Age of Adepts Chapter 223

Chapter 223 A Display of Power
Greem shook his head when he saw Knight Windsor standing at a distance, engulfed in the bright radiance of runic energy. With a single Fire Teleportation, he left the spot.
A hundred meters away, in an area sparse with trees, a group of a hundred witcher-knights under the lead of two spellbreaker knights were hacking away at a group of wolf-like voodoo beasts.
All of a sudden a halo of flames exploded amongst their ranks.
A bright red light flashed before his eyes and as everything in his vision blurred and shook, Greem appeared on the scene.
Once everything in his vision started to stabilize, Greem straightened his body and looked at the witcher-knights around him still seated high on their magic colts. A wicked grin appeared on his face made of flame and magma.
A light-red Ring of Fire blasted outwards from his body, instantly covering an area thirty meters around him. All the trees, bushes, vines, and plants in the area started to wither and burn. Even the ground itself became scorched earth.
Weng. Weng. Weng…
The sound of snapping bowstrings rang out from runic bows as runic arrow after runic arrow, shrouded in concentrated ice energies, froze the Magma Shield into a bright blue shield of ice. Occasionally, three or four runic arrows would slip through and embed themselves in Greem's thick body of flames, leaving a fleeting blue flash in the sea of bright red flames.
Greem roared loudly, waving the Fire Lord’s Scepter in his hand continuously. He summoned the terrifying ten-meter tall Fire Deity before tapping the scepter once more and ferociously bombarding the area around him with violent Magma Fireballs.
The courageous witcher-knights wove about his body, using their ice longswords to leave striking sword cuts on Greem's body and shield every time they passed by. However, the only thing waiting for them was the violent and savage Magma Fireballs and Chain Fireballs.
Greem had realized that those so-called ‘powerful’ and ‘devastating’ spells had no place on a chaotic and dynamic battlefield. There was no time or space to cast such spells.
You would lock onto a worthy enemy and start chanting and preparing a powerful spell such as the Fire Core Explosion. However, the moment you were done preparing, you would awkwardly realize that the enemy had long since ran away, or that another wave of enemies had appeared before you, hiding your target from sight.
Whenever this happened, your only choice would be to waste the powerful spell on some low-level, weak ‘trash’ that wasn't even worth killing. This was intolerable for the adepts! They had to precisely manage every bit of their Spirit consumption at every moment!
However, a mere elementium fireball, while quickly cast and launched, only had an attacking strength of a mere 30 points. It was hard to deal lethal damage to the enemy through their armor of faith and knights' armor with such a weak attack.
After some consideration, the swiftly cast yet sufficiently powerful Magma Fireball become the natural choice for Greem's battlefield slaughter!
The Magma Fireball itself possessed 45 points of fire elementium damage, along with around 15 points of physical damage when the fireball exploded. Moreover, the fireball sent lava splashing in a ten meter radius. With the 30% flame damage increase from his flame mastery, Greem forcefully elevated a simple and crude fire spell to a powerful area-of-effect spell.
If a witcher-knight was hit directly by a Magma Fireball, his mortality rate was a 100%. Meanwhile, those individuals that were engulfed by the lava splash in the ten meter radius also had a mortality rate of 34%. On the other hand, while much stronger than the witcher-knights, the spellbreaker knights did not dare to engage Greem within the sea of flames either.
Greem's Flame Fiend Transformation combined with the Ring of Fire was too overpowering. The witcher-knights did not dare to even enter the area covered by the faint red light, choosing to roam around the outside while retaliating with their runic bows.
Only the two spellbreaker knights, along with four or five fearless witcher-knights, dared to charge to Greem's side and trade blows with him.
The Magma Shield floating around his body was finally unable to endure the combined attacks of the two spellbreaker knights and exploded into several magma pieces. Greem's body had also sustained a dozen slashes from the witcher-knights.
Intense flame waves and terrifying lava surged out from the slashes, instantly igniting a witcher-knight stopping by Greem's side. He held his charred face filled with blisters in his hand as he crouched on his magic colt, screaming as he escaped from the battlefield.
Greem, on the other hand, let out several muffled grunts.
After all, once he had completed the Flame Fiend Transformation, the flame and lava on his body was equivalent to his blood and flesh. Continuous attacks would cause damage to him even with his now boosted Physique.
Greem violently ordered the Fire Deity to self-destruct. Taking advantage of the enemies being stunned by the ensuing flame shockwave, he quickly cast a spell and instantly killed a spellbreaker knight with a powerful Fire Core Explosion. He then re-positioned himself in a blast of fire.
Greem didn't choose the middle of the witcher-knight as the destination of his Fire Teleportation this time. Instead, he appeared in the woods beside a group of three hundred witcher-knights.
