The air trembled.
The tendrils of mana—those vibrant, sinuous feelers—sensed the one remaining soul that hadn't yet been bound. Their path twisted toward him like snakes drawn to warmth. They slammed into his shimmering shield with a violent hum, sparks of magic scattering into the scorched air. The barrier flared white-hot, still radiating a strong defensive aura despite the veins of pressure running across its surface.
The wizard gritted his teeth, sweat pouring down his face as he raised both arms. His fingers clawed toward the heavens.
"Reinforce: Layered Bark," he hissed, voice ragged but focused.
The barrier thickened. A second skin bloomed over the original—its texture rippling like ancient tree bark. Rings expanded from the core outward, knotting and tightening into armor. Runes etched themselves into its form, jagged and green. With every pulse of mana, it absorbed more of the attacking threads, repelling them—but only just.
Malrik tilted his head, eyes glinting at the new type of magic.
"Nature magic?" he muttered, his understanding of its principles becoming clear as day. He tried to mimic it—threading its essence into his newly crafted drain magic. This was more of a test than a serious attempt to advance the spell.
But to his surprise—
It failed.
Or more specifically, Emilim's body failed to cast the nature-attributed magic.
The wizard raised his right hand—and snapped his fingers.
The sound echoed.
Tiny bursts of green light erupted from his cloak. From his arms. From his chest.
From inside him.
They weren't lights. They were seeds.
Dozens. Hundreds. No—thousands. Each one pulsed with glowing life and burst into growth, shredding through his robes and skin. Vines exploded from beneath his flesh, flowering and blooming in seconds. Flowers screamed in unnatural frequencies. Thorns split bone. Roots cracked through his joints.
Malrik's eyes sharpened.
"Fifth Tier, Forest Magic: Little Garden!!" the wizard bellowed. His hands glowed green as he pointed toward Emilim's body. His eyes flickered—hesitation flashing in them as he weighed the potential consequences of his next action.
Tch.
He clicked his tongue. I'll just clean up the spell after, he thought—and fired.
The spell dwarfed the original mana cost Malrik had poured into his own craft.
A massive, druidic summon formed out of the chaos—a verdant forest compressed into a storm of lashing vines and giant lotus maws. The magic thickened. The air filled with pollen, choking heat, and the roar of chlorophyll in bloom.
Then—
Malrik's spell-sight twitched.
He narrowed his gaze, focusing on where the vines had erupted.
Each outburst had been centered around a circle—a very specific glyph that had briefly flashed before being consumed by the bloom. He zoomed in further, mentally tracing the runes, mapping their formation.
And then he saw it.
The wizard's body—his entire being—was stitched together by magic circles. Not merely protected by them.
He was them.
Flesh, bones, expression, breath—an illusion. A maze of glyphs, spells, and bound intention.
A flesh-suit made of magic.
The real form was internal. Malrik couldn't see its exact shape, but the spells cloaking the squat, coiled blur within had started to unravel under his focused vision. His spell-sight tore through the illusion like burning cloth.
The thing inside had constructed the wizard's outer shell using manifested spells—woven into a false identity Malrik had unintentionally dragged into the light.
"Die, you wicked witch!!"
The vegetation surged forward. Vines and thorns sliced through Malrik's mana tendrils with a shriek of pressure and magic. They coiled and lunged toward Emilim's exposed form, aiming straight for her throat, heart, liver, lower spine, and abdomen—every vital organ that would ensure a gruesome, unmistakable kill.
The vines shrieked as they surged through the burning air, their edges gleaming with poisonous sap, their barbs quivering with plague-bound mana. They closed in—mere inches from piercing Emilim's throat, heart, liver, spine, and stomach.
Then—
Boom.
A translucent barrier erupted to life around her, pulsing with deep crimson veins and a lattice of sigilwork that moved like living flames beneath the surface. The vines collided with it—and were instantly repelled, and set ablaze as if they had striked an ancient ember carved into reality itself.
The air rang with a metallic chime. The vines rebounded violently, splintering into red embers and ash, that hissed and curled in the heated wind. The spell circle beneath Emilim's feet flared with layered runes that shimmered brightly.
Then came the voice.
Smooth. Low. Cold.
It didn't echo, and yet it was everywhere—inside the wizard's false skull, behind his ears, beneath his nails, and worming into the gaps between each desperate heartbeat.
"Haven't you ever been taught…" the voice murmured.
Malrik's voice.
And he sounded like someone savoring a fine meal.
"—not to interrupt a man while he's eating?"
From behind Emilim, Malrik's form began to materialize. Threads of mana poured out of her, weaving together in a dazzling display—blue, red, green—a multitude of interlocking spells working in unison to bring his image to life.
Her body lightened as he severed almost all of the invisible strings binding her, causing her to fall backward. She was left suspended, her limbs slack, her eyes clouded, her mind nearly shattered.
She fell—but she never met the ground. A firm hand caught her back, another curled beneath her legs. Her glazed, tear-filled blue eyes blinked up. The pain had stopped. Mana still flowed through her, but…
The pain had stopped.
And in its place was the figure of the man holding her.
His lean, muscular body was both human and unmistakably something else. Two dark, curling horns arched from his tousled black hair, catching the glow of nearby spellfire.
His eyes—half-lidded and glimmering with cruel delight—drifted toward the wizard.
Then his posture shifted.
His body shot forward, sinew coiling like a whip, veins flaring like molten roots beneath his skin. He didn't speak again. There was no need. His mana surged with the intent to kill.
The wizard didn't hesitate either. His hand slashed through the air—arcane ink dripping from his fingertips like blood. Another glyph flared into existence beneath him, a spinning ring of green and black.
"Third-tier bloom, Thorn Cage!" he roared.
