After he killed the first, Luke had an easy time defeating the other, giant fish. He just had to keep his katana charged for a while and then unleash the attack. Still, he only found those creatures after a few hundred or so kilometers. Luke assumed that it was because they lived in territories. They couldn’t live together since food was scarce and they were too big.

Regardless, when he killed the tenth of those fish, something happened. Luke felt the hairs on his back standing, and in the next moment, a beam of energy was fired at him. It was the size of the whole, and its speed was surreal... Luke didn’t even have time to dodge. He only escaped because he ran away to his dimension. Using his skill like that wasn’t good, but it couldn’t have been helped...

While he was in that dimension, Luke looked for the culprit using Clairvoyance, and in the end, he found a woman flying over the road, five kilometers away from Luke’s previous position. Fighting a flying enemy in such a place would be hard, so Luke had to deal with her as fast as possible. He opened an exit right behind her and tried to cut her neck, but a Mana Shield got in the way.

???? - Lv ????

HP: ????/ ????

MP: ????/ ????

SP: ????/ ????

STR: ????

SPE: ????

INT: ????

END: ????

RES: ????

FOC: ????

Free points: ????

Gold Coins: ????

Active Skills: ????, ????, ????, ????

Spells: ????, ????, ????, ????

Passive: ????, ????, ????, ????

That was why Luke hated to fight mages, most of them had that skill, and they activated it automatically when they were in danger. The female wizard turned around while moving away, showing a shocked expression since she didn’t imagine that Luke not only would dodge her attack but attack near instantly.

In any case, the female wizard had quite the curvy body, and Luke clicked his tongue at himself for that being the first thing that he noticed. She was wearing a dark robe, but she also had a crystal staff. As for her physical characteristics, Luke frowned when he saw that her eyes were purple, and she also had a pair of horns on her forehead. It was the first time he had seen someone like that. Still, it didn’t change what Luke had to do.

The woman began to fly away while firing Spears of Light toward him, and even though Luke blocked them with his sword, he could feel a lot of heat coming from them. As expected, they had a large concentration of energy. That was probably the principle to learn light magic. They also could travel pretty fast, so Luke had to be careful.

Luke tried to approach while blocking the spears, but the woman began to fly higher and higher. She sure had a massive mana pool to be able to spam attacks like that while flying. In that kind of situation, Luke couldn’t do much, even though he had learned some skills to improve his mobility in the sky. Using space magic would be the quickest way to close in, but that would reveal to the enemy one of Luke’s best cards, so he had to be careful.

Instead of that, Luke summoned some ice platforms and began to run over them. The female magician tried to destroy those, but Luke sped up and left the ones that were hit long behind. The woman suddenly hit her back against a block of ice since she was only focusing on moving away and attacking. Once that happened, Luke charged with Stinger. His attack hit the Mana Shield that was summoned again and made it destroy his ice block with ease.

After clicking her tongue, the woman made a huge light pillar fall from the sky and hit Luke, or so was her plan anyway. Luke felt the danger when the hair on his back suddenly stood, and then he used Stinger to the side. The bonus in speed that skill granted never failed to satisfy him. Still, he couldn’t help but frown when the pillar of light hit the purple ocean and made tons of water evaporate instantly.

"Without using the mana of a clone to buff my Resistance, that might kill me in a single shot," Luke thought. "Still, her over-reliance on the Mana shield must mean that she is a Glass Cannon. Once she is out of mana, she can be killed easily. However, she must have some trump card to use in that kind of situation, so I have to keep my guard up."

Luke kept using that strategy of approaching and using the ice platforms. Still, he did that mostly to entice the enemy to attack him and waste mana. She was powerful, and she probably was using some other means to increase her mana as well, but her mana pool must have a limit while using spells like that. Luke just had to be patient and attack once the first opportunity arose. However, that opportunity never came, and it didn’t seem like she was worried about saving her mana.

"The fuck is going on here... she probably already used enough mana to create one of my clones, and yet..." Luke thought while clenching his teeth in annoyance.

