Affinity: Chaos

Chapter 2156: Trapped With Me

Grey took in a deep breath and then released a long, controlled exhale. His light element was already working hard beneath his skin, steadily burning away the restrictive effects of the array formation that tried to lock down his essence circulation. He cracked his neck once from side to side, eyes cold and focused as he studied the still-shrinking golden barrier that surrounded the three of them.

The two Necromancers felt a brief, inexplicable chill when they met that gaze.

’He’s already injured. How can he still give off this kind of pressure?’

The array master frowned internally as he sensed the subtle but clear change in Grey’s aura. The barrier had already contracted to roughly three hundred square meters, barely half the size it had been when it first formed. The available space was growing tighter by the second, and every meter lost made the fight more dangerous for all of them.

Neither Necromancer wasted any more time. The array master immediately used the golden walls themselves as weapons, sending sharp spears and cutting blades of condensed array light toward Grey from multiple angles at once. At the same time the second Necromancer formed a large flock of pure-darkness ravens that screeched soundlessly and dove at Grey in a dense black cloud, their wings trailing corrosive energy.

A faint silver glow suddenly flashed across Grey’s skin. The golden spears and the darkness ravens passed straight through his body as if he were nothing more than mist. The second Necromancer’s eyes widened in shock, he was just about to shout a warning, when Grey’s figure simply faded from sight.

”An afterimage! He’s there!” the array master barked, pointing sharply toward one edge of the barrier.

Grey stood at the indicated edge, breathing still slightly haggard, blue flames and faint lightning flickering around his body. The faint silver glow continued to pulse weakly.

”Don’t give him the chance to recover!” the array master shouted and immediately launched another dense wave of golden attacks, spears and blades forming from every direction.

Grey was forced to move again at once. He slipped between the incoming spears and blades with short, precise bursts of speed, never taking a single strike head-on. His body tilted, twisted, and shifted at the last possible instant each time. The two Necromancers pressed him relentlessly, their attacks overlapping so tightly that he had almost no room to breathe, let alone launch a proper counter.

Frustration flickered through Grey’s chest for a moment, but he refused to let it control him. He focused entirely on evasion, reading the rhythm of their combined assault and staying half a step ahead of every lethal strike. Every time a golden thread or darkness tendril came close to wrapping around a limb, he twisted away at the final moment, letting the attacks cut only empty air.

The array master managed to trap both of Grey’s legs for a brief moment with a sudden burst of golden tendrils that shot up from the floor of the formation like living chains. Grey’s eyes narrowed. Water elemental energy surged around his feet in a cold wave and instantly froze the tendrils into brittle, crystal-clear ice. He shattered them with a sharp, powerful kick of his legs, the ice exploding into glittering fragments, and used the momentum to slip past a heavy darkness slash from the second Necromancer that would have taken his arm.

The barrier continued to shrink steadily under the array master’s control. By now the three figures inside were moving so fast that from outside the golden walls they appeared only as blurred streaks of light, darkness, and flame colliding again and again in a continuous, violent dance. The sound of their clashes was muffled by the formation but still carried a deep, continuous rumble.

As the available space dropped to around a hundred and fifty square meters, the two Necromancers began to notice something that first frustrated them and then slowly turned into genuine unease.

Grey was getting faster.

When they had first trapped him, they could still occasionally force him to block or take glancing hits. After only a few minutes of continuous high-speed combat inside the suppressing array, those moments had almost completely disappeared. His movements were growing sharper, more fluid, and noticeably quicker despite the injuries he carried and the constant pressure of the formation.

”Don’t shrink the barrier any further!” the second Necromancer called out urgently when he realized what was happening. His voice carried a trace of real alarm. He was certain the continuously decreasing space was somehow feeding Grey’s acceleration, giving him less room to dodge but somehow making him even harder to catch.

The array master hesitated for only a fraction of a second, then stopped the contraction. The golden walls stabilized at their current size with a low hum. Even so, the damage had already been done. Grey’s speed had clearly risen another full notch, and the silver glow on his skin was getting brighter as well.

Grey’s breathing had steadied. The restrictive pressure of the array no longer seemed to hinder him as severely as before. Blue flames burned with renewed intensity around his fists, no longer flickering. Lightning crackled along his arms in tight, controlled arcs that left faint afterimages in the air. A thin layer of frost from residual water elemental energy still clung to his boots, melting slowly in the heat of his own flames.

He stopped pure evasion for the first time since being sealed inside the formation.

The two Necromancers felt the shift instantly. The cold, oppressive pressure radiating from Grey had returned, stronger and more focused than it had been even before he was injured. The air inside the golden cage seemed to grow heavier.

Grey’s voice was calm, almost quiet, yet it sounded clearly inside the sealed space, cutting through the residual hum of the array.

”You thought I was trapped in here with you?”

He raised his head fully, eyes sharp, cold, and completely unbroken.

”No. It’s you two who are trapped with me.”