Chapter 170: Deadly Assault II

Deadly Assault II

Usually, when two high-level foes face off. One of the most common responses of both sides was probing. Attempting to find out the capabilities of each other which would then dictate how they would fight properly.

After all, rushing in against someone who appears to be at the same level as you without knowing what they can and can’t do is hardly proper when, for all you know, they have a special magic that can instantly kill you from a reckless charge.

That being said, this wasn’t universal as some situations allowed for one to make a strike without probing. Assassins, for example, always performed in-depth studies of their potential targets before they actually tried to take them out. Assassination is, in the end, all about taking out someone in a short amount of time and requires even more preparations. It wouldn’t make sense to try and assassinate someone you know little about.

As such, the Shadow Needle Guild had done their homework not just about Xander who was their main target, but everyone around him.

They knew that in terms out raw output, Falael had everyone in the squad, and likely most mages at her level, beat. But they also knew that she couldn’t consistently utilize said output without facing Mana Burnout in record time. So their strategy against her had been to just tire her out and force her to face Burnout.

Again, under usual circumstances, that would have worked. Not to mention that Falael had essentially been a glass cannon. So a good hit would have put her out of commission anyway.

But... there was a problem with this information.

Everything they knew was based on the Falael from a bit over 2 weeks ago. So while she had likely improved, it wasn’t likely that she improved that much. Right?

However, it wasn’t 2 weeks. But 6 months.

And the Falael now... could not even be remotely compared to the Falael at the beginning of those months.

Dozens of spheres made from starlight bloomed and shrunk each second. Every single one carrying utterly obscene amounts of power and devastation as Falael truly let loose. The sheer potency of even one of these attacks making what she used against the Azure Tree look small.

Yet the terrifying part was the potency. Not a single bit of energy leaked out beyond any of these spheres. So the damage was kept strictly within their range, which only made them more terrifying as anything unfortunate enough to be caught in them was completely and utterly vaporized.

As such, it could be inferred that the assassins were not having a good time.

The team of 5 constantly teleported while barriers of varying attributes bloomed constantly just to stave off the explosions. And to little success as all they did was buy enough time for them to teleport again and avoid getting engulfed.

Fight hadn’t even gone on for more than a minute, yet it took all they had just to keep themselves from dying.

The most terrifying thing, though, wasn’t even the explosions, but Falael herself.

One has to remember, her biggest issue in the past was her inability to withstand her own output. While mages were inherently resistant to their own magic, Falael was more fragile than most, not to mention the destructive nature of her starlight.

So the fact that she could comfortably exist inside the aftermath of her own attacks should have told you everything. In terms of raw durability, she actually wasn’t worse than Curtis in his wolf form!

In other words, her body itself was the most dangerous weapon.

"Starlight Magic:..." She chanted while stepping down, watching her assailants latest retreat as the air around her warped. "... Gravity Collapse."

The assassin that had been performing the constant teleportations stiffened as they felt space change and begin to flow in a certain direction.

Not just them, but the rest of the team as their bodies began getting dragged towards a certain point against their own will.

Towards Falael.

While she still used Starlight Magic, there was much, much more to a star than simple starlight.

And one of those many things was the intense gravity they possessed. So if Falael’s star could passively pull in the ambient mana in the surroundings towards itself, what stopped her from making it do the same against tangible objects?

And the gravitational pull of a star, even a small one, was devastating.

The ground started to get broken up and promptly vaporized when they got near Falael, the air igniting as this spell didn’t just pull things in, but weaponized the heat of her star, making anything that got close to burn up violently, and the mages that were still struggling against this pull started to feel this heat. So much so that their cloaks, which were actually highly durable enchanted equipment, began to smoke!

Even worse, Falael wasn’t static as she began walking, each step causing the melting ground beneath her to sink, as though something impossibly heavy was passing over it.

Seeing things devolve to this point, the leader made an executive decision and took out an item.

