Shepherd Wizard (Novel) - Chapter 128
Chapter 128
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The first time Turan fought a fallen god, what surprised him wasn’t the suddenly amplified magical power.
It was those techniques whose causality was difficult to even guess—creating ice storms by striking the ground with an axe or rapidly sliding across ice surfaces.
That bizarre magic, created by mixing various bloodline symbols, producing far stronger and more unusual results with the same magical power, was the most unpredictable and troublesome element.
The green light that had just appeared before him was surely the same.
Therefore, instead of blocking or deflecting the incoming attack, he chose to evade using high-speed movement with Fire Soul.
Perhaps due to the practice of dying repeatedly in the dueling arena?
Unlike before when his movements had been somewhat excessive, now he could move just enough to avoid attacks.
After sidestepping to gain the advantage, Turan immediately threw a stone he had prepared.
It was granite, the hardest of ordinary rocks, prepared for when he ran out of steel balls.
However, just like before, the stone disintegrated with lightning sparks before reaching Kadram’s body.
‘So it doesn’t just melt metal?’
Unlike earlier when molten metal vapor had risen, this time dust and smoke appeared.
Well, truly powerful lightning could split even rocks, couldn’t it?
If it could block even this, it seemed difficult to penetrate with ordinary physical projectiles.
Turan immediately switched his Holy Relic to the Sun bloodline, creating a massive ring of light behind his back.
The Light of Judgment.
This harmonious blend of fire and light was material yet not material, naturally unaffected by lightning.
A whip of light extended from the ring and lashed out at Kadram.
“Hmm…!”
As expected, instead of confidently standing his ground to receive the attack like before, Kadram groaned softly and stepped back.
As the golden whip passed through where he had been standing, trees were cut down and flames erupted.
“I don’t know by what means you obtained the Mimic’s abilities, but—”
Ignoring whatever his opponent was trying to say, Turan continued his attack, swinging the light whip repeatedly.
If the other side lost their rhythm by needlessly talking, he would gain an advantage from it.
However, Kadram, unlike that Baraha elder, didn’t panic or flounder but immediately closed his mouth and drew a circle with both hands.
Then, as he extended his hand toward the incoming whip—
‘He’s deflecting it?’
The light whip that touched Kadram’s hand neither burned nor cut flesh but seemed to coil around before bouncing back.
It felt completely different from blocking with magic-infused hands—it was as if control of the magic itself had been transferred to the opponent.
As the deflected whip flew fiercely toward his neck, Turan quickly withdrew his magic and extinguished the Light of Judgment.
Then he created a fireball using the burning trees nearby as a medium and fired it.
But this too was caught in the circle drawn by Kadram’s hands before returning toward him.
‘Is he using my power against me?’
Such interference with another’s magic was generally impossible.
To buy time for thinking, Turan increased the distance, prompting Kadram to create and shoot that green light from his hands again, just like before.
Quickly twisting his body, Turan felt blood flowing from around his cheek and clicked his tongue.
‘This is quite troublesome…’
His greatest weapon, steel balls, were melted away, and attacks impervious to lightning were returned by that strange technique.
Yet despite this, the opponent continued to deliver surprisingly fast and threatening attacks.
Compared to the Baraha elder he had met before, this was a superior adversary in every aspect—from combat experience to armament and techniques.
At that moment, a thunderous boom suddenly sounded from the side as cold air rushed in.
Ymir, who had been lingering behind, was approaching with an ice axe firmly gripped.
“Weren’t you going to stay out of this?”
“Seeing how things are going, it looks like this will take too long. I can just use this body here and replace it again anyway.”
Having apparently raised his Warrior power, Ymir’s eyes were bloodshot with red veins.
Inside him, the Warrior and Frost symbols had risen and mixed, but unlike before, they wavered very unstably.
Perhaps because, as he had just mentioned, this was a ‘hastily occupied body’?
When he stomped his foot, the ground became covered in ice, and seeing this, Turan immediately predicted the next attack and launched himself into the air.
Ymir, who had been moving like he was sliding while swinging his axe, opened his eyes wide.
“What? How did you know?”
“He uses thought acceleration. He must have learned it from Meisa.”
“No, that’s not it… it feels like you already knew something.”
