Chapter 427

The flood of notifications he had previously ignored overwhelmed his vision, documenting the sheer scale of what he had just achieved.

SYSTEM NOTIFICATION

Major Feat Achieved: Savior of the Spire!

You have successfully participated in the purge of a Greater Abyssal Claim from a World-Class Construct.

+2,500,000 Exp

+5 to all Base Stats

Level up!

Level up!

NICK CROWLEY

LEVEL

MANA

STR

DEX

CON

INT

WIS

CHA

Occultist/Human

Nick exhaled slowly as he felt the rewards settle, giving him enough strength that he no longer felt like death warmed over.

His muscles grew denser, tightening around his bones. His perception sharpened, and the ambient flow of mana in the Wardroom became even clearer to his senses. His mana capacity expanded, giving his exhausted coils a vital boost of fresh energy.

It didn't erase the fatigue or the toxicity in his blood, but it gave him the foundation he needed to keep moving. He dismissed the screens, and his focus shifted back to the physical world.

Achieving a Major Feat once again was within his calculations. After all, removing the taint of a Greater Demon from a construct as powerful as the Tower wasn’t something any mage could do, and he had taken several preparatory steps with that in mind.

That didn’t mean he was sure he would succeed. Instead, he went in knowing he could die from any small mistake.

“I suppose I should be grateful that I managed to do at all,” he muttered as he considered the words ‘participated in’, which meant his reward had been significantly lessened. The Tower had done the bulk of the work in removing the demonic taint, but without him, it would have fallen.

Huffing out a laugh at how absurd his life had become, that he could freely interact with entities that would have been impossible to imagine back on Earth, he slowly started moving toward the elevator at the back of the room.

Using the Shard as a walking stick for the first few steps until he was sure his newly repaired leg could support him, he pressed his hand against the activation plate and watched the doors slide open smoothly.

Nick stepped inside and turned to the control panel, immediately noticing that it looked quite different from the other elevators he’d taken so far, even when he’d gone to the subterranean floors.

A vertical line of runes represented the different floors of the Tower, extending from the deep sub-levels to the very top of the Spire, something absent in those cabins that could be taken from elsewhere.

With just a brief hesitation, Nick pressed his thumb against the rune for the seventy-seventh floor, intending to go directly to where the action was taking place.

Hone was very clever, after all, and he might have set a trap to weaken Tholm and the Tower Master. It was the only way he could see to have a chance at winning. If such a trap was there, Nick might also be able to disrupt it.

Unfortunately, the rune flickered with red. A mechanical chime sounded in the cabin, followed by a flat, automated voice from the genius loci. "Access denied. Floor seventy-seven is currently locked due to catastrophic etheric interference. Spatial transit to the apex is suspended to prevent terminal displacement.”

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Nick frowned. That indicated the battle was generating so much magical energy that the elevators couldn't safely navigate to the area.

He quickly scanned the panel, pressing the rune for the fifty-sixth floor, where the medical bays were. It blinked red. He worked his way down until he hit the twenty-fifth floor, which held the Lecture Atrium.

That finally glowed a steady blue, and the doors sealed shut as the levitation arrays flared, launching the cabin upward. Nick leaned back against the wall, closing his eyes as the elevator carried him through the miles of stone and warding.

With some effort, he expanded his senses outward and felt the Towe’s presence around him. It was immediately clear that, even with the internal defenses restored, the structure was under significant stress, both because it was still repairing the damage to the central crystal and because several spots of pure wrongness dotted its floors.

It wasn’t that shocking. The Greater Demon definitely wouldn’t have cared enough to save its underlings, and demonic creatures rarely possessed more intelligence than a monster, meaning that even if they had been informed of the purging of the Tower, they would have chosen to stay and cause as much pain and misery as possible anyway.

The elevator decelerated smoothly as it reached his destination, and the doors opened, revealing a war zone where Nick stepped in.

The Lecture Atrium was a sprawling chamber of white marble, usually filled with studying apprentices and faculty members. Now, the marble was scorched black and cratered by spellfire.

The blue light from the Tower's restored wards illuminated the room, actively suppressing the ambient demonic taint, but the remnants of Hone's strike force remained very active.

Smoke drifted through the air, choking it out and blocking sight across the floor. But Nick didn't need his eyes, and he was able to pinpoint a group at the other end of the atrium, where, barricaded behind a shattered marble fountain, three familiar figures were holding a defensive position.

Bellamy was kneeling, his hands pressed flat against the floor as he channeled his earth affinity to continuously lift and repair thick slabs of stone, shielding them from the front. Eona stood behind him, her hands blurring as she hurled condensed lances of light over the barricade, having lost her sword sometime during the siege.

Beside her, Tim was maintaining a series of overlapping shields, deflecting the physical debris and acid spit thrown by their attackers, and occasionally sending buffs to his companions to keep them going.

