Chapter 498
A desperate battle
Chapter 498 A desperate battle
When the rainbow light receded again and Jemin's figure reformed, he was in an extremely disheveled state.
His robes were undamaged, but his exposed skin was covered with tiny bloodstains caused by excessive use of spiritual power.
His breathing was heavy, like a broken bellows, and each inhale was accompanied by a burning pain in his lungs.
His dantian was nearly depleted, and his mental energy had become dim and unclear due to continuous high-intensity consumption.
He landed on a cracked, gray-black patch of land, and looked around at the desolate, lifeless landscape.
The distant horizon distorted the thin heat waves, while the sky remained that oppressive leaden gray.
“It’s been a whole day…” Jemin muttered to himself in a hoarse voice, clenching his teeth in anger.
His deadly chase with the sixth-level wizard of the Tower of Annihilation, spanning tens of millions of kilometers, had lasted for an entire standard day.
The situation did not improve; instead, it deteriorated rapidly and became increasingly suffocating.
To overcome the fatal flaw that "light can only fly in a straight line," Jemin had already changed his strategy.
He no longer pursued high-speed, straight-line driving at the limit, but instead switched to intermittent "short-distance turns".
After flying in light for a while, it forcibly dispelled the illusion, then chose a new direction and transformed into light again to escape.
Sometimes it flies for only a few seconds, sometimes it persists for a little longer, trying to disrupt the flight pattern and make it difficult for the opponent to predict the landing point.
This method did have some effect in the early stages, but ultimately it only treated the symptoms and not the root cause.
The difference in strength between the two sides is obvious.
Every time Jieming turns around, every time he deactivates the light and restarts, it takes time and generates energy fluctuations.
This also means that the time Jemin can use to move each time is getting shorter and shorter.
The speed of light is constant; the time it takes to travel is directly proportional to the distance traveled.
When Jemin's movement distance falls below a certain limit, long-distance spatial teleportation is replaced by spatial jump.
With a level six wizard's mastery of spatial technology, short-distance spatial jumps are almost as natural as breathing.
As one side gains and the other loses, the distance between the two is rapidly closing.
The closer the distance, the shorter the safe window of time that Jieming has to transform into light each time.
The short timeframe means that the actual distance he can escape each time is shrinking dramatically.
This creates a vicious cycle.
The strategic space between Jemin and the wizard was being squeezed and swallowed up little by little, like sinking into quicksand.
Finally, as the transformation into light ended and he felt an almost exhausting sense of depletion emanating from his body, Jemin silently stopped in place.
Instead of fleeing again immediately, he quickly took out several top-grade recovery potions and drank them all at once.
The medicinal power flowed like sweet spring water into the parched earth, nourishing the nearly depleted spiritual sea and the weary body.
Through continuous adaptation and evolution using the Body Tempering Method, Jemin's recovery ability and absorption of magic potions have become stronger and stronger. This amount of magic potion is enough for Jemin to barely activate the Five Elements Rainbow Mirror again.
But he did not leave. Instead, he slowly exhaled a breath of foul air, which smelled of blood, and his eyes became sharp and resolute.
"We can't run away anymore."
If you continue like this, your condition will only get worse and worse, and you will eventually be easily crushed by your opponent when you are exhausted.
Rather than being hunted to death in a sorry state, it's better to turn around and show your fangs while you still have the strength!
The last stand!
But time was too tight.
The speed at which the enemy tracked them down was beyond imagination, leaving no time to calmly set up a complex, multi-layered killing formation as before.
All Jemin could do was arm himself to the teeth.
He closed his eyes, his consciousness sinking into the inner sanctum of his body.
In the next instant, more than a dozen strangely shaped metal components were summoned and floated behind him.
These metal pillars are about two meters long, in the shape of a regular rhombus, narrower at the front and wider at the back, with a dull metallic luster flowing throughout, and their surfaces are etched with extremely complex three-dimensional energy guiding runes and miniature teleportation arrays.
