Neither Lu Mao nor Novia moved. In a situation like this, the opponent might not have actually discovered them; he could just be reacting to a slight rustle, trying to bluff them out.
But Maurice didn't give them the chance to keep gambling.
Adjusting his glasses, he lightly tapped a finger toward the corner of the corridor. A grayish-white bone spear instantly materialized and whistled through the air, plunging deep into the shadows.
Novia dodged to the side. The bone spear grazed her shoulder armor and embedded itself into the stone wall behind her, spiderweb-like cracks instantly spreading across the surface.
“Let's go.”
Without another moment's hesitation, Novia wrapped her right fist in the faint phantom of dark gold dragon scales and punched right through the wall behind them.
Amidst flying debris, she grabbed Lu Mao and leapt backward through the breach, landing on the open ground in front of the manor.
Before they could even steady themselves, several dark figures slid silently out from the shadows of the surrounding trees—five individuals clad in black robes and masks, surrounding them completely.
Their attire was identical to the cultists who had hunted Lu Mao in the forest outside Rhode City.
Novia pushed Lu Mao behind her as her arms underwent dragonification, her dark gold dragon claws reflecting the bright light.
The five cultists lunged forward simultaneously, dense clusters of tentacles erupting from beneath their black robes, reaching for her limbs and throat from every angle.
With a single stamp of her foot, the ground collapsed inward. The five cultists lost their balance, and even the speed of their attacking tentacles slowed. For an experienced adventurer like Novia, this split-second delay was more than enough.
Her dragon tail swept out, sending the two directly in front of her flying along with their tentacles. Spinning around, her claw slammed the third cultist deep into the dirt.
The remaining two tried to ambush her from the flanks, but she forced them back with a blast of dragon breath. Their tentacles shattered under the extreme cold, crumbling into a pile of ice crystals.
Maurice stepped slowly out of the breach in the manor, standing on the steps to watch the scene. His eyes narrowed above his mask. As he scrutinized Novia's fully dragonified arms and swaying dragon tail, a fanatical gleam slowly filled his gaze.
“Such formidable combat power... Your arrival must be a blessing from my Lord.
“Splendid, truly splendid! If I can capture you and modify you, combining your dragon body with my necromantic alchemy creations, I will surely break through all current limits—and create a perfect masterpiece that can truly rival a Demon King!”
While he was still muttering excitedly to himself, an arrow burning with black flames pierced precisely between his brows.
The dark flames clung to the edges of the wound, burning a fist-sized hole right through the center of his face.
Lu Mao stood behind Novia, holding his drawing posture with the bowstring still vibrating slightly. He had fully charged this shot, timing it perfectly for the exact moment Maurice threw his head back to laugh. Theoretically, there was no way to dodge it.
Maurice's body swayed slightly, but he did not fall.
There was no gushing blood or dramatic collapse. After taking an arrow to the head, Maurice stood there completely motionless, as if nothing had happened at all.
As the arrow burned away, the fist-sized hole revealed no flesh or bone—only a mass of writhing, grayish-white mist.
Under Lu Mao's watchful gaze, the hole slowly closed from the edges. The mist reconsolidated into skin and bone, and within a few breaths, his face was completely restored, without even a single eyebrow hair missing.
Lu Mao's pupils contracted sharply.
With the empowerment of the Black Dragon Bow, he believed the power of this shot easily rivaled the limit of a genuine Silver Rank ranger. If it had been an ordinary mage or alchemist, there would have been absolutely no chance of survival.
But clearly, his opponent was far from ordinary.
Among the monsters he had encountered, there was no shortage of those at the Overlord-tier or higher, but none of them could still stand and talk after having their heads pierced.
Maurice was not only standing, but he was also laughing. His mask had been half-burned away, revealing the upward curl of his lips beneath.
“Surprised?”
Maurice rubbed his forehead with his fingertip, where the skin was already as smooth as before, without even a scar left. “Although necromancers can command many summoned creatures, their own bodies are far too fragile. Any close-combat class getting near them can easily take their lives. This is the greatest weakness of Necromancy, and it is precisely why you aimed for my head just now—
“You thought my weakness was the same as an ordinary mage's, but you made one mistake.”
He raised his right hand and grasped the empty air. A staff wrapped in grayish-white bones materialized from the void into his palm.
