Chapter 424

Nick knew he couldn’t outrun a Prestige-tier spell, and his usual defensive magics were falling apart just from being near the black flames.In that moment, he made a choice. It wasn’t one he relished, but it was the only way to win, considering the overwhelming difference in power.

Dropping his external wards, he drew the divine lightning of the and the conceptual sludge of the entirely inward, wrapping them tightly around his mana channels and his soul, and leaving his physical body completely exposed.

The five streaks of abyssal fire struck him a moment later.

The impact threw him across the antechamber like a rag doll. Agony, sharper and hotter than anything he had ever felt, tore through his nervous system. The black flames actively sought to rot his flesh, eating through his enchanted robes and searing the skin of his chest and arms, trying to find purchase deeper, to feed off his pain and emotions.

He only stopped when he hit a stone pillar, coughing up a mouthful of blood as he slid down.

Even as his body endured severe damage and flesh gave way to bone, his innermost space remained untouched. The abyssal taint thrashed against the tightly coiled magics, unable to breach his soul.

Nick gasped raggedly as the flames dimmed, not screaming only because his lungs had been damaged as well, but he knew it wasn’t because the magic had run its course. The demon was just trying to stretch out his suffering, as he had predicted.

In the occult arts, suffering was a valuable currency, and he had been handed quite a lot of it. Following the law of equivalent exchange, he now possessed substantial conceptual weight to use, especially because he had voluntarily allowed himself to be struck.

Visualizing the agonizing fire consuming his flesh, he fed it directly into the Shard resting in his ruined left hand, using his own sacrifice to free the contained power.

"Is that the extent of the World's chosen?" the Lesser Demon mocked. It was more relaxed now that its superiority had been proven, and Nick did his best to maintain a facade of painful defiance. Not that it was hard, considering the state he was in.

With a muffled cry of pain, Nick forced himself onto one knee, using telekinesis to lift his left arm and the staff, as his muscles were almost entirely useless. “!"

A sonic boom shot toward the demon, powerful enough to hurt a mage of his level if caught off guard, but Nick already knew it was pointless against such a creature.

Indeed, the entity merely sighed in disappointment and raised an elegant finger.

The spell hit an invisible spatial crease and was instantly compressed into a sphere no larger than a marble. With a flick of its wrist, the demon sent the compressed power shooting back at Nick.

It punched cleanly through his right thigh, shattering the bone and knocking him back onto the ground with a strangled cry as his leg gave out entirely. He hit the stone floor hard, and his staff stayed in his grip only because he kept it there through telekinesis, as his hand was completely slack.

"You have a decent mastery of the elements, I admit,” the demon purred, gliding forward. Its shadow-silks drifted around its obsidian skin, completely untouched by the debris of the battle. “But you are far from being a challenge. Perhaps, if you’d been given more time, you would have posed a threat, so I can’t be too disappointed. Crushing human potential was always one of my favorite pastimes.”

Nick dragged himself forward through sheer will, not needing to pretend his breath was coming in ragged, bloody wheezes. He let his aura flicker violently and dim, feigning the complete collapse of his mana coils. When he looked up at the demon, his eyes were wide, radiating mortal terror.

The being drank the fear in, relishing the breaking of a talented mage. It dismissed the spatial folds protecting its body, no longer seeing Nick as a threat worth defending against, and instead materialized a long, curved blade in its right hand, stopping just inches from Nick's boots.

"Mud shall always be mud, no matter the shape it is wrought in,” it whispered, raising the blade high to sever Nick's head.

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Nick’s fear faded, replaced by a fierce resolve. He pushed off his one healthy leg, ignoring the intense pain radiating through his body, and thrust his left hand—and the Shard of Human Ambition—straight up, pressing it flat against the demon's chest.

Time slowed.

The Mundus Cerialis was an ancient ritual that needed several checks to be satisfied before its full power could be activated.

On modern Earth, anyone claiming complete authority over land or spiritual matters would face significant opposition, and the ritual's true power had long been considered a legend.

But here, that wasn’t the case. Duke Anton Alluria held the Ruler’s Mandate, unchallenged by any other noble or temporal power. With that, the first hurdle was easily cleared, as Nick had personally received the man’s permission.

The demon's eyes widened as a heavy weight, borne of secular authority, suddenly pressed down on it, paralyzing it in place.

The second check was more difficult. Spiritual authority was an inherently vague concept to gauge, and asking a thousand people would have produced a thousand and one different answers about who had it.

That was why Nick had asked for both Sashara’s and Ulter’s priests to be present. It had been a gamble to believe he could manage the opposing divine powers, but as he called upon them from the turbulent energy held within the Shard, he felt them both answer as one.