They were arranged in a precise array on both sides of Jemin's back, their tips pointing slightly outwards, like a pair of cold and ferocious metal wings draped over the gray-robed wizard.
This is the combat system that Jemin once created to complement the spirituality of the Xuan Gang Red Dust Barrier, which was later shelved due to adjustments in the technical route, and has now been reactivated: [Floating Cannon].
Modified spells like the Divine Light of Extinction are difficult to stably bear and continuously activate using conventional talismans and magical artifacts due to their unique energy structure and driving logic.
This made it difficult for Jemin's early "Great Light Phase" tactic, which relied on a massive amount of rune artifacts for saturation bombardment, to continue to be used on these modified spells.
The core of "Great Light Image" lies in using the spirituality of the Five Aggregates Rainbow Mirror to automatically coordinate thousands of talismans and magical artifacts, forming a covering barrage.
However, for a modified spell combat system that requires constantly replacing the castable artifacts, what is needed is a precise "cannon barrel" and an efficient "ammunition supply system".
These rhomboid metal pillars are the "cannon barrels".
They are hollow inside, with a cleverly designed chain-like conveyor core.
The "ammunition" for each floating cannon consists of specially made magical artifacts, each about the size of a thumb, containing a single burst of annihilating divine light.
Once the front-end magical artifact is activated, it will be instantly teleported back to the inner celestial realm through a miniature magic array at the muzzle for recharging. Meanwhile, the teleportation array at the rear will simultaneously push the already recharged reserve "ammunition" from the celestial realm to the launch position.
The floating cannons themselves are levitated, moved, and their array changes are autonomously controlled by the spirituality separated from the Five Aggregates Rainbow Mirror, like an extended arm.
However, the ammunition scheduling, activation timing, attack aiming, and spell control within the internal celestial abode require Jemin to concentrate and personally manage them.
This requires maintaining a high level of mental energy output, precise energy control, and meticulous control over the flow of resources within the body's internal space, which places an immense burden on the body.
If he were not forced into a desperate situation, Jemin would not easily use this not-yet-fully-mature system.
The dozen or so floating cannons, as if possessing a life of their own, subtly adjusted their angles, and the runes on their metal surfaces lit up one by one, entering a state of readiness for activation.
Shortly after Jemin completed his preparations for arming...
The space thousands of meters above us seemed to be suddenly torn apart by an invisible hand!
The grayish-white mist surged out first, and then the figure of the Tower of Annihilation wizard shrouded in the mist suddenly appeared, like the Grim Reaper stepping out of the abyss!
Without any wasted words, at the very instant the other party's figure solidified, a fierce glint flashed in Jemin's eyes, and the metal wings on his back suddenly burst forth with a dazzling dark golden light!
"emission!"
Boom boom boom!!!
More than a dozen dark golden beams of light, compressed to the extreme and only the thickness of a bucket, burst forth from the tips of each floating cannon!
Under Jemin's control, these beams of light were shot out and then slightly adjusted their trajectories in mid-air, devouring the enemies who had just completed the teleportation and whose figures were not yet fully stable from different angles!
Each beam of light contained energy condensed to its extreme. Wherever it passed, the space was scorched, leaving lingering ripples. The thin air was completely ionized, emitting ear-piercing crackling sounds.
Almost at the same moment that Jemin launched his attack, the two crimson lights under the hood of the Tower of Annihilation wizard suddenly blazed brightly!
He hadn't even fully stabilized his physical form; he simply raised his right arm, which was shrouded in gray-white mist, and pressed it down in mid-air in the direction of Jemin.
Under the immense mental power of a level six wizard, a vast amount of elements were directly mobilized.
Rumble!!!
The sky above Jemin's head, spanning hundreds of kilometers, suddenly darkened!
Dark gray clouds churned, and space itself collapsed and twisted inward under the influence of some terrifying force!
