“Do it!” Ester barked, the red crystal on his staff bursting with a blinding light.
The seven mages behind him began chanting almost simultaneously. Low, rapid syllables echoed through the lobby as the tips of their eight staves lit up one after another.
The fireballs arrived first. Three fist-sized, orange-red fireballs flew toward her in a triangular formation, closely followed by two pale green wind blades and a cluster of icicles.
Wu Yao clenched her right hand into a fist. Three palm-sized, golden hexagonal light shields materialized out of thin air in front of her. They pieced themselves together, instantly expanding into a half-man-high curved wall of shields.
The fireballs slammed into it first, their orange-red flames exploding against the golden shield and sending sparks flying everywhere. The wind blades followed immediately after, grinding against the surface of the golden shield with a harsh metallic screech, leaving only two shallow white marks. The icicles shattered against the shield's face, scattering ice crystals all over the floor.
Before she could even counterattack, Ester suddenly pulled something out from the inner pocket of his robe.
His movement was incredibly swift—so fast that Wu Yao only caught a glimpse of a grayish-white powder rising from between his fingers before it burst into a light gray mist in the air.
The powder dispersed in the wind, drifting over soundlessly.
Wu Yao instinctively held her breath, but the moment the powder touched her skin, a cold, sticky sensation seeped in.
She sneezed three times in a row.
The system prompt popped up almost simultaneously.
【Affected by Mana-Suppressing Dust. Gained status effect: Mana Suppression】
【Mana Suppression: Mana circulation disrupted. All spells are temporarily disabled. Time remaining: 29 minutes and 58 seconds.】
Wu Yao looked down at her hand. The orange-red fire elements that had been dancing at her fingertips had already flickered out.
So they had items?
She scratched her chin, not panicked in the slightest.
【Load successful!】
Wu Yao waited patiently for the exact same moment. Just as Ester's fingers slipped into the inner pocket of his robe, she condensed a compressed wall of wind in her palm and pushed it outward the instant Ester threw his hand.
Before the handful of grayish-white powder could disperse, it was swept up by the wind and blown straight back, showering Ester and the mages behind him head-to-toe.
Ester got a face full of his own powder.
He coughed a few times, but there was no panic on his face.
The blue-robed mages who had been caught in the powder simply patted the dust off their robes casually and continued chanting, as if the substance posed no threat to them at all.
Of course, it was their own item to begin with.
Ester didn't even waste time wiping the powder off his face. The moment the powder was blown back, he pulled out another object from inside his robe and slammed it onto the ground.
It was a glass ball the size of a fist, which shattered into countless pieces upon hitting the floor tiles.
The grayish-white liquid sealed inside the sphere rapidly vaporized upon contact with the air, expanding into a thick, impenetrable gray fog that rolled across the floor.
The fog crept over the soles of her boots, and that cold, sticky sensation seeped into her skin once more.
【Gained status effect: Mana Suppression】
【Mana Suppression: Mana circulation disrupted. All spells are temporarily disabled. Time remaining: 29 minutes and 57 seconds.】
They sure had a lot of items.
Wu Yao's interest was piqued. She loaded her save once again.
This time, she deployed a wind element barrier beneath her feet in advance, keeping the ground-crawling gray fog at bay.
Seeing that the fog was ineffective, Ester unhesitatingly drew a slender metal tube from behind his waist, aimed the nozzle at Wu Yao, and pressed the mechanism at the back.
A silver needle as thin as a hair shot out soundlessly, its tip coated with a dark green, eerie glow.
The wind shield blocked the silver needle, but Ester had already switched to his fourth item: a scroll.
He unrolled it in midair. The runes on the scroll burned automatically, turning into a pale golden halo that descended over Wu Yao.
The two red-robed mages behind Ester joined the item battle as well. One threw a Mana-Suppressing smoke bomb, while the other unrolled a runic scroll. In the blink of an eye, the entire lobby was filled with grayish-white mist.
Smoke bombs, silver needles, runic scrolls, magic-sealing stones, mana disruptors... The eight of them were pulling out items as if running a grocery store, and every single one carried the exact same effect.
Mana Suppression, Mana Suppression, Mana Suppression.
After doing this a few more times, Wu Yao finally grew annoyed.
It was as if these mobs didn't dare to fight unless they slapped her with Mana Suppression first. Did they really think a player couldn't fight back?
Load save.
Time rewound once again.
This time, Wu Yao didn't deliberately stall to give them time to react.
The very instant she uttered the word “elf,” Wu Yao moved.
Eight vines burst from the ground simultaneously.
None of the eight mages had time to react. The vines wrapped from their ankles to their calves, from their calves to their thighs, and then crept up their torsos, pinning their hands firmly to their sides and binding their mouths shut.
Ester reacted the fastest. A spark of fire had already condensed at the tip of his staff, but the sudden yank of the vine wrapping around his wrist jerked his arm aside. The small flame flew half a meter above Wu Yao's left shoulder, crashing into the wall and leaving a small charred mark.
His staff was also ripped from his hand by the vines, clattering onto the floor.
In three seconds, the eight mages were bound like eight tightly wrapped packages, collapsing onto the floor in a neat row like a line of helpless bugs.
Wu Yao looked around, dragged a relatively intact chair over from the corner, and placed it in front of Ester.
She sat down, crossed her legs, and rested the sole of her boot on Ester's chest, pinning him flat on his back on the floor.
“Where is your Mage Association?” she asked, resting her head on her hand as she loosened the vines around his mouth.
Ester's face was flushed red from being choked by the vines. With his chest pinned down, his breathing came in labored wheezes.
“The Mage Association is everywhere!” his voice squeezed out from the depths of his throat.
Wu Yao ground the sole of her boot into his chest, complaining lazily, “Can you say something useful?”
Ester's lips moved, as if he were chanting something silently.
A fist-sized, orange-red flame erupted from the tip of his staff on the floor, burning through the vines wrapped around his chest.
The moment his hands were freed, he immediately snatched his staff off the floor.
Ester's arms were now completely enveloped in flames. Pressing his fingers together like a blade, the fire condensed at the edge of his palm into a translucent, orange-red blade, thrusting toward Wu Yao's throat at a tricky angle.
At the same time, his left hand summoned three fireballs, sealing off Wu Yao's path of retreat in a fan shape.
Wu Yao's eyes lit up.
Finally, this was starting to feel like a proper mob fight.
She neither dodged nor avoided them. Wind elements condensed into three small wind shields in front of her, precisely blocking the trajectories of the three fireballs.
The fireballs slammed into the wind shields and flew back along their original paths.
In the next second, a wind blade soundlessly formed behind Ester, slicing toward the back of his neck from an extremely low angle.
Simultaneously, Wu Yao's left index finger twitched slightly. Metal elements condensed in front of Ester into a long, slender golden spike, piercing through the air straight toward his face.
Rate on N.U.