Embedded at the top of the staff was a fist-sized, dark green soul crystal. Within the crystal, countless distorted faces surged and screamed silently.
He slammed the staff onto the ground, and a ripple of eerie green light spread from its base. The ground beneath the entire manor began to tremble.
The scent of disinfectant and blood in the air was swallowed by a deeper, more ancient aura.
“I am a necromantic alchemist. By merging necromantic spells with alchemy, my strongest summoned creation is myself.”
Maurice began to babble on, like someone who had kept a secret for far too long and had finally found the perfect audience to confide in:
“This body is an alchemical creation modified countless times. As long as my core is not destroyed, no physical damage can truly kill me.
“You thought you pierced my head, but you only poked a hole in the surface. To think the likes of you could defeat an almost immortal necromantic alchemist is nothing but a dream.”
He raised his staff, and the soul crystal at its tip erupted with a blinding green light.
A string of tongue-twisting, ancient incantations spilled from his mouth. Every syllable seemed to carry weight, causing the pebbles on the ground to dance.
An eerie green glow spread from deep within the manor's foundation, climbing up the walls, the iron fences, and even the bars of the iron cages, enveloping the entire estate and the surrounding clearing in a translucent, sickly green barrier.
Dense skeletal patterns emerged at the edges of the barrier, resembling a cage woven from countless ribs and spines, locking everyone inside.
The ground split open. The soil around the manor was overturned from within, and pale, twisted hands reached out from the earth, followed by heads, torsos, and limbs—these were the modified constructs crawling out of the ground.
They had once been demi-humans, perhaps even humans, but they had now been twisted by necromantic alchemy into some deformed existence hovering between the living and the dead.
The skin of these "creatures" was a sickly grayish-white, their joints bent at unnatural angles. Their eye sockets held no eyeballs, replaced instead by two flickers of eerie green phosphorus fire. A heavy malice, thick enough to almost materialize, swirled around them, and with every step they crawled, the surrounding vegetation withered.
“These are all my masterpieces.”
Maurice stood on the steps with his arms wide open, as if displaying a private collection. “Each one has been meticulously selected and modified. It is a pity the previous batch of test subjects had poor mana affinity, resulting in too many failures. But no matter, once I capture you—”
He pointed at Novia.
“Only with your dragon body, which naturally aligns with magicules, can I create a truly perfect masterpiece. That will be the ultimate necromantic alchemy creation, fully capable of rivaling a Demon King!”
The modified constructs surged from all directions, numbering at least thirty, and their count was still rising.
With one claw strike, Novia sliced a construct that had lunged close in half. Her dragon tail simultaneously whipped away two others trying to flank her, but the severed construct did not stop moving—
Its upper body crawled along the ground, dragging its spine behind it. Using its sole remaining arm, it gripped Novia's ankle in a death grip and lunged to bite her.
Novia crushed its skull with a single stamp. Eerie green phosphorus fire splattered from the shattered bone, sizzling as it corroded her dragon scales.
Lu Mao fired three consecutive arrows. The black flame arrows precisely struck the heads of three constructs, their dual dark-fire erosion burning through the skulls. Yet, the constructs only wobbled a few times before continuing to crawl forward—
These things were no longer living beings. As long as the necromantic cores inside them were not destroyed, losing limbs or even their heads would not stop them.
The circle was still closing in.
Novia glanced back at Lu Mao, a flash of resolve crossing her slitted pupils.
Her body suddenly swelled. Silver-white dragon wings tore through the shimmer of her Disguise spell, and scales surged from beneath her skin like an avalanche. A massive, pure white dragon materialized in the clearing before the manor.
Her dragon tail swept through the air, flattening three or four constructs into mush. With every rise and fall of her claws, deep trenches were plowed into the ground.
Maurice's eyes lit up like two burning coals. He looked up at the giant beast that blotted out half the sky, his lips trembling slightly with excitement. He muttered “perfect, so perfect” under his breath, as if admiring an artwork that was about to be his.
But Novia did not give him the chance to keep admiring her.
The pure white dragon opened her massive maw. Instead of unleashing dragon breath, she swallowed Lu Mao—who was still preparing to draw his bow—whole.
Before Lu Mao could even utter a word, the dragon's throat closed.