Finally, a colossal hand, composed entirely of chaotic spatial folds and boiling gray-white mist, appeared out of thin air like divine punishment and crashed down upon Jemin!
Before the giant hand even touched the ground, the terrifying pressure caused the earth below to crack inch by inch, and countless gray-white rock crystals were crushed into dust by the invisible force field, sending dust billowing into the sky!
The next moment, both attacks hit their targets almost simultaneously!
The dozen or so beams of annihilating divine light that Jemin fired slammed into the gray-white mist surrounding the wizard of the Tower of Annihilation.
The anticipated explosion did not occur.
The highly condensed destructive energy, upon touching the mist, vanished like mud into the sea, rapidly neutralized and annihilated by the light and dark energies that swirled and canceled each other out within the mist.
The fog churned and rippled violently, its color dimming slightly, but the wizard's figure at the core remained unmoved, his scarlet eyes coldly locking onto Jemin through the thinner fog.
And that giant hand, which seemed capable of shattering mountains, was firmly imprinted on the spot where Jemin was!
hum...
There was no earth-shattering roar, only a dull, soul-chilling hum, as if the whole world was being squeezed.
Where the giant hand landed, space was completely distorted into a chaotic mess.
Light and darkness, positive and negative, creation and destruction... countless opposing elements and laws are forcibly mixed together, constantly colliding, annihilating, regenerating, and annihilating again within a narrow area!
Each tiny annihilation releases terrifying energy, yet it is confined within the range of the palm strike, forming a continuous and rampant explosion.
As the grayish-white giant hand slowly dissipated, it left behind a huge palm-shaped crater with a diameter of over one hundred kilometers and a depth of several thousand meters.
The pit walls were as smooth as a mirror, exhibiting the texture of glass that had been melted at high temperatures and then rapidly cooled. At the bottom of the pit, there were still wisps of unstable annihilation energy, emitting a hissing sound of corrosion.
At the very center of the pit, a slightly thin figure in a gray robe slowly straightened up.
It was Jemin.
His Void Armor was flashing with an unprecedented frequency, its transparent surface covered with fine cracks like a spider web, as if it could shatter completely at any moment.
His face was as pale as paper, and a trickle of bright red blood oozed from the corner of his mouth.
"One strike... consumed more than 60% of its reserves?" As Jemin sensed the status feedback from the Void Armor, his pupils involuntarily contracted slightly.
That seemingly simple palm strike actually contained an extremely sophisticated control of energy.
It was not a brute-force attack, but a continuous, annihilating impact of countless tiny opposing elements.
These devastating impacts were like billions of tiny files, simultaneously eroding his defenses from all sides.
The Guixu Armor was theoretically capable of absorbing tens of thousands of basic level six witchcraft attacks, but it was almost instantly filled with more than half of its "capacity".
This means that, given the intensity of the attack displayed by the opponent, his Guixu Armor can withstand at most one more attack of the same magnitude before it completely overloads and collapses!
Meanwhile, the mist surrounding the Tower of Annihilation wizard, who was far outside the attack range, also fluctuated violently.
Those two crimson lights were fixed on the disheveled yet still upright figure in the center of the palm pit.
What surged within was no longer pure killing intent and coldness, but a mixture of surprise, disbelief, and even a hint of... horror.
"They actually... withstood it?"
A deep, hoarse voice emerged from the depths of the mist for the first time, carrying a distinct unease.
His palm strike just now, seemingly casual, actually utilized a deep understanding of the "Annihilation" law, and its power was enough to instantly severely injure or even kill an ordinary level six beginner wizard!
This level 5 wizard not only defended himself, but also did not lose his fighting ability on the spot!
This guy... is he really only level 5?
The gray-white mist churned violently, and the crimson light within it grew ever more intense, locking onto the figure in the pit.
The killing intent had reached its peak.
(End of this chapter)