City ​​of Witches 1083

Chapter 1083 – #257_The Witch Of Libra (5)

#1077

1.
Siwoo knows.

He knows when the most dangerous moment is during a desperate battle that chips away at life.

It’s not the moment when the excruciating pain of a hammer smashing each bone comes.
It’s not the moment when his head turns white as if piercing every nerve with a hot awl.
It’s not even the moment when blood gushes past his throat, causing a cough that feels like his insides are being wrung out.

“Ah…”

It’s right now.

The moment when all pain and suffering become hazy and faint, as if his brain has been soaked in morphine.
The very moment when coldness and stiffness are felt from the extremities of his body, and then the sensation disappears.

The mental power consumed by the large-scale calculations in Hexennacht.
The spirit body durability consumed through the fierce battle with Herya.

The temporary repairs he made to his tattered body while fighting had reached their limit.

If these two things hadn’t been depleted, he could have fought much better.

The battle structure and the flow of the situation would have been completely different.

“Don’t you get it? There’s quite a difference in our levels. It’s too late to say you can’t fight now.”
“So what? It was just another day for me.”

Lydia also felt that victory was right around the corner.
Even until the moment he took out the lotus and placed his hand on it, her confidence in her superiority did not waver.

The only variable that could threaten Lydia in this battle was Shin Siwoo’s artifact, the Red Branch.

Lydia had induced a situation where he used the Red Branch to block Mistilteinn, thus shattering the artifact.
She overcame the slow projectile speed of Mistilteinn, which had absolute destructive power and penetration, through a calculated strategy.

Now, Lydia could use the instant death prevention with special coins without hesitation, while Shin Siwoo had long since exceeded his limits.

If a witch of Lydia’s caliber focused solely on defense and induced a war of attrition, Shin Siwoo, who had lost his main artifact, would have no means to break through it.

Now, Lydia just had to watch Shin Siwoo slowly wither away and then pick up the victory for free.

The gamble was over.
She just had to wait leisurely for her opponent to self-destruct.

“Bloom.”

Siwoo used the ‘lotus and soul’ extracted from the lotus as his power source.

The required amount was about half.
The required function was the lotus’s inherent ‘resurrection through distortion.’

In fact, even Siwoo wasn’t sure if this was possible.

It was akin to a composer, inspired, scribbling notes on a staff, just randomly arranging overflowing power.

It was the starting point for Shin Siwoo as a witch, and the most beautiful form he had held in his mind.

A golden magic circle that, starting from the lotus, extended upwards, further upwards, drawing a fractal pattern.

The massive magic circle, so large that it could only be fully seen from a great distance, resembled a tree.

Lydia’s eyes could not fully grasp the identity of the magic circle.

However, she extracted keywords from the magic circle.
Birth, growth, death, regeneration.

Observing these keywords and Shin Siwoo, who had begun to regain some vitality, she guessed that it was probably a magic to restore the body.

But one thing was certain.

That tree, with only bare branches, was incomplete.
It was not perfectly completed as magic.

Whether it was a lack of calculations, a lack of power, or the poisonous insects of Lydia still flying around, it remained an incomplete magic.

It was a grand-looking dud.

This was Shin Siwoo’s last struggle.

“Is that all your struggle?”

If so, there was nothing more to be wary of.

“Immutabilis.”

Lydia consumed one special coin.

A brilliant golden magic settled on Lydia’s body.
Just as the noble value of gold has remained unchanged throughout history, Lydia’s body became immortal for a moment.

The instant death prevention of ‘Immutabilis’ was impossible to break head-on unless one had the Red Branch.

Lydia’s guaranteed victory pattern was already complete.

Shin Siwoo began to fly.
The distance had narrowed considerably, but it was not a problem.

All he had done was draw that magic circle and slightly restore his body.
And what he held in his hand was not the Red Branch, but an ordinary black spear made by weaving shadows.

“Oooooo——————!!!!!!”

Indeed, his final combustion was magnificent.

His charge, which had become more intense as he shouted, was fiercer than at the beginning of the fierce battle.
This was because the widely spread ‘tree’ was giving new life to Shin Siwoo, who had been turning into a half-corpse.

-Clang! Clang! Clang!

