Chapter 56 Moments (Patreon)

            After the near miss with what Claude considered a wheeled trap and Albert and Victoria considered a metal carriage, the three mages continued down the tunnel. When they were nearing the exit, Victoria had their illusions exit first, and the various creatures in the biome attacked them. As the creatures attacked, Claude adjusted the ice storm that was circling the vacuum bubble to attack the various essence creatures that were attempting to attack the illusions. Thanks to soul sight, he was able to see the creatures through the wall he was still behind, and so he attacked the ones nearest the illusion first.

            This meant that he ignored the two souls that were stationary at the far corner of the room. He didn’t give them any thought as he used ice to pelt the various creatures attempting to attack the Illusions of him and his two comrades. That was a mistake, as one of those souls was the ghillie dragon, and the other soul was the projectile bear.

            The ghillie dragon used its camouflage in an attempt to stay hidden; unfortunately for it, soul sight meant that Claude and Albert could see its soul, which the dragon had no way to disguise. In its attempt to stay hidden, the ghillie dragon remained motionless, which allowed the projectile bear to carefully aim its railgun at the illusions. It took several seconds for the bear to aim its weapon as the swirling ice distorted its aim for a few moments. Once the bear was sure it had its target, it fired.

            When the railgun fired, many things happened in a fraction of a second. First of all, the projectile moved so quickly that it created so much friction that the railgun and the bear's arm melted, the rest of the bear's hair caught on fire, and the bear's blood boiled, killing it instantly. The ghillie dragon felt the burn of the heat, but it was designed to dissipate heat, so it was not badly injured, only burned. The heat did not stop at the bear or dragon. The projectile moved so fast it caught the air on fire, so the ghillie dragon was no longer hidden, thanks to the flaming air that went from the ghillie dragon to the vacuum bubble.

            When the projectile hit the ice swirling around the vacuum bubble, its trajectory was slightly diverted, and the ice it hit exploded. When it reached the vacuum, the fire trail stopped, thanks to the ice diverting its trajectory, it missed the illusions of the mages, but the diversion brought it slightly closer to the real mages. Not enough to hit them, but closer. Less than a millionth of a second after being fired, the projectile hit the carbon nanotube wall, punched right through it, hit the concrete the dungeon had made between the walls to anchor the Great Black Tree Labyrinth, easily punched through the concrete, then punched through the carbon nanotube wall on the other side, which made up the wall of the tunnel, before punching through the other side of the tunnel.

            The projectile was moving so fast that each time it punched through the wall, it created an explosion. From the mage's perspective both walls of the tunnel exploded at nearly the same time. Claude had force wall set up between them and their illusions so no debris directly struck the mages, but the debris had so much energy put into them they began ricocheting off the walls. The ricocheting was helped by the reality that they had created a vacuum bubble inside the tunnel and so all three mages began being pelted by debris.

            At this range they had several layers of protection up. The first layer was the vacuum layer, which made the explosion worse since it stopped the air from slowing down. The first layer of effective defense was the force wall, but Claude was not expecting an explosion, so it was not covering the entirety of the tunnel. Even so, the force wall stopped the most dangerous debris. Of the debris that got past the force wall, the mage's water bubble spell stopped all the concrete and most of the carbon nanotube pieces. Of those that made it through the water layer, they largely had little effect since the spell empower strengthened their natural defenses.

            Unfortunately for Albert, empower was meant to largely help with blunt force attacks, and a large piece of nanotubes made it through the first two layers of his defense and managed to cut off his forearm because the nanotube's sharpness negated empower’s effects.

            Even though two of the mages were moving ten times faster, and Claude was moving twenty times faster, all of this happened too fast for them to react. The projectile bear managed to fire his projectile at over two miles a second, which was ten thousand five hundred and sixty feet per second. For the couple of two-tier mages, that meant that even though they moved ten times faster, the projectile was moving in their perspective at over a thousand feet per second. To the third-tier mage, who was moving at twenty times normal speed, the projectile was moving at over five hundred feet per second.

            The attack that came through was shocking to the trio. So shocking that Albert stopped sending mana to his spells. Albeit he had an excuse, he just lost most of his arm below the elbow. With Albert disabled, part of the vacuum bubble collapsed, so did the defensive water bubble around Albert, and so did the bending light spell.

            When they lost invisibility, Victoria turned toward her husband, saw his wound, and yelled, “ALBERT!” She was so distraught she dropped all her spells, including the vacuum bubble around the three illusions, the three illusions, and worst of all she stopped supporting her lightning immunity spell.

            Claude turned to the couple in a panic! He yelled, “RECAST YOUR LIGHTNING IMMUNITY NOW!”

            “BUT ALBERT!”

            “I WILL STOP THE BLEEDING! CAST THE SPELL NOW OR THE LIGHTNING DUNGEON WILL KILL US!”

            Victoria reluctantly recast the lightning immunity spell as Claude cast a growth spell on Albert to stop the bleeding. Claude had no intention of fully healing the arm as growth spells allowed healing only through losing years of your life. A tier-three mage with a healing core could regrow Albert’s hand without taking years away from the mage.

            Albert was still in shock as Claude healed him, so Claude yelled, “ALBERT YOUR ARM WILL BE GROWN BACK LATER. RECAST LIGHTNING IMMUNITY OR YOU WILL DIE!”

            Albert was in a daze, looking at his stump as the wound closed. Moments after it stopped bleeding, Albert was able to come to himself and begin casting lightning immunity.

            While he cast, the labyrinth did not stop trying to kill the three mages. Without Claude to direct the ice spell, many essence creatures made their way past and began launching themselves at the three mages who could now be seen. They didn’t even have dust to hide in, as vacuum bubble had been surrounding everything hit by the super fast projectile, and any dust had either been tossed far away, or fell right back down to the earth thanks to the lack of air resistance. Thankfully, Claude had kept up his vacuum bubble so the small creatures still died, but now they knew where their targets were.

            Unfortunately for the trio the ghillie dragon was angry, and it was moving in the direction the rest of the essence creatures were. In just a handful of seconds, the ghillie dragon made it across the biome and into the tunnel the three mages were still in. That said, to the mages, the time it took the dragon to get there was more than a minute. The only real obstacle to the dragon was the ice that was still swirling around aimlessly in the biome, but the ghillie dragon was big enough that it was able to bash through it. When the dragon saw the mages, it spewed out the liquid hydrogen, but that dissipated instantly in the vacuum.

            As the ghillie dragon sprayed its freezing liquid, it gave Claude plenty of time to weave the spell explosion with his staff, from the tier-two explosion core. Claude actually finished casting the spell before the ghillie dragon was done spraying the liquid hydrogen. Once the dragon was finished, it began charging forward and into the vacuum, which it could survive for a dozen or so seconds. Claude wasn’t going to give it those seconds. As soon as there was nothing between Claude and the dragon, he launched his spell. When the spell hit it caused all the liquid inside the dragon to turn into plasma, and the ghillie dragon exploded into millions of pieces, which ricocheted around, but fortunately, thanks to Clauses force wall, none injured the three mages.

            Once everything calmed down, Victoria said, “Albert’s injured. We have to go back.”

            Claude said, “No. I was injured in the force and folding space dungeon. This is good practice for him. We will continue forward.

Authors note-We have at least two more chapters following the mages before we get back to the dungeon. Note the majority of this chapter really takes place over ten or so seconds. To me this is the difficulty of writting a battle scene, in any battle there is so much going on its going to take a lot more words than normal to write.