Chapter 399
Chapter 399
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Translator: Ebonarch
Chapter: 399
Chapter Title: Masquerade Ball (6)
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The clash of powers that had shaken heaven and earth finally came to an end.
Bianca gazed down at the shipyard while floating lightly in the sky.
Or, to be more precise, what used to be the shipyard.
The massive container ship, which had boasted such grandeur, lay shattered into pieces, as if a finely crafted miniature model had been violently flung aside.
The dock beneath it was riddled with holes, slowly submerging into the seawater.
Arkhart's Bow, which folded space itself to fire.
Its destructive power transcended the laws of mass conservation and the scales of conventional physics.
Under normal circumstances, the ship itself should have vanished entirely.
Not just the ship—the entire area should have been swept away in a storm.
"……."
The reason it hadn't was simple.
The berserk Red Branch, launched using ribbons like a slingshot, and the powerful distortion field it generated had triggered a neutralizing reaction, magically canceling each other out.
But the difference in power had been overwhelming.
The Night Sky Bianca unleashed had crushed the red flash outright and sent it plummeting.
An improvised, desperate spear-thrust could never overcome a magically perfect sure-kill shot—not from the start.
Through her Ideological Observation, she spotted a man slumped against a steel structure, head bowed low.
Bianca lightly flapped her wings, and her feet were soon planted on the ship's deck, which had split into two halves and was slowly sinking.
"Too bad."
There was no response from the man, his head bowed like a corpse.
He had been brilliant right up to the end.
He had intercepted a sure-kill strike that no witch had ever blocked.
Yet even Bianca, who had no particular knack for anti-magic, could recognize the danger.
He had been exposed to that powerful distortion field for far too long.
His breathing had nearly stopped, and even now, she could see his heart slowly dying.
Bianca possessed an elixir capable of healing most wounds in an instant.
She briefly pulled out an ampule to give to him, then tucked it away again.
Even the elixir couldn't handle that injury.
He looked fine on the outside, but through magical sight, his etheric body within was crushed like tofu.
Moments later, his heartbeat ceased.
At the very least, she would recover the Red Branch.
"Huh?"
The Red Branch lay flung some distance away.
As Bianca reached for it, something unbelievable happened right before her eyes.
-Twitch
A finger twitched ever so slightly.
At first, she thought it was residual electrical signals lingering in the muscles from the intense excitement.
His heart had undoubtedly stopped.
She had observed his pupils fully dilating toward the floor through her Ideological Observation.
He was already dead.
So then.
"Why is it moving?"
Bianca looked at Shin Siu.
Shin Siu looked back at Bianca.
2.
Sinking endlessly.
A vast, dark expanse.
Yet the darkness caressing her cheeks and coiling around her waist brought a comforting warmth, like returning to the womb.
Ain.
The first gateway of the three realms, which never manifests.
On its horizon, the history of magic Siu had inscribed shone like a colossal structure.
His thoughts, adrift like his body, returned to him.
Ah...
The dazed sigh escaped because he recalled the Night Sky pouring down, swallowing the Red Branch in the final moment.
The shattering roar of magic tearing heaven and earth still seemed to echo in his ears—yet it was so quiet here.
That dissonance was eerily chilling, sending shivers down his spine.
Is this death?
Far in the distance, toward the horizon, sinking away.
A magic structure, impossibly remote, came into view.
"Ah..."
Only now did his voice emerge.
At the same moment, realization dawned.
The battle was over.
The result: defeat.
The price: his life.
Regretful.
If only he'd thought to fire the Red Branch a little sooner.
If only he'd conserved a bit more mana.
If only he'd studied harder and achieved greater magical prowess.
Regrets chained endlessly one after another.
His consciousness sank once more, submerging.
Then.
Siu noticed something amiss.
This was Ain, a conceptual realm that did not truly exist.
It should have no end.
Yet.
A bottom appeared.
The floor Siu had never perceived was black like a calm oil surface, sprawling wide enough to trisect this vast Ain.
His feet submerged.
His calves.
Surpassing the floor that swallowed him up to his waist, chest, and neck.
An inverted world revealed itself.
Another Ain, existing as if up and down had flipped, bordered by the black surface.
Dark shadows ceaselessly shifting forms.
The metallic clamor of an intense loom turning like a massive machine.
Elemental particles blooming and withering repeatedly, fluttering without end.
A palace of memories, finite amid infinite Ain, built of stairs and doors unfurling.
Strings of contract sharply etched across the sky.
A colossal moon presiding over the anti-field.
A grand fractal in the form of a tree stretching from heaven to earth, harmonizing it all.
Within that structure—harmonized in beauty beyond comparison to Siu's—a man hung upside down.
He was Shin Siu.
Shin Siu's realm had long surpassed the 15th Hierarchy.
The reason his autonomous defense hadn't activated.
His instinct hadn't recognized the prior crises as true threats.
The moment Siu's heart stopped.
Only then did it realize it had to act.
With a thunderous roar, Ain flipped.
The world, tilted from horizontal symmetry to vertical like a sinking ship.
Flipped once more, restoring horizontal symmetry.
The gods are cruel and bestow no miracles.
Thus, all miracles.
Are inevitabilities born from the intersection of causality.
