Chapter 317: Round One

Two Demigods, who were now at their prime, stood in the middle of an endless desert, which had nothing that would obstruct their battle, or give them a reason to contain themselves. No holds were to be barred ¹ .

“Let us start by saying ‘hello’,” the Archmage murmured.

He lightly raised a finger, and his mouth began to open and close, chanting an incantation. The Book of Servitude hovered a bit higher and began to flip its pages on its own at an unprecedented speed. Then, it began to emit a red glow, and a fiery red formation appeared on its cover.

“— The sky will set you aflame.” The last syllable of the Archmage’s spell escaped his lips and permeated the air.

Suddenly, the Demigod Lich, who was still so far away from the Archmage, saw a pillar of light from the heavens tear through the clouds and shine down on him. When he raised his skull to stare at the light, the green flames in his eyes sockets burned even brighter. He sneered, feeling bemused. “And we begin the game with a forbidden spell. What a belligerent greeting.”

Suddenly, the Demigod Lich spun his personal staff and heavily stabbed it into the ground. The souls orbiting the staff bellowed in agony; their screams of pain seemed to contain the syllables of an incantation.

The Archmage’s first spell, Harlek’s Incantation of Incineration, caused waves of scalding flames that were created by the most quintessential fire-type mana to pour down from the heavens; it was so hot, it turned the clouds above the Demigod Lich into a swirling mass of red hellfire. The sky seemed to teeter on the edge of succumbing to the flames and crumbling.

Unlike the simplified version used by Baiyi in the real world, the brunt of the Archmage’s spell was not limited in any way. The area that this attack covered was so large, one could not possibly escape using short distance teleportation or fleeing really fast with their own two feet.

On its descent, the tsunami of flames consumed everything in its part, including the endless sea of sand beneath the Demigod Lich’s feet. An area hundreds of miles around the Demigod Lich was swallowed by the sea of flames, and the sand below was boiled into magma.

Even from afar, the Archmage’s face was drenched in sweat from the boiling heatwave that came from afar.

When the swirling red gusts of the hellish heat parted a bit, a sphere of white light could be seen hovering the within the waves of scalding flames, and within this sphere was the Demigod Lich!

From within the white light sphere, the Demigod Lich glanced around at the waves of scalding flames thrashing at the sphere, and his bony mandibles curled up into a grin.

A closer inspection revealed the real nature of the white light sphere. It was not a type of mana shield; it was actually a barrier formed by merging a dozen banshees! Each one of these banshees possessed Legendary-level powers; as the banshees wailed in anguish, they unleashed a fire defensive magic, which protected the Demigod Lich from the Archmage’s flames.

The Demigod Lich had lived a perverse life. While he was alive, he never once pretended to be chivalrous; instead, he murdered countless women, and many of them were powerful fighters. After slaughtering these women, he collected their soul fragments and used them to create an army of banshees, who were all Legendary-level! Furthermore, each of them possessed exactly the same of level of ability they had when they were alive, and they all obeyed the Demigod Lich unconditionally! They had coordinated with each other to cast spells that fended off the fiery attack.

Contrary to the thoughts of the spectators, the Demigod Lich did not, in fact, abandon his army of revenants that Baiyi had prepared for him, in the spirit of a fair fight. This titanic undead army, which was fierce enough to slaughter an entire imperial army, had been within the Demigod Lich’s limitless Dead Space all along. It was an infinite space that was located inside the crystal atop his staff.

He would only use them during critical moments. After all, it would be the height of folly to dispatch the entire army immediately, especially when his opponent was the Sage-Emperor of the Magi; this was someone who was powerful enough to slay his undead army with only two or three wide-area spells. The Demigod Lich was no idiot; that was why he did take that approach.

Unlike the lich from the Godsfall cult, who was part of the team of cultists that tried to get rid of Baiyi in the small realm, the Demigod Lich could summon undead speedily and quietly. When the Archmage’s flames were about to strike the Demigod Lich, the Legend-level banshees had appeared almost instantaneously, and now, they were howling in pain as they warded off the hellish inferno attempting to consume their master.

“My turn,” the Demigod Lich muttered, with a low, hoarse voice. The green flames flickering in his eye sockets glowed brighter.

His next words were inaudible, but the banshees heard it. They suddenly threw themselves into the surrounding flames, screaming as it seared their flesh, leaving only bone. However, they were able to clear a path in the center of the Archmage’s hellfire.

The Lich proceeded to swing his staff, the Souls of the Enslaved, and inaudible mumbles escaped his mandibles. Suddenly, black rays appeared out of nowhere and zigzagged through the path made by the banshees, in a flash, towards the Archmage. The rays hit the ground close to the Archmage, and a group of undead riders appeared, surrounding the Sage-Emperor of the Magi.

These undead riders wore pitch-black armors and terrifyingly shaped helmets, and they were all riding undead black steeds. They wasted no time in drawing their weapons, which they had been holding when they perished. The undead rider closest to the Archmage unsheathed bloodied dual-broadswords, and with a cry like a raving animal, it swung its swords towards the Archmage’s head.

