he wasn't given much time to linger on these thoughts because nearly half of Caden's body had been devoured by the relentless mist in a mere thirty seconds, and he was on the brink of death.
By this time, the dark scroll within Alex's grasp crackled with energy, signaling its readiness, and in an instant, he was cloaked in the surrounding space, obscuring his vision as a fleeting sensation of teleportation washed over him.
After a brief moment of darkness, his vision returned, and Alex found himself standing in the middle of the dense trees with the dark barrier far in the distance.
Seeing his surroundings, Alex instantly realized that the teleportation didn't go as it should have, and knowing what could have caused this failure, he instinctively extended his hand forward, which was stopped by the ethereal wall before him.
'What grade of space barrier did these bastards deploy to stop me from escaping?' Alex thought, feeling a chill run down his spine, knowing that he was trapped and things were not as simple as he first thought them to be.
Alex had used a gradeless teleportation scroll, and even though not of the highest grade, it still carried a spell capable of bypassing through any seventh-grade law barrier, and its failure only meant that the barrier was of eighth-grade, if not higher.
Alex had a thousand questions by this point, but by now, he understood very clearly that the cult did not make these preparations just to recruit him.
But Alex wasted no time lingering on any of his thoughts and took out a simple badge from his inventory and pushed mana into it.
'I don't know how long I have before I am found again, so let's not waste any time and try to destroy my body and kill myself, but I doubt the cult has not prepared for this situation,' Alex thought as he took out a potion with a murky gray liquid and quickly drank it.
Alex had no issue with killing himself because he knew that the cult wanted him alive and alone and understood his fate would not be pretty if he didn't make such a decision and kept wasting time.
The potion Alex had drank was called "Mortisbane Elixir" a potion with quite a dark and disturbing nature as not only did it act as an extreme toxin that could kill even an Elementalist in a matter of seconds, but it also spread through the blood and made it into an to destroy a body in its entirety.
acid, dissolving the consumer body in a matter of minutes.
The potion was very expensive, a single one costing millions of gold, but it was also one of the best and quickest methods one could use to destroy a body in its entirety.
Alex was using such an extreme measure to kill himself because if he killed himself normally, his body would remain behind, slowly disintegrating in the next few minutes.
But the process could be stopped with a rare artifact named 'Reality Severance Gem,' which creates a field that completely removes all worldly laws and also cuts the influence the system has over players.
The reality severance gems were found naturally only inside the zero mana zones area, and these crystals created a reality-bending field the moment they came in contact with mana, so to take them to the outside world and make use of them, they needed to be placed in specially forged mana-less crystals.
As the Mortisbane Elixir coursed through Alex's veins, his healthy skin began to darken, marred by blistering sores that erupted across its surface.
Internally, the elixir worked with ruthless efficiency as it transformed his blood into a deadly toxin, causing his insides to burn and dissolve from within.
Alex endured excruciating pain as his bones, skin, and organs began to melt away, as he watched his health steadily decline, his life force ebbing away.
preventing him from taking his own life for the next thirty minutes.}
12:56
The moment Alex heard the notification, he felt vitality returning to Alex felt relieved seeing his health reaching zero and when he anticipated the embrace of darkness and the notification of his first death, but what he received was a system notification that sent a shiver down his spine.
{System Notification: The player is cursed with 'The Grim Covenant' preventing him from taking his own life for the next thirty minutes.}
The moment Alex heard the notification, he felt vitality returning to his body, but the excruciating pain from constantly healing and melting organs was still present and was increasing by the moment and, in the midst of his agony, he heard Caden's voice, bearing a chilling tone.
"I can't have you dying on my watch," Caden remarked, his face still sporting that unsettling, psychotic smile.
While Alex was trapped with little hope of escaping whatever the demons had planned for him, the demon commander Wrathahr's summoning ritual was nearing its conclusion, and just beyond the dark walls of the barrier, a colossal clash was unfolding between the strongest the world has to offer.
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