Dozens of spiked vines exploded outward, racing to trap Malrik in a sphere of writhing bramble.
But before the Thorn Cage could close in—
The red barrier surrounding Emilim's body expanded. It pulsed once, then grew outward with a low, resonant hum, forming a full sphere that enclosed both her and Malrik within its protective shell.
The vines reached it—and screamed.
The moment they touched the barrier, fire erupted along their lengths. The thorns blackened, curled, and crumbled into ash before they could breach the sphere. Spell runes etched in flame along the barrier's surface flared in a clockwise rotation, reinforcing themselves with each impact, consuming the intruding magic as fuel.
The wizard's eyes widened. "No—!"
Malrik didn't wait.
With a flick of his hand, a spear of fire coalesced in the air beside him. Not conjured gently, not shaped with grace—born violent, sharp, and hungry. Its tip hissed with condensed heat, and the shaft flickered like a brand held in the heart of a furnace.
He grasped it and lunged, hurling it forward with brutal efficiency.
The spear howled as it flew, parting the smoke with a trail of blazing mana, aimed straight for the heart of the false wizard.
The fire spear screamed through the air.
But just before it struck, the wizard clapped both hands together.
"Thorn Bastion!"
A wall of intertwining vines surged upward, thick as tree trunks and bristling with dark, iron-like thorns. The spear slammed into it—and exploded. The vines caught fire, burning with a roar, but they held. Just barely.
The flames hissed, licking the edges of the wizard's cloak. Smoke coiled around him as he gritted his teeth and waved both arms wide.
Roots tore from the scorched ground, snaking toward the barrier in jagged surges. Spiked blossoms bloomed and detonated. Petal-shaped shards rained down in waves. The nature itself rose to fight, empowered by his mana, forming blades, chains, and spears of green.
Inside the barrier, Malrik's expression darkened.
Mana poured from him.
His tendrils surged forth again—dozens, then hundreds. They wove and split, darting between gaps in the barrage like serpents of raw will. Some were cut down by spinning vines, others caught in bramble snares. But more kept coming.
With each failed strike, they adapted. Thinner. Faster. Sharper.
The air shook from the clash of mana—wizard against demonic might, plants against fire, art against hunger.
The wizard's cloak was tattered now. His hands trembled as he forced new magic from his veins.
But Malrik was relentless.
A final cluster of tendrils slipped through a collapsing vine net and dove straight for the wizard's chest.
They pierced.
The illusion shattered like glass under pressure.
The robe fell away in ribbons, torn by the tendrils, revealing not the battle-hardened male sorcerer they had faced—
But a girl.
Elven. Slender. Barely breathing.
Her golden-blonde hair spilled over her shoulders like threads of moonlight. Magical seals still glowed faintly across her skin, many cracked and flickering, struggling to hold a fading disguise in place. Her chest rose and fell in shallow, erratic motions.
The vines stopped.
His multicolored tendrils wrapped around her. Some pierced into her flesh, conjuring multiple stimulation spell circles both inside and around her. Others coiled tightly around her legs—spreading and lifting her upside down—while the rest floated, tense and waiting.
"An elf…?" Malrik muttered, stepping forward. His gaze trailed down her struggling, suspended form.
Her outfit, now fully visible, shimmered with enchanted silk and golden embroidery. The deep slit along her thigh-length robes revealed much of her pale skin. Thin green and black belts cinched around her waist, accentuating her shape, and her undergarments—slightly exposed from being held upside down—were embroidered with glowing elven sigils, flickering as the illusion collapsed.
His smile widened. "I always did wonder if elves existed in this world~," he said softly, his eyes gleaming with a mixture of curiosity and amusement.
Then—
Her eyes shot open. Bright, sharp green.
Crackling energy surged from her body as her limbs twisted and strained against the binding tendrils. Mana flared from her core, and every broken seal along her body began to pulse violently in response. With a grunt of pain and fury, she screamed, attempting to tear herself free.
The seals on her skin erupted in a flare of light, then shattered all at once with a sound like breaking glass. Her scream wasn't pain—it was defiance, focused and intentional. Her body arched, twisting against the tendrils holding her, as a surge of magic rippled out in a violent pulse.
Malrik's eyes narrowed.
"—A transfer spell?" he muttered, sensing the foreign shift. The burst hadn't been an attack. It wasn't even aimed at him.
It was a message. She'd just sent the entire memory of this confrontation—this room, this moment—outside the tower.
Smart.
A flick of his finger adjusted the remaining tendrils, reinforcing their grip, draining her mana before the transmission went farther and holding her in place. "Clever little witch," he muttered, stepping closer, just as a sharp screech rang through the tower walls—high-pitched, young, and full of fury.
Malrik froze.
The noise wasn't just sound. It resonated like a magical pulse, rattling the very air. Dust fell from the ceiling. The flames flickering along the walls dimmed, and even the tendrils coiled in hesitation, shrinking slightly.
His head tilted.
That was no ordinary beast.
Something that had just seen through the transfer.
The elf's head lolled, eyes half-lidded but still burning with a green light. Blood trickled from her lip. Her chest rose and fell heavily, but the magic still pulsed faintly around her body.
She wasn't done.
"Hahaha," Malrik laughed, as her sigils formed around his body and he emitted her magic once again. But unlike her call for help…
His was a direct attack into the mind of the creature headed their way.
Skiiiiiii—
A pained—but determined—cry cut through the crackling and sizzling of rendering roots as the barrier moved with him. A silver mass shattered through one wall of glyphs and circuits. Its eyes locked onto Malrik's figure, teeth bared as it snarled.
The scent of burnt flesh filled its nostrils, and the snarl deepened. The air around its maw began to shimmer—heat rising, magic coiling.
Flames.
ROOOOOOOOOOOAR!!!