Age of Adepts

The battle above the dragon’s den was still ongoing.

Magic power, life force, stamina: these prior limitations that held back low-grade fighters were no longer of any concern to Fourth Grade powerhouses.

A Fourth Grade Elven Sword Saint had essentially two avenues of development for their class.

One was to sacrifice all of their magic power, life, stamina, and Spirit to pursue the path of incomparable damage and lethality– the way of the Boundless Sword Emperor. The other was to convert all of one’s power into extreme speed– the path of the Storm Sword Saint.

Agassi was undoubtedly walking upon the latter path!

The offensive power of Agassi’s every individual attack was not very impressive. It barely passed the threshold of a thousand points. However, the terror of Agassi was in his extreme speed and phantasmal Windwalking.

The flash of lightning when he struck with his sword was usually only an afterimage in the eyes of the enemy. In truth, any single attack of his was a combination of dozens or even hundreds of attacks. It didn’t matter how tough the armor or the defensive magic was; everything would silently shatter beneath such insane accumulation of the critical damage.

His movements were as light and agile as a dancer, allowing him to casually advance and retreat in the face of ferocious attacks and exterminating an enemy with a flick of his finger.

No amount of exquisite poetry could describe the strength of a Fourth Grade Storm Sword Saint. That said, he possessed no way to execute this clumsy and slow fake Fourth Grade caster!

This evil witch composed of black smoke was like an undying cockroach. Not only were her evil spells complicated to deal with, but even that black smoke body of hers also seemed impervious to any attacks.

The energy-state shadow body had no lethal spots or weakness like typical living creatures!

Dark Witch Uzzah took advantage of her vastly superior offensive magic power and demonstrated to this speedy Sword Saint the overwhelming might of a caster.

With the constant injection of magical energy from below her, Uzzah didn’t need to be concerned about her magical power being exhausted. As such, she frequently fired ultra-large-radius dark magic in hopes of stalling the enemy’s movements.

Storm Sword Saint Agassi’s movements were swift as the wind, allowing him to weave between gaps as thin as paper freely. Yet, when faced with such a tide of assaulting darkness that spread out in every direction, he had no choice but to retreat reluctantly.

It was the chance for Uzzah to frantically repair her body or replenish her defensive spells whenever the Sword Saint was forced away. At any rate, Uzzah had plenty of magical energy to spare. As they say, the son feels no heartache selling his father’s fields, and Uzzah was using magic as often as she could.

Her unrestrained and wild attacks had rained down disaster on the Fantasy Forest around the dragon’s den!

Tides of shadow substance converted the green and leafy forest into a region of phantoms and ghosts. Even though it was a sunny afternoon, all light within three kilometers of the den had vanished. Everything was cloaked in a gray mist.

The sky was gray, the land was gray, everything was gray.

If one were to look into the distance in this odd and terrifying gray mist, they would find that the shape of the world still existed. The only difference was that all solid objects had turned from their original vibrant color into uneven patches of gray. It was almost as if a powerful god had suddenly taken away tone from this world, leaving only the most fundamental…gray!

Ordinary individuals might not understand what this scenery meant.

However, Agassi knew!

The dark witch that was recklessly unleashing evil power onto the land had used her own body as a medium to open a rift that led to the Shadow Plane. The three kilometers of strange meteorological phenomenon around her was an odd occurrence caused by the power of the Shadow Plane being projected onto Faen.

The Shadow Plane was a particular plane formed entirely out of shadow substance, and a place that had connections to almost every single material plane.

As a completely open large-sized plane, the Shadow Plane had never rejected visits from outsiders. It wasn’t like ordinary material planes and did not have impenetrable planar barriers that rejected the visiting and connection of all non-natives. It didn’t use such a method to protect its own planar consciousness.

The Shadow World was like a free territory that connected all planes. Any individual that mastered the powers of the shadows could rely on the Shadow Plane to freely travel between two different planes. Of course, the prerequisite to that was that the two planes would not block the individuals from entering.

The Shadow World was extremely generous to manipulators of shadow. As such, the plane itself became a massive weapon in the hands of such practitioners. They only needed to open up a rift that led straight to the Shadow Plane during battle, and they would be able to continually use the power projected by the Shadow World to corrupt the surrounding planar space.

The corrupted planar space would be rapidly assimilated into bland space that consisted only of shadow energy.

This way, the enemy would have no choice but to fight within the shadow home field!