It was a human shaped skull. Only that the color was a dark obsidian, and within its eye sockets, purple flames burned. The thing it gave off an aura of death and decay.

As soon as it appeared, the jaw began moving, and the sound of laughter filled the area as the surroundings actually dimmed, Falael frowning for the first time as this deathly aura grew stronger until it was directly clashing with hers, and wherever it passed, the powerful gravitation pull she was exerting weakened substantially, the heat becoming manageable.

That wasn’t all, though, as the laughing grew in volume, and she watched as dozens of spectral versions of this skull, each as large as a house, appeared in the air and stared down at her, the laughing overlapping until it reached a dizzying crescendo, and she felt a heavy sense of suppression on her being, and, shockingly, a sense of coldness!

Not physical coldness, but something that seemed to attack her soul directly while filling it with irrational terror.

It was clear that the skull was some sort of artifact, and a very high-grade one at that.

However...

"Wonderful..." Falael grinned as she looked up at the skulls peering down at her.

"You need to be able to do at least this much if you’re after our heads, right?!" The halo behind her head blazed as another magic circle bloomed at her feet, and she clenched her fist as starlight condensed around it.

"Starlight Magic:..." Suddenly, the feeling of suppression began to strain as she threw a punch.

"... Solar Flare!" The sound of laughter ceased abruptly, a horrifying wave of incandescent heat washing over the area. The ground became plasma and the air ionized as anything with matter was vaporized of transformed. The flash alone was blinding as the shockwave rocked the area, and the only reason it hadn’t been worse was because, again, Falael’s control kept it within the target area.

And said target area was utterly devastated, wisps of plasma, ionized air, lightning discharge, and molten rock could be seen, Falael standing in the center looking utterly at ease, like she hadn’t just weaponized a celestial body to generate such a horrifying effect.

As for her targets...

"Wow, y’all actually tanked that. That artifact must have been something." Falael commented, watching the only other surviving thing in the destroyed area with her. A large black skull covered in huge cracks.

When she spoke, the skull finally collapsed, revealing the assassins who, despite surviving, weren’t unscathed.

The leader, holding the skull that was cracked in several places, was covered in burns that revealed his flesh. A good chunk of his clothes were gone, revealing a blackened torso and burned hair. Such injuries would have killed a normal person, and he only remained standing due to the inherent durability powerful mages naturally possessed.

The others weren’t much better. But it seems like he had taken the brunt of the attack with the skull artifact that was, evidently, out of commission.

Staring at Falael with one functioning eye, the leader spoke in a hoarse voice.

"Begin... the retreat." Clearly, even speaking was painful as the mage who’d been doing all the teleporting, a slim female, nodded and took out something she’d likely been preparing since the fight began.

Falael saw this and tilted her head.

"Oh, sorry to say... But it’s much too late for that." As soon as she said this, the female mage abruptly coughed before vomiting blood and falling to her knees, alarming everyone in the group.

Before they could assist her, she went limp as her remaining hair fell out, followed by her flesh turning purple before melting in record time.

It didn’t take long for the rest to follow as they too fell, experiencing similarly horrid deaths.

"What... did you..." The leader, the last to fall, choked out with incredulity and anger, making Falael smile faintly.

"Yeah, turns out radiation from stars will eat through you faster than anything else." She shrugged as the leader, too, succumbed to the radiation that she had been using in addition with the devastating explosions since the fight began.

They had no clue about it and, thus, never tried to defend against it. As such, they were technically already dead not too long after the fight began.

A terrifying way to go indeed.

Sighing, Falael picked up the cracked skull, and as soon as she did, she felt a coldness try to seep into her, but she just frowned and flared her aura, forcing the thing to behave.

Then she turned to where the others were fighting and decided to see how things were going.

***

A/N: Ya’ll, I’m alive. Something dumb happened to me irl earlier this month, so I won’t be able to update much this month. But my upload schedule will return to normal as soon as the next month begins. So please bear with me. Please and Thank You

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