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The scene was a bone-chilling one, which happened so fast that only the Voidwalkers could have seen what happened. The Paladin Walker, who had been watching quietly, murmured, “That bonehead! As soon as the undead riders were summoned, he transported them towards Sir Archmage’s vicinity using space distortion magic! That means the zigzagging black rays we saw were the silhouettes of the riders, who were all moving at an unprecedented speed!”

“I-i-inconceivable! Such speed of spell-casting would be a violation of known axioms!” The Scholar remarked in disbelief.

“Axioms are for the mortals! These? These are monsters. They were called demigods because they had crossed the boundaries beyond theories and axioms,” the Sorcerer explained. “If I am not mistaken, that evil staff of his has a terrifying ability that hastens spell-casting…”

He was right; the souls orbiting the Souls of the Enslaved were not for show. They were the souls of those who the Demigod Lich had murdered; or rather, these souls had been formed by combining fragments of the souls of those he had killed, resulting in a few swirling souls that were all at the Immortal-level! Furthermore, it only took one command from the DemiGod Lich to get these souls to cast spells for him!

Not only did the souls overwhelmingly hastened the Demigod Lich’s casting time, but they also increased the damage of his spells. It was as though the Demigod Lich had an envoy of advanced sorcerers by his side at all times!

Although the Souls of the Enslaved was a powerful staff that could control the souls of the dead, it still did not seem to be on par with the Archmage’s Book of Servitude, which could unleash forbidden magic without a medium; however, the Souls of the Enslaved, a staff which the Demigod Lich had built himself, was no different from a high-level undead army at the Demigod Lich’s beck and call! When he was alive, the Demigod Lich was a sociopathic mass murderer who only regarded people as livestock he could slaughter, at will, for their souls.

Therefore, the Archmage really had been up against an entire undead army, since the beginning!

However, this was all within the Archmage’s plans. He did not use the Book of Servitude to fend off the undead rider’s diagonal slash; instead, he snapped his fingers and a ring of flames surged out of him and expanded in all directions, incinerating all the undead riders to ashes.

“Spare me your hat-tricks,” the Archmage sneered. He had anticipated his inability to finish off the Demigod Lich using just one Forbidden Spell. After all, the Lich was a Demigod-level warrior. Who would call themselves a Demigod Lich if they could be done in by one forbidden spell?

“But how about two more of them? How many more forbidden spells can your little toys withstand? This scalding heat and hellish flames aren’t going anywhere…” the Archmage added quietly.

The pages in the Book of Servitude began to flip quickly again, and this time, a transparent formation denoting wind-style magic appeared on the book’s cover.

“Oh?” The Lich stopped in mid-action, undoing his summoning, which he wanted to have distracted the Archmage. Instead, he changed his orders, and the banshees rushed back towards him.

However, it was too late.

The flames, which the banshees had initially pushed back, began to close in on him again, with astonishing speed, this time. The rushing flames seemed to be aided by an unseen force. The flames that had spread to other parts of the battlefield had also surged speedily in the Demigod Lich’s direction, leaving charred earth behind.

The rushing flames coalesced into a fiery glowing orb the size of a fist, and this orb was now right in front of the Demigod Lich’s face!

Then, it exploded.

It was chilling to imagine the outcome that would ensue if a flame hundreds of miles wide had been compressed into a small sphere, which then exploded.

As soon as the sphere burst, the hellish flames from within crazily rushed in all directions with an earth-shattering rumble. If the Archmage’s previous attack was characterized as waves in an ocean, then this attack — the explosion of this fiery flame sphere, which had been forcefully compressed by wind magic —Iwould be characterized as a whirlwind. The swirling flames devoured everything in their part, including space! Its unprecedented heat reduced everything in its proximity to nothing!

The swirling waves of flames had stirred up a storm and caused so many layers of sand to fly into the air, blocking out the light of the sun. The rising sand resembled an apocalyptic sandstorm that would devour the world. One would feel that if the fiery whirlwind was willing, even mountains would be broken in half.

“Meh. Still needs more kick to it, I’m afraid,” the Archmage said to no one in particular. He continued to chant, and his left hand rose up and tapped the book, while his right hand was drawn before his chest. He slowly balled his shaky right hand into a fist.

The sandstorm and the firestorm surrounding the Demigod Lich stilled; it was as if an invisible hand had cupped itself around that area. These two storms quickly fused together, with their target in the middle, into an arbitrary locus in the middle of this chaos—

And after a few breaths, with the Archmage’s fist completely tightened, the world regained its quiet and calm. On the ground where the storms had struck was a ring.

This ring was a forbidden spatial spell that could manipulate space — Infinite Compression. One can picture the compression of the two storms, which are both strong enough to reshape the earth, into a space the size of a ring. What sort of unimaginable damage would the storms bring in a such a claustrophobic space?!