In the pitch darkness, Lu Mao felt the soft dragon tongue beneath him. The temperature was just right, and there was even a faint lingering taste of roasted meat.
Novia began to let out a long, low chant in Dragon Tongue.
Every syllable felt like a freezing wind blowing from the depths of the far northern ice plains, carrying a low temperature capable of freezing the very soul.
Her dragon wings fully unfurled, casting half the manor into the giant dragon's shadow.
Under the illumination of this light, the constructs still surging forward began to smoke, large blisters bubbling up on their grayish-white skin like snowmen melting under a blazing sun. The skeletal patterns at the edge of the barrier also began to crackle and splinter.
Maurice's smile froze on his face, looking exceptionally ridiculous.
The wind pressure generated as the dragon wings fully spread swept the loose stones and dry grass on the ground into the air. A suffocating pressure erupted from within her body.
In an instant, the air plunged below freezing. The movements of the constructs still lunging forward on the ground seized up simultaneously, as if an invisible hand had pinned down their spines.
The skeletal patterns at the barrier's edge began to emit a harsh cracking sound. Maurice's pupils contracted sharply—Forbidden Rank.
This was absolutely a genuine Forbidden Rank spell.
Even if he had modified his physical body to be practically immortal, his soul core would definitely not survive a direct hit from a forbidden spell of this caliber.
“Stop her!”
He shrieked, raising his staff to launch a thick bone spear at the white dragon in the air.
But before the bone spear could even get close to the dragon's body, it was frozen solid by the extreme cold domain surrounding Novia, shattering into powder in midair.
The extreme cold domain spread silently beneath her dragon wings.
On the ground, the constructs still struggling were swept over by this force, their movements freezing in the same instant. A layer of white frost coated their grayish-white skin, their joints stiffened, and their phosphorus fire froze. Immediately after, they toppled over one by one like dominoes.
Dozens of deformed bodies froze in various contorted poses, turning into ice sculptures along with the five cultists who had tried to flee.
Under the pressure of this extreme cold, the skeletal barrier let out a final groan and shattered, fragments of eerie green light falling from the sky like shards of broken glass.
Maurice stood on the steps, watching the army of constructs he had poured his life's blood into creating get wiped out in a matter of breaths.
His lips twitched, and then he made an extremely rational decision—he turned and ran.
But Novia had already locked her gaze onto him.
She had originally intended to fully unleash the extreme cold domain, freezing everything in the vicinity along with any filth that might remain deep underground.
But her senses swept through the depths of the manor—the unconscious demi-humans in the iron cages were still there, and Kelulu was still curled up on the floor.
She folded her dragon wings, gathering all the dispersing extreme cold energy into her throat.
That dragon breath was no longer a sweeping torrent—it collapsed inside her mouth into an extremely thin beam of bright white light, as if compressing the cold of an entire ice sheet into the point of a needle.
Wherever the beam passed, the air was directly frozen into frost dust. The ice sculptures of the constructs and cultists on the ground were swept by the aftershocks, shattering into piles of crushed ice.
The moment the dragon breath hit Maurice, he didn't even have time to scream. Along with his bone staff, he was turned into an ice sculpture frozen in a running posture, collapsing heavily onto the steps as ice spread from his chest to his limbs, sealing him completely.
The massive dragon body fell from the sky, rapidly shrinking in a flash of blinding silver light to return to the petite form of the girl.
With her eyes tightly closed and her light armor covered in frost, Novia fell straight down from the sky.
Lu Mao was gently rolled out of her mouth by her tongue, flipping in midair to catch her.
She was unbelievably light; through her cold armor, he could feel the outline of her shoulder blades.
Lu Mao knelt on one knee, cradling her in his arms, and reached out to check her breathing. Her breath was steady; it was merely a forced slumber from depleted magicules.
He let out a long sigh of relief, resting Novia against his shoulder. With his other hand, he pulled a mana potion from his ring, pried open her mouth, and poured it in.
“Next time you swallow me, could you give me a heads-up first?”
He grumbled to her unresponsive sleeping face, then looked up at the manor, which was now mostly encased in ice.
The demi-humans in the iron cages were still unconscious. Kelulu was clinging to the iron bars, staring blankly at him with her slitted pupils.
Maurice's ice sculpture lay on the steps, his mouth still frozen in the terrified expression he had when trying to flee.
Rate on N.U.