With an uneasy expression, Ymir tapped his shoulder with the axe briefly before clicking his tongue and lunging at Turan again.
As Turan soared upward with flight magic to avoid this, Kadram shot a dark blue sphere toward him.
‘That is…’
Like the green light earlier, a magic whose nature was difficult to guess.
At least its speed wasn’t particularly fast, so avoiding it didn’t seem difficult.
However, the moment Turan dodged the dark blue sphere at an appropriate distance, it suddenly exploded with a roar, and electricity enveloped the surroundings.
Naturally, Turan’s body, caught within the range, couldn’t escape.
“Kuk…!”
The familiar sensation of paralysis that numbed his entire body, which he had often felt while dueling with Meisa.
Kadram, seeing that his attack had hit, could be seen smiling from a distance.
Fortunately, even with a paralyzed body, he could still move using flight magic.
Turan instinctively used wind magic to harass Kadram, who was flying toward him.
“Ugh!”
Unlike Meisa, who would have shrugged off such interference, Kadram reacted quite sensitively to the flight disruption.
Though one would expect a godlike being to have practiced magic for thousands of years, achieving transcendent skill.
However, before he could mock the unexpectedly poor flying skills, Ymir leaped from below with explosive leg strength and swung his axe at him.
Though he evaded using Fire Soul again, his opponent immediately created an ice platform in midair and changed trajectory.
“Got you-!”
Having already committed to one evasion, it was difficult to move again in this situation.
Turan instinctively drew his dagger for defense—
‘Ah.’ Perhaps due to the paralysis from the electricity not having fully subsided?
The awkwardly held dagger shattered as the axe embedded itself in his chest.
Using some technique, a brilliant ice flower blossomed over it.
“Kuh…”
Each petal, sharp as a blade, capable of tearing apart the place where it had blossomed, shredded his upper body.
Had Turan not been a powerful high-ranking noble, and had he not possessed various defensive magical devices including the Guardian amulet, he would have been torn to pieces and killed on the spot.
As he frantically kicked his opponent away and retreated, Ymir, who had fallen to the ground, shouted incredulously:
“How can you be so sturdy!?”
“I told you not to kill him!”
Having crashed to the ground, Turan quickly sprayed Death Water in vapor form toward the approaching Ymir, making him inhale it.
An attack that would be troublesome even for a high-ranking noble if they weren’t careful, but Ymir merely froze it with a glance, causing it to fall away.
“That won’t work twice, you acid terrorist bastard.”
While he might have been confident in overwhelming the opponent in a one-on-one situation, facing both simultaneously was beyond his capacity.
For now, he thought, if he could just keep flying and somehow hold out, he might receive help from Meisa or Solif—
“Where are you going!”
At that moment, as Kadram extended his hand toward Turan, the surrounding air began to fluctuate wildly.
Even the area that Turan was controlling for flight magic.
With a tumbling crash, Turan fell halfway to the ground, quickly rising to his feet and taking a deep breath.
“Huff… hah…”
Was it due to excessive bleeding, or had some of his wounds reached his lungs?
Despite not having moved much, he was already breathing heavily.
Kadram approached with leisurely steps and asked:
“Well, do you surrender?”
Turan merely glared at him silently, trying to conserve even the breath needed to answer while recovering.
Beside him, Ymir, who had been twirling his ice axe from side to side, pointed at Turan and said:
“But seriously, what is this guy? His magic skill is at an absurd level. Even Meisa, who was deliberately created, wasn’t this good, was she? Can something like this really appear by chance?”
“Who knows. Even in the place where we lived, there were talents that exceeded limits.”
“I’d like to use him as my next body—”
“Watch your language. People are watching. Use honorifics too.”
“Oops.”
Kadram glared at the frivolous Ymir who was covering his mouth, then turned his attention back to Turan.
“It seems you won’t surrender. I won’t give you much more time. The battle situation isn’t entirely favorable for us.”
Of course, Meisa and Solif were also quite exhausted from facing numerous enemies, but the Arabion mages confronting them had significantly decreased in number.
Naturally, in a many-against-one situation, if the single combatant expends stamina, the numerous side must expend lives.
Capturing Turan here wouldn’t end things; they still needed to capture the others, especially Meisa.
After all, their gathering here in the first place was to capture Meisa.
