Noel waved his hand, shooting out a beam of green light that quickly healed Anna’s body. She grunted and wiped the blood flowing from her mouth. The pain was receding, but boy it was fucking painful.
“Who were they?” mumbled Anna.
“They’re like golems,” Noel muttered as he rubbed his chin with a curious gaze. “Yet, they also possess something that makes them… alive. Those two were no doubt not made of flesh and blood, but there’s this liveliness and intelligence to them that’s far from the most complex golem minds.”
“You mean they’re live liking golems?” Anna suggested an analogy.
“Yes, living golems… as if they have a soul,” Noel squinted his eyes. There was a sort of fervor to his voice as if he was grabbing onto a thin line of light that would lead to greater inspiration.
“They have a soul?!” Anna asked in shock.
“If my senses weren’t deceiving me, then yes. If you had also listened, they possessed great, human-like wisdom, and could hold conversations much like us,” Noel explained. “They’re also greatly different from those artificial minds of golems and other magical constructs. They were capable of growing in the simplest of terms. They changed, reacted, adapted to my attacks, and showed the ability to evolve.”
“No way…,” Anna gasped.
“Enough wondering,” interjected Noel. “The answers lie before us already. We just need to explore it.”
Anna stared at the glowing blue portal and felt her heart thump loudly. She didn’t know if this was all connected to the mysterious disappearances from those raided villages, but this was definitely something abnormal no matter which angle she looked at.
The two walked toward the portal, preparing all sorts of spells and elemental attacks, and passed through it.
There was no turning back now - either they get the answers they were looking for or suffer the consequences of their actions.
…
Noel and Anna soon found themselves standing in a vast open meadow of grass, with distant hills and rustling leaves in the background. They hurriedly flew to the air, distancing themselves from the ground and gaining a higher viewpoint.
“Fucking flying bastards!” a voice boomed in annoyance as a shadowy figure suddenly appeared in front of them. The thing appeared the same as the previous guards they had fought, with a hulking body of muscle, wearing a plain white lab coat. Its face, though lacking any sort of eyes or mouth, frowned as they lunged forward at breakneck speeds.
Anna hurriedly waved her hand, slamming down the air with an invisible push, but that did little as the shadowy figure reappeared right behind her in a flash. Noel intercepted his lunge, shooting out two beams of light, but the figure simply fazed through those attacks and, as if releasing a mountain of anger, punched through Anna’s wind barriers like they were fragile glass.
She was already prepared for this though and had erected numerous layers before, but it was still terrifying to see their monstrous physical strength. If she had to estimate, they were without a doubt Grand Knight in terms of raw physical strength. She can only begin to imagine just how strong they would be if they had access to martial arts.
Luckily for her, Noel wasn’t any weaker than them. His mana reserves had already risen to the level of a Grand Mage, and with his well of experience to draw from, he could squeeze every drop of his mana for maximum potency. For one normal bolt cast by a normal mage, he can cast over ten with relative ease.
Anna knew to not judge Noel based on common sense. If he has the same mana as a Grand Mage, then she had to at least multiply that by ten with how mana-efficient he was. Moreover, that’s just the efficiency of his spells!
The potency of his spells was the same. It’s as if they’re on steroids and could display greater levels of strength compared to what others could do.
She wasn’t a punching bag herself. Her power had grown explosively with her newfound mana control, and she could better utilize the power borrowed from the spirits.
With the shadowy man’s arm trapped inside her wind barrier, she grunted and clenched her fist, extending out tendrils of wind and covering the body of the shadowy man from head to toe. Exerting more strength, the wind around the shadowy man caved in, crushing him completely until he dissipated into nothingness.
“There’s more coming here,” Noel murmured.
Anna looked down to the ground and saw a large group of over ten shadowy men rushing over to them.
“NOOOO! GUARD 7!” one of them shouted in deep anguish.
“WE’LL AVENGE YOU, 7!” another shouted, forming a bow and arrow out of mana.
“GUARD SQUAD, LET’S DEAL WITH THESE EVIL DOERS!”
“Fucking bastards,” said Anna, gritting her teeth. “They have the audacity to call us villains.”
“Don’t judge a book by its cover,” Noel warned. “We still don’t know why they’re here, or their objectives. You should only form a clear opinion of someone with the full context.”
“Hmph, they’re clearly the bad guys here,” Anna retorted.
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…
Rob was bored. Bored. Bored. Bored. It had almost been thirty minutes and he had just been inside his living cave of flesh and blood, inside this stupid armor he had spent nearly a month creating.
Sigh, I shouldn’t have been so greedy adding on the soul bond function, I could have used other means for the storage of the armor, like creating another layer beneath my skin or fusing it with my skeleton. Rob sighed. Oh well, it’s ending soon, so I can end this tedious mental training bullcrap.
Inside his brain, numerous books floated across a blank void, and numerous shadowy men floated around wearing white lab coats, reading those giant books in complete silence. Frankly, Rob disliked this type of training, but oh well, he’d rather be productive than do completely nothing. At least he can train his mind techniques and his ability to multitask.
Just as his mind began to wander to all kinds of places, he suddenly felt something inside and outside his body click together, as if two disjointed pieces magically fused together into one whole. His vision changed, going from the dark, bloody, and squirmy insides of the living armor to its eyes instead.
The armor was a few inches taller than the already large frame of his disguise, so it took a few seconds to reorient himself, but the living armor wore an ecstatic smile as Rob could feel the boundless strength hidden within his newly modified body.
