Chapter 307: Black Mist and Flame |
The dark mist spread from beneath Bella's feet, flowing outward with an almost physical weight, hugging the ground as it crept in every direction.
It rolled over rubble, curled around broken pillars, unhurried but relentless in its reach. Ten meters. Fifteen. Still expanding.
The color was uneven. Near Bella it ran thick and black. At its edges it thinned to a murky grey-brown, clinging to the floor at roughly knee height.
Everything it touched began to change.
Flagstones darkened from pale grey to deep brown. Their grain blurred. Edges crumbled. Loose stone dissolved to powder.
Wood splinters caught in the debris blackened, curled, and disintegrated.
A silver candelabrum half-wedged in a crack of rubble bloomed with a film of dark tarnish that climbed from its base upward. The metal was oxidizing. Rotting.
Regulus raised a Protego.
The silver barrier flashed once inside the mist. The dark fog broke against the curved surface.
His magic drain spiked instantly.
The fog was corrosive. Silver light dimmed wherever it was touched, flickering dark before the steady feed of magic pushed the brightness back. What normally cost a trickle to maintain now demanded three times that, at minimum.
A dense crackling crawled across the barrier's surface. Something inside the mist was gnawing at the Protego's structure, trying to tear it apart from the outside.
He didn't retreat. He stood at the center of the mist and felt the magic out.
Once the fog had fully settled, it changed again.
Shadows cast by rubble and debris across the floor began to deepen. Then black tendrils rose from them, thread-like, climbing the curved surface of the Protego like fingers feeling for a grip.
First they squeezed inward. The entire shield compressed under their grip, its surface bowing, silver light flaring brighter under the pressure.
Then the pressure vanished. The shadow tendrils snapped taut and pulled outward.
The Protego warped, its sphere dragged into an irregular shape, fractures spreading along the edges where the tendrils wrenched hardest.
His magical perception fogged. Precision dropped sharply. His read on Bella's reserves and condition blurred from exact to approximate.
Regulus stood at the heart of it all. Corrosion, compression, tearing. Three forces working the Protego simultaneously.
The mist itself was a compound Dark curse. Advanced work.
First, area decay. Everything within the fog's reach degraded. Stone turned brittle. Metal rusted. Wood rotted to dust.
Second, magical erosion. Structured spells like Protego were ground down continuously, burning magic far beyond normal rates.
Third, shadow binding. Every shadow inside the fog's domain became a physical thing the caster could manipulate, squeezing, ripping, coiling around a target.
Corrosion, area control, movement restriction, sensory disruption, all running at once, all self-sustaining after the initial cast. No follow-up spells required.
And that wasn't all.
He pivoted on his toe. The Side-Shift Spell fired instantly, carrying him out of the mist. He landed over a dozen meters away, clear of the coverage zone.
The Protego still clung to him, its surface marked with dark stains from the corrosion, but intact.
The moment his feet touched ground, the mist on Bella's side churned violently.
Fog so dense it was nearly solid contracted as though an invisible fist had clenched inside it, compressing into dozens of black arrows.
The speed was staggering. The gap between formation and launch was essentially zero.
The arrows shrieked through the air, trailing grey-black smoke, crossing nearly thirty meters in the time it took to blink.
Regulus shifted clear of the first volley.
Arrows punched into the floor where he'd stood. Each impact gouged a basin-sized crater, stone and rubble crumbling to powder on contact with the residual mist.
Grey-black dust drifted from the edges of the craters. The stone at the bottom was still disintegrating, cracks spreading outward like a web.
He triggered the Sprint Spell and cut laterally. The second volley arrived. Then the third.
Arrows materialized from the mist in an endless stream, tracking his movement, each volley aimed at where he'd be, not where he was.
He swept his gaze across the fog while moving.
Dozens of arrows launched, and the mist looked no different. Density, range, thickness, all unchanged.
Another function layered on top: condensation into solid projectiles for ranged attack.
He glanced at Bella. She stood at the mist's center, feet planted in exactly the same spot since this phase began.
The spell needed its caster as a core anchor. Coverage radiated outward from that fixed point. Moving would collapse the magical structure already established.
The tactical profile was clear. Enclosed spaces. Tight terrain. Plant your feet and pour it out.
In the gap between volleys, Regulus raised his wand and pointed at the ceiling.
Every piece of metal scattered through the wreckage rose at once.
Broken silver candelabras. Shattered cutlery. Bent iron lamp brackets. Copper trim blasted from the long table.