Just as Kadram raised a disc-shaped green light to finish him off, Ymir beside him suddenly exclaimed:
“What’s this?”
“Time’s up now.”
His tone resembled that of a civil servant at the end of their workday.
Having withdrawn the power of the Warrior bloodline, his bloodshot eyes had returned to normal.
Kadram groaned with an expression of disbelief.
“You…”
“Well, I’m not slacking off, this is just the limit of my ability. Still, I’ve beaten him up quite a bit, so good luck?”
After these mocking words, Ymir’s body crumbled like powder and collapsed.
Above it, a soul rose up.
Apparently, the side effect of using excessive power with a hastily occupied body.
Kadram, who had been blankly watching Ymir’s soul disappear somewhere toward the northwestern tundra region, sighed and turned his head.
“I’m exhausted… why is it that people don’t necessarily grow wiser as they age?”
Despite saying this, he didn’t seem particularly concerned about facing Turan alone.
After all, even by himself, he could easily subdue Turan in his current critically wounded state.
It would just make the process a bit more cumbersome.
But such leisure didn’t last long.
The blood-covered Turan had pointed his hand toward him.
Because he had seen a small vortex hovering above it.
* * *
Fighting in a one-versus-two battle against Ymir and Kadram, two vessels of the gods, Turan judged that overcoming this situation through conventional methods would be difficult.
The forces the Arabion-Nagin faction had invested in this trap were truly extraordinary.
If the three of them had been at the level of Meisa when she had just escaped, they would have been subdued long ago.
He wanted to ask how highly they had evaluated him to commit such forces indefinitely.
But as always, opportunity accompanies crisis.
Even while being desperately pushed back, Turan observed the symbols of the two gods pressing him.
Especially Kadram’s, who possessed the Storm bloodline like Turan.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t steal that green light-emitting technique that Kadram frequently used.
To use that, one needed to mix the symbols of the air-manipulating Windmaster and the water-manipulating Stream bloodline, but he could only use one of them through the Holy Relic.
The symbols didn’t appear in his soul even when the Holy Relic was activated.
But just earlier, Kadram had used two more spells.
A lightning explosion spell and one that controlled the surrounding air, disrupting it.
At that moment, Turan had witnessed the clouds inside Kadram turning pitch black and intertwining with lightning to form a vortex.
That was probably the ultimate usage of the Storm bloodline, which mixed the powers of lightning and wind, necessary for that magic.
It was somewhat different from the four bloodlines that the Arabion family head had shown in the past, but having seen it, it was time to utilize it.
Therefore, even while continuously being pushed back, Turan secretly activated his spiritual perception and tried to manipulate the symbols within himself.
Since he didn’t open his eyes, Kadram didn’t notice this.
Fortunately, having practiced for a long time at the hideout, it didn’t take very long.
After all, what he lacked wasn’t the ability to manipulate symbols but rather the knowledge of how to do so.
Just as Ymir exited, Turan succeeded in recreating the transformation that the opponent had created.
“You, how…”
Instead of answering his opponent’s murmur, Turan gently placed the small vortex that had formed above his hand forward like a feather… The cute vortex, initially only a few finger lengths long, instantly grew to an enormous size as it devoured the air it encountered.
“A cyclone…!”
The astonished Kadram, just like before, utilized the power of the Storm bloodline to create dark blue spheres around him to block it.
With a cracking sound, the vortex ferociously clawed at the barrier, creating beast-like claw marks.
‘Wind with cutting power?’
Naturally, no matter how strong the wind, it was impossible for it to exert physical force in such a manner.
Wasn’t that why he had given up after trying all sorts of efforts to apply wind magic for attacks when he first awakened the Storm bloodline?
In other words, he was now using magic that implemented phenomena that couldn’t normally exist, just as the fallen gods did.
Moreover, this irrational magic was somehow considered a ‘possible event,’ so it didn’t even consume much magical power.
“It’s quite unfair to keep such fun things just among yourselves.”
Muttering softly, Turan concentrated his consciousness on his inner self.
From the moment the two symbols of the Storm bloodline interacted with each other, several invisible handles had appeared in his mind.
The vortex he had just created was the result of pulling one that felt relatively easy to pull among them.
This meant there were still many techniques he had yet to try.