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As the sharp fingernail closes into my forehead, I struggle to free myself, but to no avail, I could not even move my pinky finger or twitch an eyebrow.

Failing to move my body, I concentrated internally to see if I could force my way out of this situation with aura.

I flexed my stamina energy in anticipation of igniting it with mana to manifest my aura, but a feeling of wrongness came over me as I did so. As I pushed my stamina energy to cycle, it did not respond to my will, it was almost stagnant, just enough for my body to sustain itself.

If I manifest my aura with my stamina flow in this stagnant state, I will have a short-lived burst of power, followed by me either becoming extremely weak or even unconscious.

But at this point, I did not see much choice in the matter but to risk it. As I ignited the spark of mana in my chest, I saw Sageira’s eyes shift to my chest, and the sprake of mana was swiftly extinguished.

“Now now, young man, we can’t be letting you do something reckless like that now can we?” she chided.

At this point, her fingernail has dug past my skin and is digging into my skull, but has yet to penetrate it.

Failing to activate my aura, I now try to fend the mad old woman… thing… off with magic. I flex my mana manipulation to see if my mana is in the same situation as my stamina, and thanked the heavens that it felt normal.

Seeing that I am unable to move in order to form gestures with my hands, or say anything in order to chant, I had to cast a 3rd circle lightning spell purely with mental casting.

At such close range, Sageira could not dodge my spell and the bolt of lightning hit her right in the face, which resulted in the relief of pressure applied to cut into my skull.

But that was only for a moment before, “Oh ho. You can already cast at the 3rd circle level with pure mental casting. Well done I suppose, but we also can’t have that.”

She then used the blood from my forehead to draw something on my cheek while chanting in a language I did not know. When she was done, my eyes that were stuck in position, saw a purple glow from below me, and just above me I saw the edge of an array circle small enough for just me.

Then the pressure of the fingernail started digging into my skill again.

While bearing the pain in forced silence, I quickly cast another lightning spell, but as the spell left my body, I felt the spell construct break down and fade before it could get an inch away from my body.

Noticing my failure to cast spells as I felt her breach my brain case and was making very small finger motions to saw it open, she started commenting on what she did to prevent my casting.

“Interesting isn’t it? The spell array I cast is in the language of the Deep Ones, mortals who look upon them almost always go mad, and their languages that I embedded in the array does much the same to most branches of orderly magic. The logic and rules of Runes crumble and erode in the presence of such illogical madness, and only the enlightened can see the methods to the madness.” She lectured as she was happily sawed a couple of inches away from the insertion point.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Fuck Fuck Fuck!! I am very much Fucked! If what she says is true, that means no matter what spells I cast, it fails the moment it leaves my body. That means I only have one option left, my only way of casting without magic without relying on Runes, just pure mana manipulation. Molecular Magic.

I will my mana into the floor and shoot an earth spike from between my legs, up toward Sageira’s chest.

From the look in her eyes, my earth spike surprised her for a moment before she raised her other hand and took it straight on her bare palm. The earth spike that I trained to the point that it could punch through tree trunks was stopped by a frail-looking hand.

No! Snap out of it, me, think later, fight now!

As Sageira crushes the earth spike in her hand, I send another two earth spikes at her while I ionize the air beside myself.

This forced her to use both her hands to block the earth spikes. At the moment she crushed the earth spikes, I had another surprise ready for her.

I released the charge from the ionized air, which in turn released an arc of lightning at her outstretched hand she used to block the earth spike, and this time, from the twitching body and grimace on her face, she really felt it.

Unlike the lightning bolt I cast earlier, which was just me casting the “concept” of lightning, the lightning I cast this time was the real deal and as natural as it got outside of a lightning storm.

A moment after Sageira got struck by my lightning, I felt the force holding me in place vanish, and I gasped a deep breath before gathering mana in my right foot and stomping down, this caused an earth pillar as thick as a tree to shoot up from under Sageira, sending her into the ceiling.

Did I really need to do the stomping move? No. But I found it helped a lot to visualize my will upon what I wanted to happen.

At this point, I was fighting to kill. My family told me to keep Molecular Magic a secret mainly because of people like this crazy bitch who is trying to poke around in my brain, and now that she has seen my secret, only one of us is leaving this room alive, and I would prefer it to be me.

Seeing that she was able to block earth spikes with her bare hands, I was not confident that smashing her to the ceiling would finish the job. I gathered mana in my hands and started swinging, this sent a flurry of wind blades into the dust cloud where I presumed the pillar met the ceiling.

And to finish off the combo, I took a deep breath before I drew as much oxygen out of the air, vibrated the air in front of me beyond the point it could easily light wood on fire, and forced the pure oxygen in a stream, through the superheated air, and towards where Sageira was.

This resulted in the pure oxygen igniting into a blowtorch of translucent blue flame engulfing the old lady who was now pushing herself off the ceiling.

As the high pressure jet of flame came in contact with Sageira, her hair was instantly incinerated off of her body, followed by her clothes, and finally her skin.

As her body started to char and her eyes popped from the intense heat, Sageira's body eventually came to a stop.

A few seconds later, my blowtorch sputtered to a stop as I finally released the breath I was holding and bent over to hyperventilate for a while.

After I caught my breath, I looked back up at the burnt corpse of Sageira standing on my pillar with her hands on the ceiling.

“Fuck, that was too close. Got to get out of here before someone comes around to see what the ruckus is about.”

As I made my way to the exit, I was wiping the blood out of my eye that came from the deep ass cut in my forehead. How am I going to explain this injury to the healers?

I opened the door and stepped forward, only to walk nose first into some kind of invisible barrier.

“What the fuck?” I cussed as I held my nose in pain.

Then it hit me, the feeling of this barrier… it has the same feeling as that spell Sageira cast, what was it called?... Sealed Space?... And if the spell is still active, that means…

I slowly turned around to see Sageira standing next to my raised pillar without a hair out of place.

She released her cane/staff to let it float on its own and started a slow clap, “Impressive, most impressive.”