Chapter 248: The Crimson Witch and The Absolute Zero
The kinetic shockwave sent Alicia skidding brutally across the polished obsidian floor.
She slammed into the base of a stone pillar, the air forcefully expelled from her lungs. The underground hall violently shook as the dimensional rift tore the ceiling apart.
Alicia forced herself up onto her hands and knees. Her wrists were bleeding, the heavy runic suppression chains completely shattered by her brother’s final act.
She looked up at the altar.
Leon was gone. All that remained chained to the central pillar was a charred, smoking husk of blackened bone and ash.
"The catalyst is incomplete!" the Chancellor shrieked. His arrogant composure instantly dissolved into sheer panic as he stared at the violently expanding, unstable rift. "The Gate is collapsing! Hold the array! Anchor the mana!"
The remaining Infernus mages scrambled, frantically pouring their own life force into the purple runes on the floor to stabilize the dimensional tear.
Alicia didn’t scream. She didn’t cry.
She just stood up.
From his position near the entrance, Lucien’s eyes narrowed as a blaring red notification overlaid his vision.
[Warning: Entity ’Alicia Valemont’ has shattered mortal limiters.] [Class Evolution Triggered: The Crimson Witch.] [Magic Comprehension Unlocked: Level 9 Fire (Absolute Domain).]
The ambient temperature in the underground hall skyrocketed.
It didn’t just get hot. The air itself ignited. The dense, corrupted dark mana saturating the room acted like vaporized fuel, violently combusting around Alicia.
Her silver hair bled out from the roots, turning into a vibrant, glowing crimson. Her eyes lost their pupils entirely, burning with a blinding, white-hot light.
"Chancellor," Alicia said.
Her voice didn’t echo. It was a suffocating, hyper-compressed wave of heat that instantly melted the stone floor beneath her boots into liquid slag.
The Chancellor snapped his head toward her. His eyes went wide with absolute terror.
"Kill her!" the Chancellor screamed, pointing his dark-mana staff at the glowing girl. "Vanguard, kill the witch!"
Thirty heavily armored Infernus cultists abandoned Kael’s frontline and charged directly at Alicia, their weapons raised for the execution.
Alicia didn’t draw a weapon. She didn’t chant a spell.
She raised her right hand and snapped her fingers.
The entire center of the Grand Underground Hall erupted.
It wasn’t an explosion of fire. It was an instant, absolute incineration. A dome of white-hot, Level 9 plasma expanded outward from Alicia’s body.
The thirty elite vanguard cultists didn’t even have time to scream. The moment the white fire touched their dark armor, the steel vaporized. Their flesh, their bones, their weapons—instantly reduced to fine gray ash that was immediately incinerated again into nothingness.
"Shield!" the Chancellor shrieked, slamming his staff down.
A massive, dense blood-barrier erected around himself and the altar.
The white fire washed over the blood-shield. The barrier held for exactly a fraction of a second before it began to aggressively boil. The Chancellor screamed as the intense, localized heat baked him alive inside his own defense. The wooden staff in his hands caught fire, instantly turning to charcoal.
The blood-shield violently shattered.
The Chancellor’s scream was cut short as the white fire swallowed him whole. The leader of the Valemont remnants, a man who had manipulated a kingdom and slaughtered thousands, was erased from existence in less than a second.
The Infernus mages surrounding the altar suffered the exact same fate, their bodies turning to dust mid-chant.
But the fire didn’t stop.
Fueled by her completely shattered psyche, Alicia’s Level 9 Fire Magic expanded indiscriminately. The white-hot inferno rapidly melted the obsidian walls, rushing outward toward the entrance where the strike team stood.
"Lucien! The heat!" Kael shouted, throwing his arms over his face as the blistering air began to singe his hair and melt the jagged edges of his shattered golden armor.
Bordon threw his massive frame in front of Mariella, using his own back to shield the healer, but the radiant heat was already baking his exposed skin. Elisha dropped to her knees, gasping for oxygen that was burning her lungs.
Lucien gripped the Lumeveil Enforcer. His mind raced through the tactical options.
He couldn’t shoot Alicia. Even if he wanted to drop her to save the party, the heat radiating from her body would melt the bullet long before it reached her skull.
She’s completely lost control, Lucien analyzed grimly, taking a step back as the stone floor beneath him began to turn red. We are going to burn to death in a sealed bunker.
Chained to the altar, just inches away from the epicenter of the expanding white fire, Princess Celestia watched the horror unfold.