The sudden explosion of his flame halo was still as conspicuous as ever. As a result, the moment Greem appeared, he was instantly greeted by a hail of ice arrows and four or five savage energy blades.
The Magma Shield Greem had just concentrated around himself once more instantly started to tremble and fall apart.
Greem grit his teeth and endured this series of attacks as he waved his scepter and summoned another Fire Deity. Then he raised his right hand high above his head and launched a Magma Fireball at the group of witcher-knights.
The knights, however, were clearly prepared. Another wave of ice arrows and energy blades instantly shredded the Fire Deity to pieces, blasting the Magma Fireball in the air and causing it to explode in a cloud of flames as it did so.
Greem let out another muffled grunt. The Scroll of Voodoo in his left hand started to flip rapidly before stopping on a page with a Meteor Shower stored within it. Greem hesitated for a moment, as he was still unwilling to waste this powerful instant-cast spell on this group of witcher-knights. He could only wait for the cooldown of Fire Teleportation before moving away once again.
There wasn't just one or two adepts roaming about like Greem in this chaotic battlefield. Every adept that dared to fight alone had their own unique style of combat, as well as their own unique means of slaughtering enemies.
The ones that drew Greem's attention the most were Acteon, Marionette, and Hyde.
After going just a few days without seeing him, Evil Bugs Acteon's abilities had improved significantly.
There were no longer just ordinary scorpions and flying bugs swarming around him. Thrown into the mix were a group of odd beetles half as tall as a man, with black shells and green wings. The black shells on these beetles were extraordinarily tough. Even the witcher-knights shining runic longswords could not deal any damage to them, only leaving behind a shallow mark on the shells.
The knights needed to hack away at the same spot numerous times before they could pierce through the armor and deal lethal damage. On the other hand, this group of strange beetles only needed to from groups of two to three and they could easily tear apart a witcher-knight.
Even the armor of faith could not stop the beetles' sharp claws from piercing the knights' bodies.
Greem saw with his own eyes the toughness of these beetles. A black beetle was hit by a spellbreaker knight's violent flame blade. It flipped about in the air several times before regaining its balance, with no damage done to its beetle shell. This clearly demonstrated that the outer shell of the black beetles had even more resistance towards elementium and energy damage compared to physical damage.
Carcass beetles!
Who knew that Acteon had actually managed to cultivate a swarm of them.
Even Greem grimaced when he looked upon the three dozen carcass beetles swarming about Acteon. He started to slowly think about how he would win if he battled with Acteon.
On another battlefield one and a half kilometers away, the adept known as Marionette had also drawn Greem's attention.
Marionette's movements were slow and stiff. However, he was still able to remain mobile with his ability of teleporting between trees.
His style of combat was not as violent and unrestrained as Greem's. Instead, there was an indescribable wickedness and ruthlessness to it.
He would hide within the trees, waiting for small numbers of witcher-knights to walk by before gaining control over them with his strange puppet strings. After doing so for some time, he would gather a witcher-knight squad of around twenty or thirty men beside him.
He would then direct this group of puppet knights to attack other witcher-knights. What happened next would be an internal conflict between knights!
Should the witcher-knights ever pull their punches against the friends they knew so well, against their allies betrayed expressions of pain, they would likely die under the swords of their ‘companions’.
However, it was obvious that the success rate of Marionette's puppet strings when controlling witcher-knights was not very high. Moreover, the number of puppets he could control was limited. Thus, the battlefields he was involved in were hardly ever as conspicuous as Greem's, with his Flame Fiend Transformation.
The other person that attracted Greem's attention was the powerful Boss Hyde.
He looked like a robot with metallic tentacles all over his body. Sharp tentacles gleaming with a metallic sheen danced about everywhere around his body. Every witcher-knight that stepped within twenty meters of him would be pierced by numerous sharp tentacles.
These sharp tentacles had been enhanced with Spells of Piercing and were not something the knights' armor could defend against.
They danced in the air, agile and lithe as if they were metallic serpents, launching terrifying piercing attacks from any angle around their enemies. On the other hand, the runic longswords of the witcher-knights, steeped in runic energies, could do absolutely no harm to the tentacles other than sending bright sparks flying everywhere.
When the enemies surrounding him reached a certain number, countless spinning blades would swarm out from within Adept Hyde's body, forming a scary wall of blades around him. And all Adept Hyde needed to do was to quickly walk through the ranks of the knights with the wall of blades around him.
With a single charge he could cut through the entire formation, leaving behind him a bloody path filled with severed limbs.
If he met an enemy he was unable to beat, Adept Hyde would instantly turn into a metallic top, drilling into the ground and escaping into the distance.