3.
A witch is a being who wields mysteries.
Resurrecting the dead is hardly noteworthy.
But his case was different.
The Ideological Observation had unequivocally declared Shin Siu's death throes.
It had also thoroughly confirmed no artifacts or mechanisms for resurrection.
A mystery arisen without reliance on magic.
No matter how much Bianca pondered, she couldn't fathom how he had risen again—or how he could gaze upon her.
"Incredible. You're up? You had something hidden after all?"
Common black pupils for an East Asian man, paired with a golden-gleaming magic eye.
Their heterochromatic gaze met hers.
Those emotionless, inorganic eyes resembled a deep abyss.
Bianca's eyes narrowed.
"You're... who?"
Eyes stripped clean of all emotion.
Different.
This wasn't merely a shift in mindset.
A chill crept up her spine unbidden.
By the time his shredded armor reformed around him, Bianca had already flapped her wings and ascended into the night sky.
Dozens—no, hundreds of ribbons surged toward Bianca, locked in the heavens.
Her accumulated combat experience, her Ideological Observation, an instinct beyond words—all screamed a warning.
Something was dangerous.
The Shin Siu she'd fought until now had always felt like he was somehow scraping by.
Each Nature Magic alone rated generously at around the 18th Hierarchy.
He'd supplemented those individually insufficient Nature Magics with others.
For instance, unstable shadows were channeled through the Loom into ribbons or reinforced with elemental magic to serve as armaments.
Unable to compete head-on in a proper magic battle, he'd adopted the heretical tactic of close combat to balance things.
In short, he'd been an ambiguous, middling foe—hardly worthy of being called a true witch.
But this was different.
Each ribbon's construction was exquisitely precise and solid, incomparable to before.
Fewer in number, yet their sheer power rivaled Ea Sadalmelik at her peak.
An awakening after transcending death's crisis?
A newfound enlightenment in the final moment?
Impossible.
The world wasn't designed to be so kind and forgiving.
Then how to interpret this overwhelming disparity in power, as if he'd become another person entirely?
-Sheek! Sheek! Sheeeek!
The ribbons surged toward Bianca like each strand possessed its own will.
Not merely tracking her, but herding her like a net cast in the air, cornering her to one side.
Yet no matter their number, the Ideological Observation missed nothing.
Icarus's Wings flew faster than the incoming ribbons, shrugging off pursuit with ease—not a single hair out of place.
No need to panic.
She still had mana to spare.
Mach 30.
A realm of extreme speed where blinking sent objects 10 km ahead flashing past behind her.
At a velocity where sharp turns would crush the human body with G-forces, Bianca drew Arkhart's Bow.
Arkhart's Bow could unleash greater firepower than any weapon in Bianca's arsenal.
But it consumed so much mana that even she could fire it comfortably only three times.
In other words, at least two shots remained.
The bow drawn to its limit, the sky bending once more.
The target: Shin Siu below, manipulating his ribbons.
The instant the Night Sky was about to fire again.
-Weeeeeeng!
The ribbons slicing through the air as if on cue drew a circle hundreds of meters in diameter all at once.
Chaining end to end, they formed a massive ring tunnel that narrowed inward.
The dense golden magic formulas inscribed on each ribbon were all for controlling the anti-field.
Layered like coils, the ribbons and the anti-field they emitted dared to block Bianca Bellily's ultimate strike.
"Fire!"
The second shot, unchanged in power.
-Kiiiiiiik!
The black arrow raced forward, carving through space.
As if waiting, the ribbons resonated in unison, and the black arrow hesitated like it was caught in a net.
"What...?"
The arrow—too fast even for Icarus's Wings to evade—now crawled visibly slow.
Bianca could scarcely believe it.
It meant the arrow was being interfered with by the anti-field.
Not some out-of-spec sure-kill, nor the Red Branch's distortion field.
Simply by deploying an unidentified spell on a ludicrously massive scale.
The anti-field straining to block, the arrow pushing to pierce.
With every advance, the surrounding ribbons burned cherry-red, like filaments exposed to high-voltage current.
The arrow, faltering as if to stop, regained speed and smoothly sucked into the ring tunnel.
She realized soon enough.
His goal from the start wasn't to block the attack perfectly.
-Kuwaaaang!
A roar that made her innards throb.
Pure white spray erupted from the sea, soaring hundreds of meters high.
Bianca had seen the entire process clearly.
Her sure-kill strike, guided into the ribbon-made ring tunnel, plunging into the ocean depths instead of its target.
"……."
How many times would she think the same thing?
Unbelievable.
The idea itself was something anyone could come up with.
Guiding a linear attack like a slide.
A tactic often used even in Wizboards to block magic bullets.
But Bianca's attack wasn't some mere magic bullet.
It was a strike that could obliterate a 1 km cube of special alloy outright.
And he'd deflected it simply by combining ribbons and anti-magic?
That precarious stunt, where the slightest calculation error would claim his life?
The act of a madman.
Something no sane person would attempt.
Bianca, unable to contain her shock, searched for Siu.
Even amid the scattering spray and mana noise, her Ideological Observation instantly pinpointed his location.
Shin Siu, tearing through space and swinging the Red Branch right behind her.