Millennium Witch

Book 3: Chapter 234: Manifestation

In the cold, clammy rain-mist, Flami Frost’s remains ignited, burning away into drifting ash. This was the Eldritch God brand the Witch Cult stamped onto high-ranking members; under certain conditions it would trigger to prevent leaks of critical information. Clearly, death was one of those triggers.Lucia stood there, hollowed out, as if a piece of her heart had suddenly gone missing. The blazing anger from moments ago seemed to dissipate with Flami’s death. Rain streamed down her forehead, turning her vision into a blur. She dropped her sword, lifted a hand to wipe the rain welling at her lashes, but the more she wiped, the more it came.

Then she felt it—the raindrops falling from above suddenly vanished.

She shivered and turned. The girl with silver hair and red eyes, disguise shed, stood behind her, holding up an umbrella.

She couldn’t hold it in any longer. She threw herself into Yvette Loxivia’s arms and burst into tears.

The silver-haired girl reached out, gently stroking her back.

Out of Lucia’s sight, a single silver strand of hair trailed along the ground, linking to the pink-haired girl’s corpse not far away, as if checking something.

Beast Spirit College sat on the edge of District Four. The whole school connected to the city only through the North Gate, from which stretched a broad “Magibeast Boulevard” wide enough for six carriages abreast. Rows of terraced houses lined both sides. The ground floors were almost all street-facing shops now gone dark, while the upper floors, packed with windows, were mostly student rentals—most of them deep in sleep at this hour.

Though thunder boomed and lightning flashed, the commotion within Beast Spirit College was so pronounced it shook the barrier itself. Before long, many woke from their dreams, blearily pushed open their windows, and looked toward the college.

What they saw made them blanch: the sky over the main gate of the college was spiderwebbed with cracks, like glass struck by a massive force, flickering with overburdened magical light.

Another deafening crash—and the barrier shattered. Lightning branched like trees across the night sky. The stark white glare lit the ground…and illuminated a colossal shadow.

It was a bipedal monster like a wingless, standing dragon, planted before a host of rampaging magibeasts. Armor-like metal plated its body, and in the rain its mana streamed as searing light. Each step it took made the paved street quake and crack inch by inch. Few had ever seen it with their own eyes, yet everyone recognized it at once—the Terrorclaw Beast King, Daedalus!

Why, at this dead of night, was it not penned within the Storm Gorge enclosure, but appearing with the beast horde—and why was it smashing the college’s barrier?

What in the world had happened inside the college?

Questions surged, but panic spread faster. Anyone could tell this bloodthirsty, roaring behemoth, and the flood of beasts surging beneath it, were not a staged exercise by Beast Spirit College but a bona fide emergency.

The beast horde had gone berserk!

Lamps flared to life one after another, and shrill screams pierced the air. No one wanted to stand in the way of that onrushing force. All they could do was run—even the Beast Spirit College students, the ones who knew Contract Beasts best, were no exception.

Some, too late to flee, could only hide upstairs, bolt their doors tight, and pray no magibeast would come up.

At the edge of the district, a bedraggled figure flashed like lightning into a nearby building, blood at the corner of his mouth, face bone-white.

It was the duty director on call that night, Korf Hunter. He had tried to slow Daedalus’s advance, but a tail strike so fast it was a blur sent him flying. Now he was terribly weakened, inwardly injured, and could only wait for backup.

He was certain that even through the heavy cloud, the Sky Realm must have noticed something was wrong. As long as Dean Tertia took the field, everything would be all right. But from the first sign of anomaly to actually notifying Dean Tertia would take time—even a sliver of time was enough for Daedalus and the horde to wreak enormous devastation on the city.

Watching the beast batter the district beneath the downpour, his heart quailed. Daedalus alone could raze this whole block—an ordinary Archmage couldn’t stop it. And now, with masses of magibeasts pouring in, the glare of jagged lightning made the world look like the end times.

But then, he saw two strange figures appear on the rooftops of the terraced houses to either side of the street.

