Austra's heels echoed steadily against the stone floor as she began to walk forward again, speaking as she did, "You know, I thought wisdom was one of the things you mages take pride in. It was one of the traits that made me feel like you stood apart from the rest of your kind."
She continued, "It's that very wisdom that has shaped the relationship between vampires and mages throughout history," her voice steady as Magnus remained silent.
He focused on strengthening the barrier around the family, adding layer after layer. His [Combat Assistant] hadn't been programmed to shield them from Austra's attack—it had only responded to the warning from the BGM Glitch and Magnus's heightened sense of danger.
It was sheer luck that the family was close enough and the barrier large enough to protect them as well, but it wouldn't happen again.
So as Austra was talking, Magnus glanced back at the family. They were still in shock, visibly shaken from watching the group wither into death in an instant.
"Hey," he muttered, his voice low and serious.
They didn't react.
Still stunned, he raised his voice slightly and repeated, "Hey!"
This time, the parents turned to him, their eyes leaving the grim sight beyond the barrier to meet his.
"I need you both to listen carefully," he said, his tone firm.
"Do not try to leave this barrier, understand? It'll protect you from any outside attacks, but it's vulnerable to pressure from the inside. Push against it too hard, and it'll crack. Got it?"
"Y- Yes," the mother replied, her voice trembling, and the father followed suit.
"We understand..."
Magnus nodded and returned his focus to Austra. She'd noticed his lack of attention and paused mid-sentence, standing with one hand on her hip, a smile curling on her lips. But if expressions could speak, it would say her smile was filled with cold anticipation, not amusement.
"Finished coaxing the sheep?" Austra asked, her voice dripping with mockery.
Magnus took a step forward, slipping through the barrier surrounding the family.
He shrugged, sneering as he said, "I don't know. Have you finished monologuing, or are you finally getting to the point?"
Austra let out a short laugh and then stopped in front of one of the dried-up corpses on the ground.
"My point... boy, is that despite how hard my kind works to stay hidden, we've crossed paths with mages plenty of times in the past. It's inevitable. Yet each time, it was their wisdom that made them realize it wasn't worth fighting us, not when the potential result could be an all-out war. It was a simple game of math: fight us, risk valuable mages' lives in the process, or let us continue to influence humanity from the shadows. Considering how little we've appeared in history, which option do you think they typically chose?"
Magnus frowned, taking a moment to process before responding, "So, mages in the past chose to avoid mutual destruction, and you just let them go on with their business?"
Austra's eyes narrowed just slightly—not in anger, but in acknowledgment that he was understanding her, and she gave a slow nod.
"Exactly. It's only logical. After all, even mages don't care much for their own kind. To them, the Ten Great Magic Academies, I mean. They only see humans as a seeding ground for more mages and knights to reap when they see fit. As long as that keeps going, who cares who holds power? That's their mentality. It's why the academies haven't interfered in the war that threatens humanity even now. Beastkin, while slightly rarer, can also become mages and knights. We feed on humanity, mages cultivate humanity, and when humanity's gone, they'll turn to cultivating beastkin. A simplistic form of order. Which is why I was surprised..."
At that moment, Austra did something that made Magnus freeze, his eyes going wide.
He shouted, "What the hell are you doing?"
Austra had raised her leg, placing her foot right over the dried-out head of one of the corpses. As her heel pressed down, the sickening squelch of dried flesh gave way, followed by the crack of bone echoing through the underground chapel.
"That," she said, her voice eerily calm, "That right there. That's what surprises me. You actually cared about these... people you've only just met. You're an anomaly compared to any other mage I've encountered. You've grown stronger at an absurd rate. Your ties are deep, given the military's strange actions recently, right after your raid. And yet, you're still a student of one of the world's few Archmages. Even now, you're using up mana to protect those three behind you when you should be saving it all to fight me."
