Chapter : 203

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The five Black Magicians unleashed everything they had. Dark purple energy blasts erupted from their hands, tearing through the frozen air toward Karna. The woman created a wave of shadow tentacles that surged across the floor. The young magician summoned a spear of concentrated dark magic and hurled it with all his might. The reedy-voiced magician conjured a shield of black flame and charged forward. The dry-laughing magician opened a portal beneath Karna's feet, trying to drop him into a void dimension. The leader himself gathered the largest ball of dark energy he could manage and threw it like a meteor.

Karna did not dodge. He did not move from his spot. He simply drew the string of the Divine Vijaya Bow and released.

A single arrow of pure, radiant light shot from the bowstring. It was beautiful. It was terrifying. It was fast beyond comprehension, moving so quickly that the air itself did not have time to react. The arrow passed through every single one of the Black Magicians' attacks as if they were made of paper. The dark energy blasts were split apart. The shadow tentacles were vaporized. The dark spear was shattered into a thousand pieces. The black flame shield was extinguished like a candle in a hurricane. The void portal collapsed in on itself and vanished.

The light arrow struck the young magician first. He did not even have time to scream. The arrow pierced through his chest, and his entire body erupted in a flash of golden light. In less than a second, he was gone. Not dead. Gone. Reduced to nothing but motes of floating light that drifted gently toward the ceiling.

Karna was already moving. He drew the bowstring again and again, each shot faster than the last. His movements were a blur, a dance of perfect, flawless speed that no eye could follow. Arrow after arrow of brilliant light tore through the chamber. The reedy-voiced magician tried to run, but an arrow caught him in the back, and he dissolved into golden particles before he could take three steps. The dry-laughing magician tried to open another portal to escape, but an arrow struck the portal itself, and the magical doorway shattered like glass, taking the magician with it.

The woman raised a desperate barrier of dark magic, layering shield upon shield upon shield in front of her. Karna fired a single arrow. It passed through all twelve layers of her barrier as if they were morning mist, and she vanished in a burst of light, her cracking-ice voice silenced forever.

The leader, the oldest and most powerful of the group, channeled every ounce of his dark magic into a single, massive attack. A column of black and purple energy roared toward Karna like a dark tsunami, shaking the entire chamber and cracking the stone walls. It was the kind of attack that could level a city block.

Karna nocked three arrows at once. He drew the bowstring back to his cheek. And then he released. The three arrows flew in a tight spiral pattern, rotating around each other like a drill. They met the dark energy column head-on, and for a brief, terrible moment, the two forces clashed. Light and darkness. Radiance and shadow. The chamber shook. The floor cracked. The ceiling groaned.

And then the light won. The three arrows shattered the dark energy column and struck the leader simultaneously. The old magician's eyes went wide. His mouth opened in a silent scream. And then he, too, was consumed by the golden radiance, his body breaking apart into particles of light that floated upward like fireflies in a dark forest.

The chamber fell silent. The purple flames on the altar had been extinguished. The dark magic that had filled the room was completely gone, replaced by a warm, fading golden glow. Karna lowered his bow, the Divine Vijaya Bow dissolving back into the light from which it came. He stood in the center of the ruined chamber, untouched and unharmed, not a single scratch on his golden armor. The entire fight had lasted less than thirty seconds.

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Karna looked around the destroyed chamber one final time. The stone seats were shattered. The altar was cracked down the middle. The walls had deep gouges from the magical explosions. The floor was covered in a fine layer of grey dust from the disintegrated doors and golden particles that were slowly fading away. The air was still cold, but the freezing temperature was already beginning to rise back to normal. Karna's work here was done.

The spirit closed his burning white eyes for a moment. A faint pulse of mana rippled outward from his body, a signal. It was a message sent across dimensions, traveling through the invisible channels that connected him to his master. The message was simple and efficient, just the way Ken Eliot would have wanted it: "Target eliminated. Five hostiles neutralized. Returning to standby."

Karna's form began to fade. His golden armor dimmed, his white cape dissolved into particles of light, and his body became translucent, like a reflection on the surface of a lake. In another few seconds, he would be gone, returning to the space between dimensions where he waited for his master's next call. The chamber would be left as nothing but a ruined, empty hole in the ground, a silent testament to the overwhelming power of Lancelot's forces.

But Karna paused. His fading eyes swept across the rubble one more time, and something caught his attention. A faint, almost imperceptible pulse of dark magic. It was incredibly weak, barely a whisper of energy, the kind of signal that most mages would dismiss as background noise. But Karna was not most mages. He was a legendary spirit whose senses were sharper than any blade.

Under a pile of shattered stone near the far wall, a hand twitched.

The hand was pale and cracked, with long black fingernails and glowing purple veins. It reached out from beneath the debris, grasping weakly at the air. Then, with a tremendous effort that cost every ounce of strength left in his broken body, the leader of the Black Magician cell pushed himself out of the rubble.

He was alive. Barely. His black robes were torn to shreds. His hood had been blown away, revealing a gaunt, hollow face with sunken cheeks and wide, terrified purple eyes. His left arm hung at a wrong angle, clearly broken. Dark blood dripped from a deep cut on his forehead. His breathing was ragged and wet, each breath accompanied by a horrible rattling sound in his chest. He coughed violently, and a spray of black blood spattered across the broken stones.

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