Chapter 299: The Red Anomaly
With enormous fists, infused gauntlets, and mana-forged weapons, they slammed against the transport pods, attempting to crack them open and free the trapped students before more could get sucked into the reddish circle.
At first, one pod cracked.
Then another.
"Fast, get out!" The berserkers yelled while pulling students out.
Cheers rose briefly until the sky retaliated.
A bolt of powerful lightning surged down like the wrath of a god.
It pierced the chest of one of the Berserker warriors before he could pull more students out of the pod.
The man didn’t scream... he simply looked down to spot a giant hole in his chest.
His body jerked once as his eyes widened in disbelief, before falling backward.
He was dead before hitting the ground.
Screams echoed as purple lights descended.
The pods that had been opened and freed seconds earlier... glowed.
Strings of violet light circled the freed students, and before anyone could react, they were yanked into the air.
"NO!!" shouted one of the instructors. "It’s taking even the rescued ones! What sort of magic is this?!"
A voice behind him cursed. "This isn’t just any magic... This is a premeditated ritual."
Mana Defense Officers were panicking.
Warriors tried to cut through the pods with lower leveled strikes so as to avoid harming the students within.
Some managed to land a few slashes, only for their sword skills to dull out halfway as mana drained mid-swing by the air itself.
Instructors were being overwhelmed. Mages couldn’t properly cast spells. Warriors couldn’t cleave. The enemy wasn’t a person... it was the very sky itself.
Suddenly—
"Out of the way!"
The voice rang out with clarity and command. Even amidst the chaos, everyone turned instinctively.
Victor Revenant had arrived.
He wasn’t in a pod like the other students—neither was Elyra Vorn, who stood just a step behind him.
The two had been late to the get to the transport hub due to Victor’s last minute detour and somehow this was their saving grace.
The moment Victor saw what was happening, his jaw clenched.
Pod after pod rose. Some students were pounding on the insides of their prisons and even trying to activate their system skills while screaming with tear-stricken faces.
Some were already unconscious, floating helplessly. Others were moments from rescue, only to be snatched into the sky once again.
"We can’t get close," one of the mages warned him while grabbing his arm. "There’s lightning! Mana backlash! And the circle is draining everything!"
’I possess something, it can’t drain,’ Victor’s eyes narrowed.
Elyra placed a hand on his shoulder. "Don’t do something reckless."
"I’m not."
He turned his head toward her with a half-smirk. "I’m doing something stupid."
He gripped the hilt of his Legacy Sword, strapped to his back.
Electrical arcs swarm around his hand, the moment he touched the hilt.
One of the instructors reached out. "Victor, stop! You can’t do this! This isn’t something someone of your calibre can—"
Before he could complete his sentence, Victor had already charged forward.
With a sharp exhale, Victor leapt off the platform and soared toward the battlefield, traveling over a hundred feet across the terrain in nearly an instant.
Dust kicked up as he landed with a thud and charged forward once more.
His uniform flared with the wind, and his shadow seemed to split momentarily, leaving faint afterimages in his trail.
The battlefield reacted instantly.
Another red lightning bolt descended from the heavens.
Victor tilted his body while exhaling sharply as his Wind Dash activated.
His figure turned into a blur as he vanished from the trajectory, reappearing on the far side of the field like a bolt of wind.
"Did he just—?" one of the younger officers gasped.
"Yeah..." the instructor beside him muttered. "He just dodged red lightning."
"Is he unaffected by the mana absorption? No, that can’t be possible..."
They stared into the distance in disbelief as Victor reached one of the rising pods and immediately unsheathed his sword.
He narrowed his eyes. "Let’s do this."
He twisted his body while swinging his sword diagonally.
CLANG!
The first strike bounced off, barely making a dent.
But Victor wasn’t done. He inhaled deeply, and then—
Fwooooom!
A serpentine shaped flame shot out from his mouth and wrapped around his legacy sword.
In the next instant, he swung once more at the rising pod.
The blade coated in flames, slammed into it causing a loud sound of collision to ring out.
Crack!
The shell finally splintered, causing students to fall out in mid air.
However, just as the pod cracked and the students inside began to fall—
Purple threads reached from the sky, aiming for the students.
Victor’s dimmed glowed as he leapt off the broken pod and grabbed onto the closest student while using the momentum to continously veer through the air before slamming into four others.
The moment he made contact with all five of them, he activated Shadow Blink...
Fwwwhii~
All six of them, including Victor vanished mid air and reappeared on the ground just before the threads touched any of them.
The crowd exploded.
"He saved five!!" someone shouted.
"Who is that kid?!"
"Victor Revenant..."
But it was far from over.
More pods were still rising.
In another position, Instructor Rukia summoned a massive serpentine looking beast that swallowed up three pods in a go and then slithered away to safety.
The moment that happened, a reddish and powerful lightning bolt descended upon her precise location.
She instantly summoned a second beast that appeared above her and tanked lightning. The beast scales cracked from the blast of the bolt and got badly injured but fortunately, Instructor Rukia was safe.
She coughed out a mouthful of blood from the backlash and fell on one knee. A mana defense officer by the side swiftly handed her a healing solution which she downed in one go.
Victor pushed the five he had just rescuded towards instructor Rukia in the distance.
She had gotten back to her feet and already summoned a third beast that rescued a few more students.
But this was as much as she could do for now even though she had up to six creatures under her belt. She couldn’t summon more than three due to their mana getting sapped by the red circle.
"You shouldn’t be here!" She yelled while commanding her third summoned beast to carry all five students that Victor had just rescued on its back.
She gestured for Victor to also join them so he could leave this area with the five but he shook his head.
"I can’t stand around and do nothing," Victor yelled before turning around to dash towards another.
She wanted to stop him but he was already gone and seeing as more purple threads were beginning to descended, she commanded her summoned beast to get the extra five to safety.
The ground shook as the red runic circle above K-22 blazed brighter, buzzing with an eerie resonance that pressed against every student’s chest like a mountain of iron.
The air vibrated with a hot and suffocating feeling, pulling at the very marrow of their bones as if reality itself demanded obedience to the sigil’s call.
Apparently, it became more intense when a few more students were successfully rescued from a couple of floating pods.