Am I weredragonbeetle-armor now? I’m partially a dragon beetle, the insect that I used to design this living armor, or maybe not since this form is bonded to me not just physically, but also spiritually. Perhaps a spiritual weresomething? Rob shook his head, dismissing his needless questions. He can answer those later once those pesky bugs are gone.
He took his first steps, and his feet immediately sunk into the ground like it was soft butter. He raised his eyebrow at this slight miscalculation and used alchemy to lighten his body by quite a significant weight, decreasing his overall strength for increased control and finesse.
From quasi-Archknight, I had gone down to the level of a bonafide Royal Knight. Rob scratched his chin as he began to move around the empty white room. Hmm, it’s a bit clunky with actual practice, but it’s to be expected.
Fufufu, those bastards should have hyped me up by now. Let’s finish these tests and prepare for the grand entrance of moi! Rob chuckled and disappeared with a flash of shadowy light.
…
Noel flew through the air, swerving away from one attack to another as icy winds and burning hot flames littered the wide sky. He waved his arms, casting from one spell to another as he launched a barrage of counterattacks against the flying shadowy men following him from all sides.
One of them was pierced through by a sharp glacial spear, which then exploded into a burst of icy mist, covering the humanoid being in an enclosure of ice and plummeting down to the ground at breakneck speed.
“Guard 9!” said one of the shadowy men.
“Why are you attacking us?! We did nothing to you, yet you came barging into our paradise and started massacring us!”
“You and your lies!” Anna angrily shouted, launching a ball of flames toward the guard that shouted, but they simply chuckled and teleported away with a simple step.
“Is it a lie though? Do you even know who we are? We’re just the inhabitants of this dungeon, particularly smart monsters, and we’ve just been living quietly without disrupting the silence outside!” they grieved. “Do you really think all creatures that are born within dungeons have the urge to kill all beings outside?! We and the boss had just been here, doing nothing but keeping silent!”
“What?” Anna was taken aback. There’s no way that’s real, right?
She appeared to have slightly believed the shadowy man’s words, as she subconsciously stopped her attacks and stared at them with wary eyes.
“Ignorance is fucking bliss alright! You think we’re the bad guys here, but you guys are!” they continued, waving their hands wildly as their face bubbled in rage.
“Greenhorn,” Noel snorted, and without any hint of mercy, a blade of sharp wind cut through the guard talking halfway through his long-winded speech. “This is a dungeon for horned rabbits, not those weird living golems.”
“Ah, fuck…,” murmured the guard, who then clapped their hands without much care and laughed at Anna’s dumbstruck reaction. “Hahaha! You should have seen your face, you dumbass! Welp, I guess this is another pitiful servant that has to be avenged by the boss!”
“That’s right!” another guard who was dispersing into a cloud of dark smoke shouted indignantly. “The boss would be pissed off by having his precious children get destroyed like this.”
“They were… lying…,” Anna said blankly. She stared at the guard that had deceived her, the one whose lower half was completely gone, and she angrily fired a spear of flames. “YOU LIAR!”
“AND YOU’RE A DUMBASS! EAT MY NONEXISTENT NUTS!” the guard shouted, and out of nowhere, they and another guard appeared around her wearing devious smirks on their featureless face.
“Divine Fusion Spell!” the two dying guards shouted in unison. “EXPLOSION OF FRIENDSHIP!”
Just as their bodies began to release extreme amounts of magical energy, Noel hurriedly rushed over and grabbed Anna, casting spells over spells to erect multiple spherical barriers around them.
He couldn’t teleport, not with the thick spatial barrier the two had erected before their final moments, so they had to just tank this through.
BOOM!
A loud mushroom cloud rose to the air, and fierce winds blew, tearing down the distant trees and the ensuing heat burnt the grassy meadows. Noel and Anna flew out of the epicenter of the mushroom cloud, landed on a faraway hill, and Noel immediately coughed out blood upon landing on the ground.
“You okay?” Anna hurriedly helped him stand up as Noel wiped his mouth with an impassive face.
“No,” he answered blandly. “I’m essentially fucked on the inside and my spell casting is severely dampened, but we can’t stop now. All of the guards are dead, and that laboratory over there is where the boss should be hiding. They wouldn’t be dumb enough to let us recuperate, so we can only rush over now and gain the initiative.”
“But you’re dying right now!”
“Not dying,” Noel dismissed her worries and began to walk as he cast multiple healing spells to stabilize his condition. “The only problem here is my mana reserves. No matter how efficient I may be, I still only have the mana reserves of a Grand Mage. We’re already out of mana potions, so I can only hope I have enough mana by gathering the ambient mana by the time we reach the boss.”
“Let’s hurry then,” Anna said through clenched teeth.
“Let’s hurry indeed,” Noel agreed and calmly walked with an unperturbed gaze.
And so, the two rushed forward to the plain white laboratory.
Unbeknownst to them, a shadowy man wearing a white lab coat and a pair of glasses sat on a skull made out of bones and watched them through a golden screen, observing their every move and every plan.
“The reborn Archmage of Miracles, and flashes of surface thoughts leading to a mysterious past. If their luck isn’t a telltale sign, then their thoughts sure are,” Rob murmured.
Sometimes, people just aren’t paranoid enough to even consider the possibility of living with a mind reader nearby. I surely do, especially when I got fucked over by that mind-reading cunt who somehow just found his way to me from another continent.
Rob’s face twisted in anger as he remembered a vile and unfortunate memory of his distant past and groaned.
“Damn sentient planets,” Rob clicked his tongue and shifted into a more comfortable position on his bony throne. “I can’t fucking wait to pummel their asses.”