Her voice lowered at the last words, and with a final stomp, she crushed the skull beneath her heel. Magnus gritted his teeth, taking a sharp inhale as she did. Behind the barrier, the mother and father turned their heads away, not wanting to see what spilled out of the broken skull. Austra, however, gazed down at the shattered head, impassive, watching the gray matter pool and spill across the stone floor.
"In the end, meeting you has been... enlightening," she continued, her voice colder than it was a moment ago.
"I've never been so angry at a human before. Not even the idiot soldier who stabbed my eye truly angered me, but you...," she trailed off, running a hand through her well-kept hair, her words hanging in the air.
In that instant, her eyes snapped back up to meet Magnus's, and the air seemed to crackle with rising tension.
Then, in the blink of an eye, she was gone. She moved with such speed that Magnus couldn't even track her, his eyes and reflexes failing to keep up. However, the combination of [Combat Assistant] and the BGM Glitch detected the movement before it even happened. As [Self Body Puppetry] activated, Magnus's right arm shot up, blocking the incoming strike. His forearm locked against Austra's elbow, stopping her sharpened nails just centimeters from piercing his temple.
They were face to face, her eyes burning like flames as she spoke in a low, vital tone.
"I don't know why, but your very existence repulses me!" She spat, her voice full of venom. As the words left her mouth, her other hand twisted into a claw-like motion, aiming to gouge out the side of his stomach.
Once again, Magnus's body moved on its own. His left hand shot out, grabbing her left arm and halting it mid-swing. Austra's body strained, her incorporeal true form pushing her limbs forward, but an impossible strength in Magnus held her back. Meanwhile, [Combat Assistant] made its move. With a powerful yank that even her body couldn't resist, Magnus tore off Austra's left arm. At the same time, his right arm pushed her strike aside and swung at her head.
Austra reacted with blinding speed, stepping back just in time, but the strike still grazed her, snapping her neck with a sickening crack as it spun more than three hundred sixty degrees.
"Huh?" Magnus had heard a secondary warning note of an attack blare through the music that followed Austra's presence during his strike just now. Glancing down, he noticed a deep gash across his stomach, five claw marks that weren't deep enough to reach his organs but bled freely. He hadn't even seen when she'd made the strike.
She's just as fast as I remember. Even [Combat Assistant] couldn't defend against that.
As a Hierarch, Austra's regeneration was far superior to a mere Nightborn. Her head snapped back into place, spinning to face him as she pulled herself into a retreat. Unlike the Nightborn, fatal strikes didn't disrupt her body's control.
She was a true undead.
Before her retreat was complete or her left arm had even regenerated, she swung her right arm like a whip, two Umbral Rends forming instantly, aimed straight at Magnus.
Magnus's body didn't slow. His reinforced nerve endings kept him from even flinching at the pain throbbing out from the gash across his stomach, and instead of dodging, he reached into his storage ring, pulling out K-Variant Rokshaata. With a quick twist, he separated the projectile from the coin. Rokshaata shot through the air faster than the Umbral Rends, moving like a snake at speeds faster than sound.
It struck the first Umbral Rend on its flat side, and in an instant, the attack dissolved as if it were dissolving in water. Rokshaata didn't stop there either. It hit the second Umbral Rend head-on, causing the same result—complete dispersion.
A magic artifice?
Austra felt something was wrong. The parts of her body she had used to form the two attacks had gone silent, inert. She couldn't call the energy back to her main form—it simply hung in the air, unmoving, reacting to nothing. On top of that, the left arm Magnus had ripped from her now floated behind him, suspended within a layered mana construct, keeping it, which had already decomposed back into energy from returning to her.
Her mind raced as she thought back to the black flames she'd seen on the surface.
He's been preparing for this. Not just spells to fight vampires, but ones designed specifically to counter Hierarchs like me. He's going to keep chipping away at my true body. I shouldn't be surprised that he's got magical artifice capable of paralyzing our true forms with that being the case. But... even if it's fast with whatever form of psychokinesis he's using, it's still nowhere near the level of speed needed to tag me with it.
