35. When a Mage Is Forced into Melee

When a Mage Is Forced into Melee

Once these demons were no longer limited to throwing explosive fireballs, countering their magic became much harder, Chi Li thought.

As a young mage, Chi Li could understand why the invaders did not want their “pets” freely using their power in whatever form they pleased.

These demons were far more than beings that could explode and ignore flame.

They possessed many troublesome abilities. They could amplify entropy. They could magically interfere with oxidizers and easily smother ordinary flames and chemical reactions. They could vastly increase heat inside a target, enough to kill anything nonmagical. They could even deprive enemies of the ability to use flame at the level of their “power,” causing obvious magical effects to fail instantly and become useless.

Moreover, the demons seemed able to switch rapidly between these different abilities, just as Chi Li could shift the use of her own magic.

That made them extremely difficult to deal with.

When the red-haired girl tried to draw in one demon’s fire, the other immediately cast anti-magic at her.

When she turned to stop that demon instead, the first one launched deadly magical attacks at her friends.

Almost every second, she was barely holding on, struggling to respond.

All the while, dozens of imps were constantly trying to break through the shield I had raised around her, doing everything they could to split her attention.

At last, Chi Li realized that either one of the demons might succeed in casting a lethal spell at any moment, and one of her friends would die because of it.

She refused to allow that.

So she decisively split her magic in two, constantly weakening both opponents’ power so they could not accumulate enough force to cast major spells.

It did not, however, completely stop them from making smaller attacks.

The demon that had caught me by surprise in midair tried to dispel my active abilities by stripping away Chi Li’s layer of power.

The teenage mage gave a cold little smile.

True, her best friend could not accumulate power over time to produce major and persistent magical effects.

But at that moment, neither could the demon.

Besides, my basic strength was far greater than Chi Li’s, let alone the strength of two mediocre incarnations of evil.

The demon very nearly got itself cut into pieces for its attempt. I used a new kind of force magic that pierced through every obstructing layer of force, losing only a little power along the way.

Chi Li focused more of her attention on stopping the other demon—the one that had just blown Cheng Rui’s mecha apart.

She managed to limit it to weaker dispelling magic, entropy attacks, and that suffocating black flame.

But the only real fire Cheng Rui’s armor used was an auxiliary power source.

Cheng Rui had almost talked Chi Li’s ears off explaining all the low-entropy alloys he had used in building the armor, and the suit had no obvious active magic.

Cheng Rui seemed able to hold for the moment, so Chi Li let him keep handling his side while she shifted her attention back to the other fight.

What she saw filled her with anger and fear for her friend.

In the blink of an eye—perhaps only one or two seconds, the brief instant in which she made sure Cheng Rui would not be blown away—I had fallen into disadvantage and was being attacked without the ability to fight back.

Although we had never discussed this directly, the signs left by previous battles indicated that I possessed a certain degree of magical resistance, or at least resistance to magical alteration.

Understandably, with Liya nearby and with my naturally suspicious personality, her best friend had been unwilling to reveal the details.

So Chi Li only now realized that my resistance was not nearly as strong as she had assumed, and that this demon was an exceptionally terrible opponent for me.

It was slowly suffocating me, draining my stamina, and my super-speed was actually accelerating the effect of the attack.

Chi Li frantically gathered power, preparing a stronger spell.

Then, just as the trap snapped shut, she realized she had fallen into another demon’s scheme.

The moment she stopped focusing on drawing in that demon’s magic, it redirected an attack that had failed to affect Cheng Rui and aimed it at her instead.

Three shadow spears, reinforced by its second casting, shot toward the teenage mage like black lightning.

The first struck the shield I had made for Chi Li, making it shudder violently.

The second warped and bent it, attacking the force of the magical structure directly.

The third made the shield vanish in an instant.

Immediately afterward, more than a dozen imps surged toward the red-haired girl like a black tide.

Chi Li was in the middle of casting. There was no time to build an effective defense against the swarm.

Under the command of an outside intelligence that had learned many tactics during the course of battle, the imps did not attack with fireballs.

They swarmed Chi Li physically, striking and pinning her down.

Chi Li’s magic granted her immense strength—far beyond any human’s, let alone that of a girl her age.

But she was still a mage, not a close-quarters fighter.

More than twenty stone fists rose and fell like clubs, beating her ruthlessly to the ground.

Chi Li quickly cast a jet of flame and melted one imp, then another.

Two more imps fell motionless, the animation magic stripped from their stone bodies.

One desperate attack knocked half the remaining imps off her, some even shattering to pieces.

Yet the few that remained were still enough to hold her down long enough for more imps to arrive.

They came faster than Chi Li could destroy them with rapid attacks, and they would not let her focus long enough to cast anything stronger.

Chi Li shouted in fury. Instead of attacking the imps directly, she reached her magic toward the source of magic behind them.

Suddenly, the torrent of flame drowning me shifted away from my head.

The next breath I drew was sweet, clean, breathable air.

I gulped it in greedily, and my thoughts cleared a little. Only then did I realize that, as the disgusting green-black magical stream was pushed back, I could see my surroundings again.

Unfortunately, what I saw was not encouraging.

The suffocating, strength-draining, foul-smelling breath still filled the space around the rest of my body.

No matter how much clean air I inhaled, my body continued to spasm, exhausted, as if I were trying to run a marathon while holding my breath.

Stop whining and use your brain, a small voice deep in my mind snapped.

That sounded like good advice.

So I did.