In the end, Uzzah herself was only a Third Grade Dark Witch. She also only had Third Grade magical equipment in her possession– the Orb of Darkness. The limit of the shadow space that she could erect was no more than three kilometers. She couldn’t expand her zone of darkness beyond this.

Still, this was more than enough already!

The Storm Sword Saint Agassi would have to enter this dark and lightless shadow space if he wanted to attack Uzzah’s shadow body. Uzzah could rely on her affinity with shadow energy to correctly grasp Agassi’s real-time physical location.

That way she would be able to use ultra-long-range energy attacks to force the enemy to move around and dodge, even when he wasn’t within her range of vision. Uzzah was like a horrifying poison spider hiding under layers of spider webs. She quietly and patiently waited for the enemy to fall into her webs.

Uzzah had never felt as relaxed and free as at this moment!

It was an overbearing might that only Fourth Grade elites could manipulate and control. It was also a feeling of extreme strength that only Fourth Grade powerhouses could experience. Yet, as a Third Grade Dark Witch, she had managed to experience this feeling in a different world with the help of a crude energy funneling system.

Such a rare experience and feeling had completely intoxicated Uzzah. She wanted nothing more than to make this power truly hers.

She was like a madman, utterly lost in that extreme experience of wielding ultimate destructive power and savagely attacking that damned gnat leaping about within her shadow space. She fantasized about using her shockingly powerful shadow energy blasts to wipe the enemy out of existence entirely.

Sadly, her control over this extreme power beyond her abilities was not that familiar or natural. The way she was using the force was so unbearably clumsy that proper Fourth Grades wouldn’t be able to stand seeing her fight. If it weren’t for the power injected into her being so suffocatingly immense, she would have had trouble dealing with Agassi’s violent and rapid strikes, even with the support of a tower system.

After multiple tries, Agassi realized that he could not execute this fake Fourth Grade witch. He turned his attention to the flying ship below.

Several sharp strikes continued to land upon the thick metal shell of the ship, leaving behind horrifying blade marks.

Uzzah’s defenses could not protect such a massive ship after all. She had to quicken the rate of her attacks, trying to force Agassi to dodge and reduce his attack speed by responding with aggression.

The shell of the ship was several meters thick and was empowered by an energy forcefield. That might make it an impenetrable wall for most people, but it was nothing to a Fourth Grade Sword Saint.

If it weren’t for Uzzah’s interruption, Agassi would have only needed three consecutive strikes to break the ship!

After an hour of fighting, the battlefield slowly shifted from the vast space outside to the narrow and winding metal corridors within the ship.

Here, Agassi started to make full use of his phantasmal movements and speed, initiating a deathly battle against the pursuing Uzzah within this narrow space.

Every single time, Uzzah’s body of shadows would be sliced and diced into tens of thousands of strands of thin shadow energy. A terrifying energy storm would then erupt that was so powerful it could kill an ordinary Fourth Grade.

Agassi was forced out of the flying ship to avoid these energy storms.

By the time he changed locations and broke into the ship from another angle, Uzzah would arrive hastily with a new shadow body for another round of blows.

This tactic was reasonably effective!

Extending the battlefield to the enemy’s core area was causing a lot of trouble for them. The awkwardly fleeing Agassi wasn’t the one to suffer the most with every energy storm– it was the crumbling ship.

After all, it wasn’t the metal beast that Third Grade Brain Monster Gazlowe was personally controlling; it couldn’t transform or repair itself at will. Instead, it was an inferior metal fortress that was being supported by the modified energy circulation system and Greem’s Chip. The damage to the energy system within the flying ship increased with each energy storm that exploded.

The most direct consequence of this was the significant loss of energy that was supposed to be supplied to Uzzah, as well as the reduction of magical power that Uzzah could control!

Once the energy system inside the ship had suffered over thirty-seven percent damage, the power controlled by Uzzah started to plummet uncontrollably.

The power balance that they had barely maintained was slowly slipping towards imbalance!

Uzzah, Greem, and every adept involved in this operation were helpless in seeing this inevitability.

After all, the fact that a group of mere Second and Third Grades could even manage to stall a Fourth Grade Elven Sword Saint for so long was already a miracle. Moreover, it wasn’t as if the Fourth Grade Sword Saint had been completely unharmed throughout this one and a half hours of fighting.

The shadow energy everywhere around him was continually assaulting his body.

Agassi might have relied on his exceptional magic resistance and robust Physique to endure this corrosion, but the shadow powers had left evident marks upon his body.