The two figures dropped from the sky, abruptly blocking the horde’s advance. Against the backdrop of people fleeing through the rain-dark night, the sight felt all the more unreal.

Looking closer, he realized they were the bronze statues, common on street corners and in residential blocks—one of the Legendary Mage, the other of the Silver Witch!

One was tall and slender, with gentle brows, a cube-like crystal cupped in her hand. The other, a girl, had only the roughest suggestion of facial features—yet both felt vividly alive as they landed in the middle of the wide Magibeast Boulevard, sealing off the horde’s path forward!

Next, he saw the two statues raise their hands in unison, as if bridging five hundred years to stand shoulder to shoulder once more.

With that synchronized motion, a vast number of intricate, arcane azure runic rings welled into being, in an instant filling the air over the entire boulevard!

The rain-mist saturating the air froze, turning into a storm of icy dust that blew across the horde.

It was a magic unseen in this world—more like a forbidden curse than a forbidden curse, more like magic than magic itself. On such a scale, apprentice-level, low-tier, and mid-tier magibeasts alike were swiftly frozen in the dense, frigid haze; no matter how they thrashed, they couldn’t break free!

“Good heavens—” Korf trembled, sensing a chance at survival. He’d never studied water- or ice-type magic, but even he could tell this wasn’t anything any known discipline of those elements could do.

The content of those runic rings was too complex, too deep—interlinking, cross-stacking, responding to each other.

Unheard of!

Was this really magic?

Or—were the gods answering the prayers of their believers?

He watched with tears in his eyes and whispered devoutly, “O God of Truth and Magic, O God of Serendipity—”

The cold haze spreading through the city froze most of the horde, but it couldn’t slow Daedalus—and a small number of high-tier magibeasts—down.

Noticing the two statues that had blanketed it in frost, Daedalus broke into a charge along the open street. Its heavy footfalls crushed many of the lesser magibeasts, now statues of ice. Every step stamped a deep crater into the ground.

Light gathered in its maw—runic gleams. It was about to unleash some annihilating energy.

Seeing this, the survivors in the terraced buildings on both sides, on every floor, all held their breath at once.

Those with experience, like Korf, could recognize it: one of the joint fruits of the Alchemy College and Beast Spirit College’s Daedalus Project—a fire-type magic called “Hellfire Wave,” whose power even surpassed a dragon’s breath. Even an Archmage of Korf’s standing within the college wouldn’t dare to take it head-on.

Only someone of the Saint Realm could face that attack!

And in the face of such devastation, the two statues lifted their hands. Subtle runic rings flickered and vanished.

Then, to everyone’s astonishment, the “Hellfire Wave” blasting from Daedalus’s jaws—bent!

At the instant the dark-red pillar was about to engulf the statues, it traced a graceful arc, turned back, and slammed into Daedalus’s head, blasting the overbearing Beast King into a tumbling roll across the ground. It let out pained, furious—yet bewildered—howls.

What just happened?

All were stunned into confusion, until someone shouted, “Spell Hijacking!”—and the realization hit them like a drumbeat.

Yes—this had to be Spell Hijacking, the famed signature art of the Legendary Mage, passed down from the Silver Witch and recorded only in secret archives!

Even the First Demon King had once suffered badly under this move.

But with the fall of the Legendary Mage, the technique had long since faded into history’s dust. Many later scholars, on seeing the records, often suspected the method wasn’t real at all—that awestruck admirers of the Fifth True God five centuries ago had simply dreamed up an unbelievable, almost laughably fake legend.

Yet now, the legend had returned.

The long-lost Spell Hijacking had appeared before his very eyes!

The gods had truly manifested!

Soon, with the two gods’ bronze statues standing shoulder to shoulder, the chaos the horde had brought was held in check; it couldn’t push into the city at all.

At the same time—about five minutes after the Truth Barrier shattered—within the Sky Realm, Dean Tertia, who had been at rest, appeared in midair and looked down at the scene below.

She froze for a heartbeat at the sight of those profound runic rings, then hurriedly dove, alighting upon the grounds.