The accumulated divine magic of the city's priests flooded the demon's body at his command, countering its abyssal power. The demon opened its mouth to scream, but its flesh was already vaporizing into ash, unable to be sustained by the surrounding reality any longer as an opposing force took over.

There would be consequences for ordering about two opposing faiths, especially since he’d personally led them into a wild goose chase and sometimes openly opposed their plans, but for now, Nick couldn’t help but feel relieved that their hatred for demons outweighed their desire for revenge.

The third condition, however, was the easiest to fulfill. Nick needed more power than he possessed to seal the powerful entity, and the World was all too eager to assist him.

Its power roared through his channels, surpassing what he had gathered during the first ritual outside the Tower, and he made good use of it.

An ethereal array spread outward from the Shard, composed of interlocking pentagrams and Latin chants.

The Lesser Demon’s power surged as it was caught in the middle. It fought desperately and showed more resilience than any creature Nick had encountered so far, but finally, the combined forces of the ritual reached its core.

The secular claim shattered its spatial authority, the divine chants burned away its abyssal power, and the raw rage of the World itself entirely unraveled its conceptual existence.

“Exi, exi, spiritus maligne!

Non Ultra moraberis in hoc loco.

In nomine Lucis aeternae,

In nomine Veritatis,

APAGE! DISCEDE! NUMQUAM REDIBIS!”

Bloody spittle flew out of Nick’s cracked lips as he poured everything into the chant. If he failed here, he wouldn’t just die but be unmade by the abomination, his soul cracked open like an egg and its contents drunk to empower it.

Failure was not an option, and the Shard shone like a lighthouse in his hand, reflecting the overwhelming intensity of his emotions.

With a final scream of pain and defiance, the demon’s physical form was finally removed from the material plane, its essence returning to whatever hell it came from.

SYSTEM NOTIFICATION!

You have participated in the completion of !

+500,000 Exp

You have participated in the defeat of !

+2,850,000 Exp.

Level up!

Level up!

Nick lacked the strength to do more than glance at the prompts and recognize that his reward for killing a Lesser Demon had been lessened by the use of foreign powers. Once the Shard’s power was depleted, the adrenaline left him, and the excruciating pain from his injuries overwhelmed him.

Even the thrill of leveling up twice in a row couldn’t stop the whimper that escaped through his clenched teeth, or the tears that streamed down his cheeks.

Still, he didn’t let himself do more than that. With a shuddering breath, he gathered his focus enough to dive into the spatial ring on his ruined hand, which had survived the demonic flames unscathed, and pulled out a crystal flask.

It was Ogden’s final great elixir, a brew able to heal nearly any illness, and one that would have sold for hundreds of gold on the open market, and that he’d almost wasted on Simeona Angel.

Without hesitation, he popped the cork with his thumb and quickly drained the thick, golden liquid in one gulp.

Heat flooded his veins, and his body couldn’t help but shudder after being subjected to the infernal fires, but this was the vital heat of pure life magic, and the fear was washed away soon enough.

Nick gritted his teeth as his femur snapped back into place and knitted together. The ruined flesh on his chest and arms rapidly flaked away, replaced by raw muscle, which was covered by sensitive pink skin a moment later. His mana coils, previously running on fumes, drank in the elixir's power, cooling and stabilizing.

It took almost a full minute for the healing to complete, and when Nick finally pushed himself up from the ashes, he remained exhausted. His clothes were torn, and his body throbbed with phantom pains that even the miraculous brew couldn’t reach since demonic taint couldn’t be removed so easily, but at least he was functional, and that would have to be enough.

Picking up his staff, Nick used it as a walking stick for the first few steps as he approached the melted adamantine door, until he was confident his legs could support him.

The heavy metal groaned in protest as he pushed against it, then gave way, allowing him to step over the threshold and revealing the extent of the damage.

Normally, he should have been blasted to dust just for approaching the wardroom without an Archmage present, but since a demon had been guarding it without any harm coming to it, he felt he could take the risk.

The central wardroom was a wide, circular chamber that, under different circumstances, would have left him breathless.

Dozens of floating runic matrices hovered in the air, controlling everything from the defensive arrays to the analysis spells cast on each applicant, along with hundreds of smaller spells controlling all the secondary systems that made life inside the Tower possible.

In the center of the room was the object he had been searching for, the massive crystal that served as a physical anchor for the genius loci.

Yet the sight was spoiled by the black veins of corruption that wrapped around every construct, pumping corruption through the structure.