Her royal dress was scorching. The skin on her arms was blistering. She saw Kael bleeding on his knees. She saw Bordon burning to protect the healer. She saw Elisha suffocating.
Celestia closed her eyes.
She ignored the heavy iron Infernus cuffs sealing her mana pathways. She bypassed her mana core entirely and tapped directly into her raw life force, forcing the energy through her closed circuits with reckless, suicidal force.
Blood poured from Celestia’s nose and ears as her internal pathways violently ruptured.
The heavy iron suppression cuffs on her wrists frosted over. A split second later, the metal became so brittle it shattered into ice dust.
Celestia dropped to the scorching altar floor. She slammed both her bleeding palms against the melting stone.
"Absolute Zero."
A shockwave of impossible, ultimate cold erupted from Celestia’s hands.
It was a complete thermodynamic inversion. Where Alicia’s white fire sought to melt everything, Celestia’s ice sought to freeze atomic movement entirely.
A massive, crystalline dome of blinding blue ice shot across the hall, throwing itself directly between the expanding white inferno and the protagonist party.
The clash between Level 9 Fire and Absolute Zero Ice was catastrophic.
The sheer thermal shock violently shattered the remaining obsidian pillars in the hall. Steam exploded outward with the force of a bomb, blinding everyone.
"Get behind the ice!" Lucien roared.
He grabbed Bordon’s shoulder, shoving the heavy knight completely behind Celestia’s frozen barricade. Kael dragged Elisha into the safety zone just as a wave of superheated steam washed over the entrance.
The ice dome groaned. It cracked under the intense, continuous pressure of Alicia’s grief-fueled fire. But Celestia held her ground. Her hair turned as white as snow, her eyes glowing with a terrifying, frozen light as she poured her entire being into keeping the shield active.
For a few agonizing seconds, the two overpowered magical domains locked in a perfect, destructive stalemate.
Then, a third pressure dropped.
It wasn’t heat. It wasn’t cold. It was gravity.
A weight so incredibly oppressive slammed into the Grand Underground Hall that the stone floor violently buckled inward. The steam in the air was instantly forced to the ground.
Lucien was forced to one knee, the breath completely driven from his lungs. Kael collapsed flat on his stomach, his golden aura instantly extinguishing.
Even Alicia’s white fire sputtered and died, the oxygen forcefully ripped from the room by the sheer density of the descending aura. Celestia’s ice dome cracked and shattered into a million useless pieces.
Everyone looked up.
The Chancellor was dead, but the Gate had not closed.
The pitch-black dimensional rift above the altar was completely stable. It expanded outward rapidly, swallowing the ceiling until it was the size of a cathedral dome.
Two massive, gauntleted hands reached out from the absolute darkness. The hands alone were the size of siege boulders. They grabbed the edges of the spatial tear and violently ripped it wider. The sound of tearing space shrieked through the hall like twisting metal.
A figure stepped out of the Abyss and dropped heavily into the bunker.
It was a towering, twenty-meter-tall god of death.
The Demon Lord was clad in jagged, asymmetrical armor that looked forged from compressed starlight and dried blood. Its head brushed the cavernous ceiling. Its face was a featureless black visor, burning with two piercing, abyssal red eyes that offered zero humanity or mercy.
In its right hand, it dragged a massive, rusted halberd the size of an academy watchtower. The weapon bled an aura of pure, unadulterated rot that decayed the stone beneath it.
Just its physical presence displaced the air in the room, creating a suffocating vacuum.
Hundreds of high-tier gargoyles and shadow stalkers poured out of the rift behind it. They clung to the obsidian walls of the cavern like a swarm of massive, rabid insects, shrieking as they flooded into the mortal plane.
The Calamity didn’t roar. It didn’t boast. It simply stepped forward.
Its massive steel boots came down directly onto the stone altar, effortlessly crushing the slab—and Leon’s ashes—into fine powder.
The Demon Lord slowly looked up at the ceiling of the underground hall. It raised its colossal, rusted halberd and casually tapped the roof.
The kinetic force of the casual tap hit the ceiling like a tactical nuke.
The entire reinforced masonry of the Grand Underground Hall violently exploded outward. The bedrock, the earth, and the massive stone structures of the botanical gardens above were completely obliterated in a deafening roar.
The ceiling collapsed entirely, pulling the destroyed underground bunker and the pitch-black academy courtyard above into one massive, open-air crater.
The real war had just begun.
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