Over the last year, Luke saw many enemies using several types of tricks to obtain an advantage before and during battles. He wasn’t the first to use a trick like mana clones, and he certainly won’t be the last. Some used undead, others used plants, and a few even used other living beings to extend the sizes of their mana pools and make them recover health faster as well. Still, all of those had some sort of trick to have access to that, and yet, Luke couldn’t see how that woman had access to so much mana.

Before he could find his answer, the woman noticed that Luke was waiting for something, and that meant that he didn’t have the power to defeat her at once, at least not yet. She couldn’t understand how he escaped her previous attack and suddenly appeared behind her. He didn’t look like the type who would know Teleport. Regardless, what she knew was that she had the chance to deal with him now.

The woman pointed her hands in front of her before crossing them. Luke used Stinger to move because he knew that something wasn’t coming, but he still was stopped when five pillars of light surrounded him and began to close in. Before Luke could cross the space between them, they increased in speed and locked him completely.

Luke bit his lips since his options were limited, but in the end, he decided to put the woman in an even worse position. He used all his mana to create an ice prison around her. The female wizard was unable to destroy it since she was busy with her own spells. She was also slower since her type of magic was way more complicated. Once that was done, Luke made the ice prison fall into the Poisonous ocean.

The woman didn’t even try to destroy the prison since she would also target her Mana shield, but Luke still frowned that things happened just like he had planned. Still, the pillars of light engulfed him.

Luke felt like he had discovered how cup noodles feel when they stay in the microwave for too long. The attack burned his body and melted his armor a bit, but it felt different than the usual fire magic. It was more like high-density energy-destroyed matter without showing any physical properties. Thanks to that, none of Luke’s defensive skills worked, aside from Magic Resistance.

While feeling like crap, Luke survived the attack. The duration of the woman’s spell was short since it had a large area and worked as a trap as well. In any case, before Luke could recover, the woman emerged from the ocean of poison with her Mana shield still active. Most likely, the ocean melted Luke’s ice, and she focused on keeping her Mana Shield active. She probably lost a considerable amount of mana, but she didn’t receive any damage. As for Luke, he had too little mana, and he was wounded.

"More than enough..." Luke thought and then smirked.

Even with his current mana, Luke still could use Stinger, as long as he doesn’t increase its output, and so he did that. His attack bounded on the Mana Shield and made him go back to the starting point, but he created an ice platform that stopped him in the midway. Soon after, he used Stinger again, added with the power of Concentrated Strike. This time the woman and her Mana Shield were pushed backward.

His power had increased, and she didn’t expect that. Still, the female magician knew how to handle that. However, before she could put her plans into action. Luke moved to the side after using Stinger and then landed on another ice platform. He had created several of those around her, and he used them to change his position and stance. In the blink of an eye, he landed on another and then attacked the same way as before. That woman has pushed backward again... the power of his attacks was causing more than a bit of a problem now. To make sure that Luke wouldn’t be able to attack like that, she moved closer to the ocean.

"Hehehe... how cute," Luke thought while smirking. "She thinks that I am sane."

Luke made the platforms follow her, and then she began to melt them with her magic. Unfortunately for her, Luke didn’t have a lot of space, so he recreated them and began to attack again.

While bounding like a ball, Luke kept his eyes on the enemy. Even while attacking, he tried to understand where in the hell she was taking so much mana from. Suddenly, the woman created several light spheres and made them spin around her shield. It was another layer of defense. She sure was cautious if anything. However, that wasn’t enough to stop Luke.

When he approached and swung his sword, he spun and then repelled three of them that almost touched him and finished his move by attacking the mana shield. Still, instead of retreating, he jumped over the mana shield and then kicked it with all his might, making the sphere submerge. Soon, the woman returned, but not before Luke froze all the poison around her. Her shield began to suffer damage from the ice and poison, thanks to it.

Without any other choice, she used her light spheres to destroy those... It was quite troublesome how well she could control the light. In any case, her plan finally started to work when she saw one of those massive fish approachings, and Luke was too busy bouncing around. In the end, she deactivated her mana shield for a moment and fired a beam of light from the Palm of her hands, making Luke block with his sword. The beam pushed him backward, right to the mouth of the massive beast.

When the mouth closed, the woman smirked. It was time to take down the fish alongside the enemy. However, she was the one who got taken by surprise...