Chapter 431: Moonlight Reflection on Ice!
Black and thorny roots burst forth under the left Golem, wrapping around its legs with phenomenal constricting force. The bone monster collapsed, crushed by the power of the flora summoned by the elf’s distress.
Lynn, for her part, displayed a deadly elegance. She did not move from her perch. She simply pointed her index finger toward the central Golem.
< Water Magic: Lances of the Eternal Sea >
Hundreds of high-pressure water javelins materialized in the sky before raining down on the monster. Each lance pierced the bone as if it were paper, methodically dismembering the creature until it was nothing more than a pile of inert debris.
Despite this local victory, the ordinary skeletons continued to surge in uninterrupted waves. The cooperation between the three women was fluid, Lynn orchestrating the movements like a conductor, Rosalinda healing the wounds as they appeared, and Noriah serving as a destructive spearhead.
"Lynn..." panted Noriah, her knees trembling. "I... I’m starting to see blurry. How much longer?"
"We must hold, Noriah," replied Lynn, her face remaining like marble despite the bead of sweat rolling down her temple. "Klein Konstantine said we had to encircle the bastion. If we give way here, the entire East flank will collapse and Spectrum will be able to crush us."
Rosalinda approached Noriah, injecting her last reserves of healing mana. "Hold on, Miss Noriah... please... I don’t want to be left alone with all these dead..."
"She annoys me..." Noriah clicked her tongue.
The battle continued in a bloody and exhausting repetition. The three mages pushed the limits of their endurance, carried by the will to survive this hell.
***
Noriah, her clothes torn and her skin streaked with ashes, staggered. Her hands, once agile in weaving the four elements, were shaking violently.
She had just released a final < Pillar of Blaze >, but the mana no longer responded with the same fluidity. Her magic circuits were burning, and her endurance was close to nothing.
"Lynn!" panted Noriah as she took an unsteady step back. "They... they never stop... My elements... I’m out..."
Lynn Of Lake, from the top of her rocky promontory, did not take her eyes off the tide of skeletons that continued to surge. Her face, pale as marble, betrayed a fatigue she tried to mask under her usual authority. She raised her right hand, but the ice shards she projected were now smaller, less sharp.
"Hold on, Noriah!" ordered Lynn, her voice slightly cracked. "Rosalinda, heal her! Now!"
In the back, Rosalinda van Spina was prostrated. Her gentle and fearful personality had taken over in the chaos. She was trembling all over, her green eyes dilated with horror at the thousands of empty skulls converging toward them.
"It’s too much... it’s too much for me..." murmured Rosalinda, her hands wrapped in a flickering emerald glow. "Lynn-san... we’re going to die here..."
Suddenly, the ground shook with a tremor different from the previous ones. Through the demonic mist, an imposing silhouette emerged. It was not a simple bone soldier. It was an S-rank Lycht, an abomination dressed in tattered black silk, its eye sockets burning with a spectral purple fire. With a simple gesture of its emaciated hand, it summoned hundreds of new skeleton warriors, instantly reinforcing the horde.
The Lycht raised its blackened bone scepter toward the sky. The air froze instantly, charged with an emanation of death so dense it seemed to weigh on their chests. A sphere of necrotic energy, dark and pulsating, began to condense at the tip of its weapon.
"A necrotic discharge..." breathed Lynn, sensing the imminence of their end. "Noriah, Rosalinda, protect yourselves!"
It was at this moment that the fear, that visceral terror paralyzing Rosalinda, reached its breaking point. Something inside her broke... or awakened. Her green eyes lost their veil of tears to shine with a cold, merciless, almost royal glow. Her shyness evaporated, replaced by an aura of vegetal domination.
"Enough of this shit..." murmured Rosalinda, her voice having changed timbre, becoming that of Lady Spina.
She slammed both palms violently against the ground.
"< Nature Magic: Thorns of the Abyss >!"
Instantly, the basalt fractured. Thousands of black thorns, thick as trunks and bristling with poison-impregnated spines, burst from the earth. They did not merely repel the skeletons; they crushed them, pulverizing them into bone dust. The area around the three women became an impenetrable vegetal bastion, a forest of death that answered the elf’s will.
Yet the Lycht did not stop. Its spell was ready. The necrotic discharge, a mass of absolute void capable of disintegrating the soul itself, was hurled toward them with lightning speed.
’It’s over...’ thought Lynn, closing her eyes.
*CRACK!*
A tearing sound shook the plain. A blood-red streak, fast as thought, split the space. A flash of pure destruction struck the necrotic discharge in mid-flight. Upon contact with this red energy, the Lycht’s magic was literally disintegrated, erased from existence before it could even touch Rosalinda’s thorns.
"Yo."
A casual, almost bored voice echoed behind them. Lynn turned her head, breathing hard.
Before she could identify the intruder, a sharp whistle tore through the heavy air of Tenebris. A silver mana arrow planted itself with millimetric precision at the exact center of the melee, right at the feet of the first line of skeletons. The instant the arrow touched the ground, the energy it contained resonated with the humidity of the mana-saturated air.
*BOOM!*
An explosion of frost of phenomenal power swept the area. A wave of absolute cold spread in a perfect circle, instantly freezing thousands of skeletons in grotesque combat postures. The ground, Rosalinda’s thorns, and even the surrounding air were covered in a layer of translucent ice.
Lynn, eyes wide, could not understand how such a quantity of ice mana had been deployed in a second. "Where does this power come from...?" she murmured.
Jasper Del Luna, the blind archer, stood on a rocky rise a few dozen meters away, his longbow still drawn. He slid his blindfold down a few millimeters, exposing his lunar eye that shone with an iridescent gleam.
"Julian, now," said Jasper in a monotone voice.
Julian Frostvine then appeared in the middle of the frosted mist, his silhouette seeming to materialize from the water vapor itself. His vine-shaped sword shone with an intense blue glow. He plunged his blade into the frozen ground, invoking the final technique of his lineage in synergy with the archer.
< Moonlight Reflection on Ice! >