At least, that's what Austra thought—until the projectile section of Rokshaata, which had been at beyond Mach speed, vanished from her sight. In that instant, something broke through space, blinking in and out of the world. When it appeared again, Rokshaata was barely a centimeter from her face.
Even a Master-level knight wouldn't be able to move fast enough to avoid it at point-blank range.
But Austra wasn't a Master-level knight.
Hierarchs and Master-levels were similar, but not the same. The reason vampires moved so fast and possessed incredible strength was because their bodies were controlled by their true forms, much like Magnus's [Self Body Puppetry]. However, like [Self Body Puppetry], their biggest limitation was the body they controlled. If they pushed too hard, the force their true form tried to exert would surpass the limits of their puppet bodies, and the body would fail to withstand it.
So, they always operated below a limit, with higher-ranked vampires able to create more powerful puppet bodies.
As for their true limit? The true speed at which they could transfer information as beings of pure energy, unreliant on nerves or physical limitations?
Near-instantaneous, or more precisely, the speed of light.
The only reason vampires couldn't fully exploit this was that the more complex the action, the more information needed to be communicated, and the more their virtual brains, which didn't think at the same speed as their forms, could transfer information. As such, the more information their brains needed to compute, the slower they became. Only Hierarchs and above had the energy density and understanding of which actions translated into how much of a delay could truly take advantage of this.
In the fraction of a second before Rokshaata could strike, Austra's head exploded into black fog, her true form transmuting and assimilating her body's head an instant. Magnus's eyes widened in shock as he saw her body already forming a new head as Rokshaata flew straight through where her head had been a mere moment ago.
She actually dodged it? No... she dispersed her physical body back into energy to avoid being knocked out completely. The condensed energy that Rokshaata hit, the same energy that used to be her head, is still inert.
It was strange, but the Knockout Brick was specific. If it hit someone's body, no matter who or what they were, it knocked them out. It didn't matter if they were human, monster, mana beast, or even a corpse controlled by an entity of sentient energy. But if it hit the sentient mass itself, it only caused the condensed energy it came in contact with to enter a knocked-out state.
Still, that means as long as I can hit her body dead on, this fight will be mine.
Magnus's expression tightened, his realization clear. Austra's expression shifted as she, too, understood: being struck by Magnus's K-Variant Rokshaata meant game over for her.
"A magic artifice capable of teleportation? You really are full of tricks, aren't you?" Austra yelled, rushing at him with sudden erratic, unpredictable movements, darting left and right, making it as hard as possible for Magnus to teleport Rokshaata directly in front of her.
The projectile section of Rokshaata flickered, appearing in Austra's path, forcing her to halt and quickly change direction. Every time it neared her, she'd let the part of her body it was about to hit decompose into energy, letting it turn inert on contact as she regenerated. This slowly wore away at her true form, but she realized that the inert sections only stayed that way for about a minute.
That fact might have looked like it made Rokshaata useless in this situation, but the opposite was true. Her need to constantly change directions slowed her down significantly. She wasn't charging at full speed anymore.
Now that I can track her movements, I have more options.
Magnus held out his hand, visualizing the mana formation for the Fractal Ice Flower Spell. The next moment, a massive, intricate ice flower materialized in front of him.
Austra, still heading toward him, didn't hesitate. She pinpointed the core of the mana formation and immediately used Blackout, shattering the flower and sending ice petals flying in every direction.
She had thought she'd destroyed it fully, but as thousands of ice petals made contact with each other, as well as the walls, floors, and ceiling of the underground chapel, they began blooming into flowers of their own.
The growth was nearly instantaneous. Within seconds, Austra was forced to stop, momentarily overwhelmed by a sea of ice spreading across every surface, multiplying with each passing second. It rapidly engulfed the space.
Another self-replicating spell? He knows exactly what we struggle to counter. But where is he getting all this mana to cast spells over and over?