Over a hundred fragments of varying size floated upward, converging two meters above his head.
Transfiguration.
The fragments merged, stretched, narrowed. The tip was honed to a needle point. A metal spike nearly two meters long took shape above him.
Nothing like the rough stone needles he'd conjured earlier. This one looked engineered.
It began to spin.
Slow, then fast, then so fast the tip glowed red from air friction, the heat creeping backward along the shaft.
Hot wind swept through the hall.
The hum deepened, then sharpened as the rotational speed climbed further. The red at the tip turned orange, then white-hot.
The entire hall vibrated. Loose stone on the floor trembled in sympathy.
Regulus whipped his wand forward.
The spike launched.
Air along its path was punched into a thick corridor of white vapor. The dark mist tore open instantly.
Wind pressure in the spike's wake dragged the remaining fog inward, and a single blazing white line burned across the length of the hall above the floor.
The detonation shook the building. Remaining shards of glass blew out of the narrow windows. Orion's barrier shuddered violently. Everyone behind it stumbled back.
The spike pierced the mist and arrived in an instant, but a black barrier materialized in front of Bella.
It appeared without warning, coalescing half a meter from her body. Semi-transparent, its surface roiling with patterns born from the same source as the fog.
The white-hot tip struck it. The contact point erupted in an explosion of firelight and dark energy intertwined.
The shockwave blasted outward. Rubble flew. The mist peeled back, exposing the blackened, corroded floor beneath.
Rotational kinetic energy converted to heat and vibration against the barrier's surface. Temperatures seared the air into a plasma state, throwing off a blinding white glare.
But it didn't break through. The barrier held.
And it wasn't finished.
The firelight on the barrier's side began to bend inward. Flame curved. Light curved. Energy was being pulled, sucked into the barrier itself.
The surface patterns flared bright as they absorbed the energy, then dimmed again.
Regulus narrowed his eyes.
Behind the barrier, Bella rocked from the impact, her body swaying, but her feet never moved.
When the fire cleared, she looked at him through the barrier and pulled her lips back, baring a sliver of teeth.
A white impact scar sat on the black barrier's surface, its edges still glowing red, still smoking. But the barrier was whole. Not a single crack.
Bella tilted her head and gave him a smile.
Physical attacks couldn't break that barrier.
What he'd just thrown was the highest-tier physical strike he could produce within conventional Transfiguration.
Against Bella's earlier Protego, it would have shattered in one hit.
Not just the shield. The person behind it, taken out in the same blow.
But the black barrier had caught it and absorbed part of the energy besides.
Physical methods ended here.
Magic, then.
Three more black arrows closed in from different angles.
His figure flickered through the rubble, Side-Shift chaining into Sprint Spell with almost no gap between.
Legs alone couldn't outrun the arrows anymore. Magic was the only option.
Bella's combination was genuinely difficult to deal with.
Fog for area control. Arrows for pursuit. Black barrier for defense. Three layers stacked, and against an ordinary wizard, the only option would be to run.
The fog had a range. Bella hadn't moved. Get outside the coverage area and you were safe.
But running wasn't on the table tonight. One of them had to be put down decisively. Neither could afford to back off first.
And besides, he still had things to do.
Regulus vanished from the ground. When he reappeared, he was three meters above the mist, hanging in the air.
Wand overhead. A searing blue-white light erupted from the tip.
A fire charm, and he fed Betelgeuse into it. The image of the dark red star swelled in his mind, expanding, erupting outward, and that quality of relentless outward explosion wove itself into the spell's structure.
The white light at the wand tip shifted. White to vivid orange, then deeper. The core burned white. The edges turned blue, approaching blue-hot.
Heat distorted the air around him into a translucent curtain. The temperature in the hall leapt.
A fraction of a second to gather, and the wand swept down.
Blue-white flame poured out and crashed into the mist. Contact produced a sharp, sustained hiss. The fog burned away wherever the fire touched, revealing the charred black ground beneath.
Regulus dropped into the center of it.
The flames didn't dissipate on impact the way an ordinary fire charm would. They rolled around him, condensed, spiraled, forming a domain of fire four or five meters across.
Blue-white light flooded the entire hall. Heat radiated from the flame's edge in waves.
The dark mist surged in from every direction, pressing against the fire, churning where grey-black met blue-white, hissing at the boundary.
A layer of fog burned away. Another layer replaced it. A ring of flame was eaten back. It swelled out again.
Two magics grinding against each other.