Chapter 1295. A Hundred Reflections, and Every One of Them Looks Annoyed

Chapter 1295: 1295. A Hundred Reflections, and Every One of Them Looks Annoyed

On the lawn below, the spectators were no longer merely watching a fight; they were witnessing the dissection of a legend.

The air around them hummed with the displaced energy of the two titans clashing overhead, each magical discharge sending shockwaves that ruffled the grass like waves on a lake.

"She is more dangerous than I thought," Cassandra muttered.

Her voice was tight, strained by an intensity she couldn’t suppress. Her eyes, sharp as her blade, never left the two figures silhouetted against the morning sky.

Her sword remained sheathed, but her free hand had drifted unconsciously to her stomach, fingers curling against the fabric as if bracing for an impact that was still miles away. "She isn’t holding back..."

"Every spell is a new language, a new equation... She hasn’t repeated a single pattern."

Gorvasha let out a laugh, a great, booming sound that seemed to vibrate in her very bones, defiant in the face of the impending doom.

"By the gods, look at her go!" she roared, her eyes bright with something resembling respect. "I would have crossed the Underlayer on my bleeding knees just for the chance to trade blows with a woman like that in my youth!"

"That is not a mage; that is a force of nature!"

Lilith said nothing. She stood like a statue carved from grief, her fingers twisting compulsively into the fabric of her sleeves, knuckles white.

Her gaze was fixed on the sky, her expression caught in a terrifying limbo between awe and absolute horror.

Behind the protective stone wall, the atmosphere was different. It was quieter, more intimate, and infinitely more devastating.

Valentina had begun to speak. Her voice was low and steady, but it carried the hollow timbre of someone reading an epitaph.

Lily and Diana had instinctively moved to her sides, clinging to her like children seeking shelter in a storm, their eyes drawn irresistibly to the carnage above.

"This is the Gale Scythe," Valentina whispered, her voice cracking as she identified the first major maneuver. "She invented it when she was nineteen..."

"The first time the world called her a prodigy."

A moment later, a crescent of compressed air tore through the sky with a sound like a guillotine blade cutting through silk. SHING! nearly missing Rex’s head.

"That one..." Valentina continued, her voice growing more fragile, "...is a variant of the Stone Colossus."

"Her father taught her to weave it from soil rather than granite, making it lighter, faster, more vicious."

She named them like a mother reciting the names of her children as they died one by one. Each spell she identified was a piece of Helena’s soul, a memory of her growth, her suffering, and her triumph.

As she spoke, Valentina’s hands shook violently, the words tumbling out of her mouth as if she were trying to memorize Helena’s legacy before it was erased from existence.

Above them, the sky itself seemed to ignite.

Helena’s desperation had reached its breaking point. She couldn’t outmaneuver him; she couldn’t outthink him.

So she would simply burn him out of the sky. She threw her arms wide, her wings of wind snapping taut, and screamed a word that sounded less like magic and more like a prayer to a dead god.

"PHOENIX!"

The reaction was instantaneous. From the center of Helena’s chest, a spiral of molten gold erupted. It wasn’t fire produced by combustion; it was fire produced by pure will.

The construct spiraled upward, unfolding wings that spanned as wide as a manor house, each feather a blade of living flame that shed sparks like burning rain.

SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

The phoenix let out a shrill, piercing shriek that echoed off the Academy’s marble towers, a sound that felt like it was tearing at the eardrums of everyone in Aethelgard.

It dove at Rex with terrifying precision, its beak thrust forward like a lance and its talons spread wide to rake the flesh from his bones. The heat was so intense that the air around the creature began to ripple and distort, creating a visual distortion field that made the bird look like a hallucination.

This was the Phoenix Conflagration.

A legendary spell from the Starlight family’s most sacred grimoire, a spell Rex had studied in ancient texts, marveled at in theory, but had never once believed he would see unleashed in the flesh.

Rex did not flinch as the avian nightmare bore down on him. He did not retreat.

Instead, he planted his feet in midair, using his own supernatural momentum to anchor himself, and raised both hands in a violent, upward gesture.

"Hydros Spiral!"

From the garden pond hundreds of feet below, the water didn’t just rise; it screamed. A massive, streaming column of liquid tore itself from the pond, ascending in a roaring column that wrapped around Rex in a corkscrew of impossible pressure.

The water spun so fast it began to hum, a low frequency vibration that rattled the teeth of everyone watching from below.

When the Phoenix Conflagration slammed into the spinning vortex, there was no graceful collision. There was an explosion.

BOOOOOOOOOM!

It sounded like a massive cannon firing underwater. A sphere of superheated steam detonated outward in every direction, a white shockwave that momentarily blinded the city.

The phoenix’s flaming head was instantly vaporized, its majestic form dissolving into harmless sparks as the water swallowed the fire. But Rex’s spell did not break.

The water vortex remained intact, spinning with vicious intensity, a few yards wide and humming with lethal force.

With a guttural roar, Rex thrust his hands forward, sending the water spiral spearing through the steam clouds toward Helena like a massive, liquid drill.

Helena screamed as the water drill shrieked past her, the displaced air nearly tearing her wings apart. She banked hard to the left, her wings flaring with desperate energy.

"You think you can brute force your way through my art? Reflect!"

She slammed her palms together with enough force to crack bone.

"Frost Mirror Labyrinth!"

The air around Rex didn’t just freeze; it crystallized into architecture. Tall, jagged panels of perfect ice sprouted from the empty sky, each one as clear as polished diamond, each angled at impossible geometries.

In the span of two heartbeats, Rex was no longer in the open sky; he was trapped in the center of a deadly, refracting maze of reflections. A hundred versions of his own face grim, determined, and monstrous stared back at him from a hundred cold, unforgiving surfaces.

Rex spun in a slow, deliberate circle, his eyes narrowing as he tried to track her position through the kaleidoscopic nightmare. But the mirrors were too perfect; they scattered light and movement until he couldn’t see Helena at all.

He was alone in a prison of ice.

Then came the lightning.

"Tempest Chain Lightning!" Helena’s voice rang out, distorted by the wind.

It didn’t come as a single bolt. It came as a predator. A jagged streak of violet-white electricity tore through the sky and struck the nearest mirror with a bone-jarring CRACK THOOM!

The lightning didn’t dissipate; it obeyed the geometry of the labyrinth. It leapt from mirror to mirror, forking and branching like living veins of energy.

Each panel caught the strike and redirected it at a new angle, turning the labyrinth into the inside of a deadly thundercloud.

"Damn it!" Rex hissed as a bolt arced mere inches from his chest.

The smell of ozone burned his nostrils.

He threw himself into motion. He dropped beneath one fork of lightning, the heat searing the hair on his arms, then rolled over another that shattered the mirror beside him into a million glittering teeth.

K CHAK!

The shards of ice rained down like deadly confetti, but the lightning was faster. The chain continued its deadly dance, leaping through the floating fragments of broken glass, finding new paths, seeking his flesh.

Rex gritted his teeth, his muscles bulging as he fought to stay ahead of the electrical storm.

"You’re trying to trap me in my own reflection?" he growled to himself, blood trickling from a small cut on his forehead where a shard of ice had grazed him. "Try harder, Helena."

With a precise flick of his wrist, he conjured a blade of compressed air thin as a razor’s edge and twice as sharp.

Fshhhhhhht!

The wind blade sliced through the nearest mirror, splitting it cleanly in two. The ice shattered, cascading downward in a glittering waterfall, but the lightning didn’t care about the debris.

It simply leapt through the broken fragments, finding new angles, turning the labyrinth into a chaotic web of death that closed in on him tighter with every passing second.