Austra's sudden stop made her take drastic action. The projectile section of Rokshaata, which had never stopped hounding her, appeared just in front of her chest, and she forced her torso to self-detonate. Her upper and lower bodies split apart, leaving only inert, condensed energy—black fog—between them that had taken the hit from Rokshaata. Immediately, she used Blackout again, but this time, she didn't target the Fractal Ice Flower Spell directly, nor did she use it in a large radius around her. Instead, just as she had done to deal with Magnus's Abyssal Flame embers, she focused it around the surface of her skin.
As her upper body began regenerating a lower half, and her former lower half broke down into energy to rejoin her true form, the ice surrounding her never touched her. It was as if a knife were cutting through butter—any ice within a few centimeters was instantly broken apart, becoming mana.
Magnus took note of that as Austra began tearing through his ice wall, moving as if she were swimming through it.
So that won't stop you? Alright then, let's see how you react to this!
Magnus severed his connection to the Fractal Ice Flower Spell, letting the ice begin to break down under the effect of spirit suppression. At the same time, he looked over at the floating mana construct nearby, containing her arm, which had already been reduced to a condensed ball of black foggy energy.
[Deletion]
It happened in an instant. One moment, there was a mana construct, and the next, both it and the energy inside of it were gone. Austra immediately sensed the loss, feeling part of her true form vanish.
It wasn't the same as when her body went inert, like when your arm falls asleep.
What- What did he do? Teleportation?
That was Austra's first thought, but even then, there should have been some trace of her body being sent through space. Yet, she didn't detect anything of the sort. No, her true form had simply lost a part of itself, permanently.
As she stood frozen in confusion, Magnus made his move. He exploded off his right foot, charging straight at her. It may have looked like a dash, but he was already flying the moment his feet left the ground, rushing toward her at nearly three times the speed of sound. A heavy shockwave erupting from around his body shattered ice throughout the underground chapel, echoing through the air and shaking everything.
Austra quickly reacted as Magnus surged toward her, one of his arms outstretched; she prepared to kick, aiming to knock his head clean off his shoulders.
Before she could even move, Rokshaata reappeared behind her, trapping her between it and Magnus.
She had to make a split-second decision, and with no choice, Austra sacrificed part of her body again, this time her right ribs. The result was her being unable to strike back as Magnus flew past her, landing heavily on the ground. His feet scraped against the stone, leaving cracked lines in his wake.
Austra glanced back at him, her eyes sharp as she saw that Magnus had ripped off one of her legs in the instant he passed. As her body began to regenerate, she was forced to detonate her left arm from another strike of Rokshaata.
Her gaze darkened with frustration.
Magnus tossed her right leg into the air, encasing it in a mana construct. The mana construct twisted and ground the leg down with multiple layers of destructive functions lacing its surface. Within seconds, the mana construct had shrunken, and the former leg had been reduced to a sphere of energy no larger than a hand.
Magnus glanced at it before using [Deletion].
Another part of her body was gone. Austra didn't react as violently this time. Her body only tensed slightly, but Magnus could tell it was starting to take a toll on her.
It doesn't matter how much energy she's accumulated over her time as a Hierarch. Losing parts of her true form to Rokshaata, even if temporarily, the energy spent regenerating and breaking down her own body to avoid getting hit, and now my [Deletion] on top of all that... It must be eating away at her reserves.
And Magnus was right.
Because in the next moment, Austra did something completely new.
The entire area around her—the whole underground chapel—seemed to pulse, as a wave of darkness spread out from her body, dimming the brightness noticeably. As the wave rolled toward him, Magnus instinctively took to the air, avoiding it just as it passed over the ground where he had been standing moments before.
His eyes only left her for the briefest moment, but when he looked back, Austra had vanished.
Not in the same way she had when moving at full speed, and there was no warning from the BGM Glitch.
She had simply disappeared.