Shades of the New World

Chapter 123: Unprecedented

No one wanted to get close to the door willingly.

"Kortan, do you recognize this feeling that those devices give off?" Kal asked.

"I have a guess when I was working with some unknown harmful metals, there was something among them that felt like this. If I'm remembering correctly, it was a lime-yellow ore which caused the cells of people who lived near it to break down. I tried isolating the gases around it to see if they were poisonous, but I couldn't quite find anything substantial so I dropped the idea," Kortan replied. Since Kortan called it an idea and not a project, Kal could be confident that the man wasn't serious about it.

"Hmph," the Puppeteer snorted and one of the threads on her fingers drooped down to the ground. Contrary to what one would expect, the thread did not fall on the ground, instead falling right through it. The Puppeteer pulled slightly and a pale man appeared from under the ground. Under his master's orders, the man walked into the room.

"There's only these metal devices in this room. There's also a door ahead, but it seems blocked from behind. Oh, there's some sort of tablet with some writing on it, with a symbol that depicts a big star and a cluster of smaller ones around it," the woman informed.

"The Religion of Ascendants?" the bronze skinned woman muttered.

"The language isn't something I'm familiar with I'm pretty sure it's not from the Empire" Kal heard the Puppeteer's muttering, but then suddenly all the cells inside his body started screaming danger. 

He hurriedly engulfed the others in his Barrier made with an absurd amount of Mana and braced for impact. A blinding light came from inside the room swiftly engulfing the group. The others hadn't stayed idle and had already stacked their mana barriers inside the one that Kal made. 

Some preferred to hide out the catastrophe through other means, like Devin who jumped into a portal and the Mage King who disappeared into the shadows.

An intense wave of light engulfed the group in an instant. Even if they closed their eyes, the massive light still blinded the super-imposers around. Only Kal and Vin managed to keep their vision intact. 

Then, the shockwave of a million explosions hit Kal's barrier, instantly shattering it and propelling the group towards the metal wall at impossible speeds. Thankfully, there were still seven more barriers inside, but they too, started shattering one by one. Even if they were blinded, the super-imposers worked in perfect unison, each of them reinforcing the mana barriers from inside after their own was shattered. A perfect cycle of seven barriers evaporating and reappearing one after another occurred briefly.

None tried to use their World spells and domains, since they all knew that this explosion had nothing to do with mana. But just because it didn't involve mana, it didn't mean that they were safe from it.

Inside this fireball of doom, Kal could feel everything around the group evaporating into nothingness. The steel walls, the soil behind it and every insect and animal that happened to be in the area of 500 meters vanished forever due to the ungodly heat of the explosion. Even if their barriers protected them from the air particles and shockwaves that assaulted their surroundings, the mana-barriers weren't exactly heat resistant and the air inside it was turning excited and lethally hot in a matter of milliseconds.

Kal's crimson horn shone brightly and a red colored forcefield was trying its best to push the heated air away from the group. But the mage's efforts were doomed to fail, as patches of burnt skin started appearing on the bodies of the mages and their skins and muscles begin to melt. There was nothing that Kal could do about this. Even with the abnormally powerful physique of super-imposers, they still couldn't resist the powers of nature. Everyone looked like they were wondering how to escape from this situation.

But suddenly, everyone could see their surroundings and the mana barriers take on a Pink shade. 

'The domain of the World of Life!' everyone thought. They couldn't understand why the mage from the East would betray them like this! If someone cast a domain here, they wouldn't be able to use other Worlds, and their ability to bend raw mana to their will would become compromised as well.

But to their surprise, this domain did not inhibit their abilities to use raw mana or even the other Worlds, all while healing their bodies at a rapid pace. 

Their melted skins and muscles started regenerating at a rapid pace, but some parts were still melting down due to the heat that pervaded them. Their bodies had turned into a deadly battlefield between life and death. The unimaginable pain of their cells dying and regenerating assaulted their heads, but the super-imposers gritted their teeth and diligently focused on keeping their mana-barriers up.

If the air particles which were furiously flying around outside breached through their barriers, there wouldn't be any bones left from their bodies. They would be ground down by the air particles and start evaporating like the metal and rubble around them. 

After five seconds which seemed to be a millennium to the super-imposers, the heat and power of the explosion was beginning to weaken. But even after the worst was over, the group inside the mana barrier was still surrounded by a red landscape. Their struggles weren't over yet, but there was hope in their situation. 

"10 more seconds!" Kal shouted as he furiously dissipated the heat inside the barrier outside. 

When the heat became more bearable, the group noticed how the earth from above them was collapsing onto them, since everything near the explosion had evaporated into nothingness. 

"Old man!" Kal shouted and the old man from the East, whose facial tissues were visibly regenerating nodded resolutely. The bronze skinned super-imposers strangely lenient domain allowed the old man to cast his spells without issue.

The small old man glared at the falling red rubble on top of him with evident hate and released the mana that was contained in his little body. The Earth above the group suddenly stopped and started to create a clearing in the middle. Kal and the rest sighed in relief and quickly floated up the makeshift tunnel.

A few seconds later, a ball of mana rose from the mess of scorching rubble. Inside the mana barrier, a group of individuals with countless patches of burnt skin could be seen floating. The undine of the group had the worst state. Only Kal and the black woman from the East looked relatively normal. They immediately settled down and started treating their injuries. 

"What the hell kind of attack was that?" Vin asked through some coughs.

"Don't know, but it was almost as powerful as one of my strongest attack, but it happened much too fast," Kal muttered. 

Hearing the leader's words, the Super-imposers nodded subtly. They all had flashy attacks but none of them could create it this fast. Even with a prepared Mana formation, they would need at least a few dozen seconds to charge it with the required energy.

"There's too much of that dangerous substance here and some of them had taken root in your bodies. We need to fix it immediately. Even I can't tell what the effects would be like," Kortan said warningly after warily glancing around. 

"Oh, I can cast my spell here," Irene said suddenly and hurriedly started casting, lest the 'strands of destiny' disappear into nothingness.

Kal left the Prophetess to her devices and glanced at the damage done by the explosion.

A landscape of black and red filled his eyes. The heat of the explosion caused some of the sand to melt underground, with some areas looking like cooled down lava stones. The clearing that the old man had created was spewing lava from underground, which would quickly dry up when it met with air. Thankfully, the explosion happened underground in a desert, or the scope of the damages would be enormous.

Kal could recreate the same scene every day if he wanted to, but obviously he wouldn't. The World was too small for such repeated destruction. He would run out of places to ruin after a few dozen years. And besides Kal's spells were were much more contained and focused, nothing like this explosion which targeted everything around it. 

He looked around and saw the Eastern mage and Kortan healing the others' burnt skin and cleansing them of the poison that was in their bodies. Everyone here was skilled in self-preservation, so they were all back in tip top shape after a few minutes. Devin and the Mage King reappeared as well. Both looked at the destruction around with a pondering gaze. Both seemed unaffected by the previous chaos. Kal didn't bother getting impressed by the old man's methods, as everyone here had their secrets.

If it was a normal super-imposer Dark Mage that hid in their shadows, the light and heat would have broken into their shadows and boiled them inside it. But obviously, the Mage King wasn't someone so weak.

'Fucking shit' Kal sighed and his thoughts drifted again towards the explosion. There wasn't a single thread of mana involved in the process of the explosion, which was baffling to Kal. 

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