The Evil God Summoned by the Saintess
Chapter 334 - 332: Touch Her, and You Become an Enemy of the Empire
In urgent situations, Hilia rarely ever smiles.
Unless she’s truly been driven to laugh in anger.
"Fine, you’re all impressive. Such a huge League Committee, and not a single person knows about Arrays."
Hilia watched as half the people in the audience were struggling to break free, while the rest—those farther away—were still encased in ice.
The Committee and all the mages who had the ability to break the ice simply couldn’t keep up.
Their lives were slipping away.
They clearly had a chance to be saved...
Hilia was obviously smiling, but her tears wouldn’t stop flowing.
The pressure from the Tier Four Mage—she could resist it, but only barely. If she was just trying to run, maybe she could escape.
But what she wanted to do was save people.
There was simply no way to do it.
The girl felt deeply aggrieved. Most of her tears were because she clearly had the chance to help, yet, due to ’friendly’ interference, she could only watch helplessly as countless lives faded away before her eyes.
A small part was grievance as well—she had been driven to laughter and to tears by anger.
The girl looked toward Rose in her spiritual space.
"Lord Rose..."
Rose looked at her. "Do you want to continue? If you keep going, it’ll be far more than just losing your eligibility to participate."
"I want to save people." The girl’s tone was resolute.
Rose nodded, "Very well, let me handle it."
"Alright!"
Hilia immediately relinquished control of her body.
The next second, her sobbing ceased.
Rose stared coldly at the mage restraining Hilia in front of him.
The next instant, driven by spiritual power, he broke free of the Tier Four Mage’s hold in a flash, darting toward the next core node like a cannonball.
The mage was caught off guard. The next moment, seeing ’Hilia’s’ back, he snapped, "Still trying to run?"
Saying nothing more, he rushed forward. When Rose finished disabling the node and just as he got in front of Rose, the mage yelled angrily, "What are you doing? Tell me—your action of tossing out spectators, is that how you rescue them?"
Rose didn’t bother arguing. In the next second, he rocketed toward another node like a cannonball.
Seeing this, the Tier Four Mage instantly hurled a spell at him.
Rose raised his hand and conjured a massive shield of ice, forged from copious amounts of magic, blocking the attack head-on.
After tossing out the last core node spectator, Rose looked at the ice-encased arena and frowned slightly.
"Just doing this isn’t enough. I have to use some drastic measures now."
Seeing the mage still unwilling to give up, Rose raised his hand, creating a volley of minute ice needles, condensed from the Ice Rain Skill, along the path of the oncoming enemy.
The ice needles were tiny, like slender strands of hair.
Every ice needle contained a burning flame within.
Together, the ice needles formed a sphere of ice about the size of a human head—inside were at least ten thousand needles!
The next moment, the sparks within all the needles ignited in a chain reaction, instantly exploding, triggering a blast from the mass of needles—almost as powerful as a Tier Four explosion!
Boom!
The blast sent the surrounding seats into utter chaos, with spectators tumbling in all directions.
The Tier Four Mage, who hadn’t paid any attention to Rose’s attack, was caught completely by surprise, taking the explosion square in the face. He was blown backward, smashing into a boulder wall behind the audience stands, leaving a deep crater there.
Rose ignored the man’s condition, his entire figure now floating in mid-air, supported by spiritual force, as he hovered down to the center stage.
In his palm, a new sphere of ice needles rapidly took shape. He hurled it skyward, producing a smaller explosion.
The detonation shattered the ice needle sphere, forming dozens of ice spikes, each constructed from countless needles. They shot forth, landing with pinpoint accuracy on every audience member positioned at a node under the "Absolute Freeze" Array.
All thirty-six of them!
None of these people had any power to resist the ice spikes. As the spikes pierced into their heads, their skulls burst open like watermelons, and the corpses collapsed stiffly to the ground.
The spectators in the freed sections, horrified by the sight, broke into screams again and again, fleeing in terror.
"He’s killing people! He’s killing people!"
"A contestant is killing people!"
"Run!"
"Uagh—"
"..."
The civilians, just unfrozen by the broken Array, also saw the headless corpses, panicked, and rushed to bolt with the rest of the crowd.
The entire audience area was thrown into chaos.
Rose paid no heed to the fleeing crowds. Instead, he looked to Hilia in the spiritual space and asked, "Next, you’ll face accusations and charges of murder. I can give you two options: let me handle things, or you handle it yourself?"
Hilia broke into an easy smile. "Let me! Lord Rose, thank you. In the end, it was only thanks to you that we managed to save more than a thousand spectators. As for the accusations that follow, I’ll handle them myself, no need to trouble you with such trifles. Besides, I’m sure the Academy will stand by me; they’ll help me too."
Rose nodded: "Alright, very well."
With that, he returned bodily control to Hilia.
Hilia regained her body, immediately sensing that most of her abundant magic power had already been depleted.
She hadn’t expected those two high-level, precision-cast spells to consume so much magic power.
Especially given that Rose was the one operating.
If she’d done it herself...
Hilia didn’t think she could replicate such a feat.
A single ice sphere containing over ten thousand needles, each with the Fire of the Singularity inside—the level of control required left Hilia in utter awe.
Is that the level you need to reach, as a Tier Three Mage, if you even hope to injure a Tier Four Mage?
She looked at the Tier Four Mage climbing out from the crater—clearly badly hurt, but not in mortal danger—and thought to herself.
But if Rose had really wanted to kill him, would that have been a problem?
The reason for simply injuring him, instead of killing, was probably to avoid making things worse, just to keep him out of the way.
Hilia stood on the stage, watching as the mass of mages quickly surged forward to surround her.
"Contestant of the Ista Empire, Hilia, do you realize what you’ve done?"
"You rampaged in the arena and killed dozens of spectators. That’s a capital offense!"
"Raise your hands immediately and accept the League’s judgment!"
Hilia lifted her chin, staring fearlessly at the encircling mages, and said coldly, "I killed heretics—a group who tried to kill thousands of innocent spectators. They are the ones who deserve to die."
"That’s easy to say, but your actions are grave and have caused serious harm to the Mage League. You can argue with the Chief Judge in court."
The crowd closed in tighter and tighter.
The terrifying pressure made it hard for Hilia to even breathe.
Just then, the image of Nikodemos appeared before her.
He raised his head and looked at the Northern Alliance mages surrounding her. With the crushing might of a Tier Five Mage, he shattered their combined pressure and forced them all from the air to the ground.
His voice was calm as it spread into everyone’s ears—
"Harm her, and you become enemies of the Divine Magic Academy and the Ista Empire."