By releasing magic power, creating shockwaves, and outstripping with pure speed.
Siwoo’s spear strike, which had finally overcome all resistance, was aimed at Lydia.

Now, she would just give up her life once and take the victory.

“……!”

Lydia, who had been thinking that way, felt a sensation that made all the hairs on her body stand on end.

Amidst all indicators pointing to victory, a sudden unease arose.
Lydia trusted this instinctive sense of crisis, which might just be a simple paranoid delusion.

“Prove it…!”

Belatedly, she blocked Shin Siwoo’s path with Mistilteinn and wrapped her body in flames.

However, Shin Siwoo, who had reached his maximum speed, could not be caught by Mistilteinn’s slow movements.

He easily tilted his head to the side to avoid Mistilteinn, and then, before the flames of immortality could completely defend Lydia, he swung his spear and brushed past her.

-Thud

A chilling sound.
A throbbing sensation that was more hot than painful.

The combination of Lydia’s desperate twisting and the incomplete spear strike of Siwoo, who had avoided the flames, barely missed her vital points.

“Shit…”

Lydia looked down at her side.
Her fair skin was torn, and her peritoneum was ripped, causing her intestines to spill out with blood.

“Cough…!”

Red blood also spurted from Lydia’s mouth as she covered her side.
Her horrified gaze turned to Shin Siwoo, who was spinning his spear to shake off the blood.

“You, you…”

Before coming here, she had been cut, sliced, broken, and crushed countless times.

Magic was a comprehensive art that required the use of all the caster’s skills.

Therefore, even if only one of the five senses was paralyzed, its power would drop sharply, so Lydia had endured the pain while smoking a cigarette.

If it was just a slight tear in her side, it was pain she would scoff at.

But this was not just a wound.

It was a dangerous injury that seemed to tear apart the very source of her spirit body.
An attack that nullified the ‘immutability’ of a special coin just by touching it, and even the recovery through Libra did not work.

There was only one way that was possible.

“…You bastard…”

The black spear that Shin Siwoo was holding transformed.
As if shedding its skin, the black spear, with pieces of black shadow peeled off, took the form of the Red Branch.

It wasn’t just taking on the form.
Even the prayers and effects of the distortion field flowing around it.

It was not a cheap replica, but the original without a doubt.

“Now it’s a bit more fair.”

Shin Siwoo grinned, revealing his blood-stained teeth.

“What the hell…. I’m the one who’s hurting more, you know?”

Lydia also responded with a twisted smile.

Lydia had clearly killed the Red Branch with Mistilteinn.

If the form disappears, does the existence also disappear?
No, it doesn’t.

For Siwoo, the Red Branch was just a tool.

If you understand the root, all objects in the real world are just imperfect copies of an ideal form.

Distortion and warping are the very essence of the Red Branch.
If you understand the root of a higher dimension, you can recreate it as much as you want, even if it disappears.

Just like this.

“Bloom.”

Along with the incantation, a huge and incomplete magic circle shone.
As Siwoo chanted, red branches bloomed at the ends of the golden tree’s branches, which had looked somewhat bare.

One, two, three.
One hundred, one thousand, ten thousand.

The red branches, which had multiplied exponentially, soon dyed the entire tree red.

Not all of the red branches were perfectly materialized as if they were held in Siwoo’s hand.
They were just incomplete entities that would vanish in vain the moment they fell from the magic circle.

But their purpose was clear.

-Woo woo woo!

Just as the former knight had resonated with the white spear, a replica of the Red Branch, resonance began.

With just that, the worthless poisonous moths that had been hovering in the air all exploded at once.
The flames of immortality that had been surging across the battlefield subsided.
The scenery of the golden garden, which had been showing off its splendor, distorted.

The essence of distortion, resonated through tens of thousands of red branches, was fully realized in the spear held in Siwoo’s hand.

This was the ‘Red Tree.’

The final secret technique, the last move, that squeezed out all of Shin Siwoo’s abilities.

-Woo woo woo!!!!

The distortion field, amplified to the point where the image of Shin Siwoo holding the spear was distorted, and the surroundings filled with red light as if the world was about to perish.

Lydia, who had been looking at the sky, took out the remaining special coins.

“Well, you have to do this much to be my most feared enemy.”