They were encircled by a pack of six abyssal hounds and two larger, multi-limbed fiends that looked like a grotesque fusion of spiders and apes.

Despite their skill, and his friends had made great progress over the months he knew them, it was clear they were struggling to cause significant damage. The demons emitted a distortion field that caused most basic magics to fizz out, and they must have been fighting for quite some time now.

Nick didn't announce his presence yet, stepping fully out of the elevator and tracking every demon in the vicinity.

He was tempted to unleash his wrath upon the abominations, making them feel just how much their mere presence disgusted him, but Lasazar had taught him better. When facing the Abyss, a mage should never rely solely on their own reserves, and at his slightest nudge, the World surged back up, filling his coils with its golden power.

was the method mages developed to channel such incredible power, and Nick had gained a lot of experience with it recently.

He reached outward, feeling the ambient ether, the solid stone beneath his boots, and the renewed, humming wards of the Academy. He drew upon the World's innate rejection of demonic entities and channeled it through the Shard, then swept his staff in a wide arc.

A gust of wind appeared in the middle of the atrium as took form. Because it was powered by , the wind was extremely dense, carrying a fraction of the conceptual weight of the planet itself, and when it struck the pack of abyssal hounds, it tore through their unnatural flesh.

The hounds disintegrated into black ash before hitting the ground, being mere low-level creatures, while the two larger fiends shrieked, pivoting away from the barricade to confront this new threat. They scrambled across the marble, their multiple limbs propelling them forward, and became wreathed in dark power, demonstrating that, despite their completely feral appearance, they had a vague understanding of how to counter such magics.

Nick tapped the butt of his staff against the floor and focused the power running through his channels into lightning, weaving a series of sigils directly into the cobblestones beneath the charging fiends.

The moment they passed above it, he let them go, letting several empowered by the World erupt.

The crackling power pierced the fiends from beneath, locking them in place and allowing the World's power to flood their bodies, overloading their corrupted mana channels in a fraction of a second. The fiends stiffened, let out a gurgling hiss, and collapsed into smoking heaps of charred flesh that began bubbling away.

The entire engagement lasted under ten seconds, and Nick didn't break a sweat.

Compared to what he had just gone through, this fight was barely worth mentioning, though he knew that wasn’t true for many others, as shown by the corpses littering the atrium.

The mages who fought here had put up a fierce fight, taking down as many of the abominations as they could, but it was clear the cost was high.

Across the room, the defensive stone slabs sank back into the floor, and Bellamy stood up, wiping a streak of soot from his forehead. He stared at the piles of ash, then looked up with an unreadable expression.

"Nick?" Eona breathed, stepping out from behind the ruined fountain. Her clothes were singed, and she looked exhausted, but her eyes were wide with relief.

Tim let his shields drop, slumping against the edge of the fountain. "Thank the gods, we thought the lower levels were completely overrun. When the purple energy shattered and the wards turned back to normal, the demons started losing their coordination, and we managed to push them back, but they just kept coming.”

"The Tower’s wardroom is secure," Nick informed them, stopping a few feet away. He looked over his friends, checking for serious injuries. Aside from exhaustion and minor wounds, they looked okay, or as much as was reasonable to expect in this kind of situation. "The Duke has locked down the plaza alongside the priests, and I expect they will be pouring in soon. The demons have no reinforcements coming, and the Tower is actively suppressing them now.”

Bellamy let out a long, shuddering breath, a weary smile spreading across his face. “You crazy son of a bitch, what the hell did you do?”

Nick shrugged, feeling oddly uncomfortable with the attention. “What was necessary,” he replied, then moved on. "Where are the others? Devon went to coordinate with the Grandmaster, and they should be here soon, but what about Raphael, Willow, Lina, and Malik?”

"They're holding the library archives on the twenty-fourth floor," Eona said, pointing toward the emergency stairwell doors. "We got separated when the traitors blew the main transit bridges, but I know Malik and Lina set up a choke point in the stacks. As long as the wards are back online, they should be able to hold out.”

"Good. You three need to head down to the library, team up with them, and make your way to the ground floor," Nick instructed. “You might even meet the Duke’s knights as you go down.”

"What about you?" Tim asked, noticing the way Nick hadn’t included himself. "Aren't you coming down with us?”

Before Nick could answer, the entire Tower shook, but it wasn't a normal earthquake.

The ambient ether in the room violently compressed, causing Nick's ears to pop, followed by a deafening, concussive boom that echoed throughout the entire structure. Dust and small chunks of marble rained down from the vaulted ceiling, and the crystal lights flickered wildly, struggling to hold their mana against the immense magical pressure radiating from above.

Eona stumbled, grabbing Bellamy's arm to steady herself. "What was that?”

“The Archmages must still be fighting,” Nick replied, and from the horrified looks on his friends’ faces, they had just realized where he intended to go.