Apart from the bravado, as she felt the scenery before her and the pain of her wound that showed no signs of healing, one word flashed through her mind.

Defeat.

That two-letter word, which even sounded unfamiliar.

Despite the terrible pain, Lydia straightened her back.
Holding onto Mistilteinn, she unleashed the strongest magic she could muster.

“Mors.”

Its meaning was death.
The final move of Lydia, which maximized the power of Mistilteinn’s concept of killing and fired it in all directions.

But she already guessed.

This was not enough.
It was absolutely impossible to stop Shin Siwoo with just Mors.

The intellect of a great witch and her combat experience as a public figure allowed her to judge the already tilted battle situation.

-Clink

The last gold coin scattered from Lydia’s hand.

The most cherished and treasured, the most powerful of the special coins with excellent performance.
A gold coin that had sacrificed a 22nd-tier witch.

But Lydia could only use one special coin for one magic.

In other words, this was an investment that far exceeded the limit of diminishing returns, and in a sense, it was a rampage.

Lydia felt the magic power that had gone berserk, destroying her body.
The magic circuit that had been cut off on her side caused a magical short circuit.

The concepts that had begun to twist forcibly were destroying her five senses and began to tear Lydia’s body apart in earnest.

Ah.
Was this the pain that Shin Siwoo had fought through?

A round of applause came out of reverence for him.

In the blink of an eye where life and death were at stake.
Amidst the magic power that was fluctuating and urging self-destruction and the blurred mental image, Lydia moved forward in a state of trance.

The place she finally reached was a huge wall.

The wall that had gifted suicide in the name of succession to countless witches.
The wall called ‘tier’ that those who were not chosen could not overcome even if they poured out their entire lives.

That wall, which even Lydia had repeatedly been frustrated by and turned away from.
It collapsed with a roar, like a miracle.

Therefore, this magic was a realm that Lydia had wanted to reach someday, and a magic that was only possible in theory.

“Mortalis.”

Its meaning was mortal.
Living things, objects, even huge stars and the universe itself, could not escape this mortality.

An absolute sentence that transcended the concept of death.

She was realizing it here.

——————!!!!!

The sentence of mortality, which could not be avoided or blocked, spread like a classification of bright light.
All objects, magic power, and even invisible atoms or particles that had been placed between Lydia and Siwoo began to disappear.

Lydia smiled silently.
A smile appeared on her lips, and joy burst in her brain.

Shin Siwoo could be seen in the distance.

His figure, running with his life on the line with a single spear, was as brilliant as Lydia had so desperately wanted to obtain.

The moment Shin Siwoo came into contact with the spreading fan-shaped light classification.
The fan shape quietly split, as if cutting a round piece of fabric with sewing scissors.

Shin Siwoo approached Lydia, denying the insurmountable mortality.

“It’s kind of romantic, isn’t it.”

Reaching the center of the fan shape and no longer able to approach, Shin Siwoo threw the Red Branch with all his might.
His two eyes were definitely looking at Lydia.

It was quiet.
Perhaps it was because even the medium to transmit sound had completely disappeared.

A strangely elongated timeline.
Looking at the spear slowly flying towards her without a sound, Lydia thought.

A life that had been born from desire and had only repeated victories.

She had constantly repeated it.

Even if the day came when she lost a gamble, she would not leave any regrets.

A loser was just a loser.
She would not end up in a pathetic state, wallowing in self-pity and regret, and chewing over futile remorse.

Countless scenes flashed by like a revolving lantern.

The day she received the succession as an apprentice witch, the day she surpassed the wall of tier with her brilliant talent, unlike her third-rate public figure teacher, the day she joined the Qliphoth and started a war, the day she built the Solidus Trading Company, the day she rapidly expanded her power after the Hexennacht was founded.

Lydia did not regret any of those things and let them flow by without looking back.

However, just one scene remained and did not disappear from her eyes.

The adopted daughters of the Angel’s House.
Charlotte, Isabella, Patricia, Mitch, Tanya, Lepe, Maria.
The apprentice witches who had run to Lydia like puppies and acted cute.

“Maybe I should have given them more kisses back then…”

In a bitter smile, Lydia’s floating body scattered like fallen leaves that had reached the end of the season.