Supreme Magus novel Chapter 553

Lith looked at his clock. There was still half an hour before the Wardens sent by the army would start tearing down the underground complex. He had no intention of calling off the attack. Not until he was sure that the orc shaman was no more.

"Can you turn off the device?" Lith asked Ratpack while pointing at the amplifier.

"No. We must wait for master."

Lith cursed his bad luck and used Clean Slate on the barrier surrounding the amplifier to no avail. The spell required physical contact to work and the paranoid lich had shielded his creation on purpose.

Invigoration too worked in a similar way, so that Lith’s only way to pass time was to study the pseudo core of the various barriers around the lab, hoping that Solus could reproduce them to improve her tower form’s defenses.

***

Zolgrish and Dann’Kah were locked in a deadly embrace. None of them could allow to let go of the other because the undead energies kept moving back and forth from their bodies.

Choosing the wrong moment to push away the opponent would have meant to lose all hope of regaining their freedom. The lich would end up being trapped inside a body even inferior to that of a skeleton forever, while the orc shaman would have been reverted to his fallen state.

To add insult to injury, he would be crushed under the weight of his magic crystal and be defeated without even getting a chance to fight back.

He was able to keep the crystal compressed in the form of a ring only thanks to the undead energies coursing through his body. They restored the powers his bloodline possessed before the fall and granted him the lich’s inhuman strength.

Even if it appeared small, the ring actually weighed over a hundred kilograms, something he couldn’t lift with just one finger in his orc form. The tug of war of sheer willpower was quite balanced.

The orc-elf drew his strength from the grudge he held against the lich and from the echoes of the past shamans inhabiting his ring. The moment they perceived the lich’s mind, they stopped harassing Dann’Kah and joined his efforts, having mistaken Zolgrish for a member of the dreaded demon race.

Despite his current madness, Zolgrish had the indomitable will of all those who had not only sacrificed most of their humanity to achieve lichhood, but also had survived the excruciating pain that severing part of their soul and mana core involved.

He had the home advantage as well, since it was his body that the undead energies were supposed to inhabit. Unfortunately, the long imprisonment the lich had undergone and the support the magic crystal gave Dann’Kah were enough to even the field.

"I knew I should have never bestowed upon you such a huge crystal, you ungrateful dog! Without me, you would be no better than a wild beast, only worried about your survival!" The lich said.

"Without you, I would still have my tribe and my dreams. You slaughtered them all for your experiments and enslaved me! Yours are no gifts, but curses." Dann’Kah rebuked.

Zolgrish had Warped them to the Disciplining Hall, where he had killed Dann’Kah over and over again to break him into submission. He hoped that both his words and the dreadful memories linked to such a place would give him an edge.

Yet the orc-elf didn’t flinch. Contrary to Zolgrish’s expectations, his maneuver backfired.

Up until that moment, the lich’s will had been like a black fog, slowly engulfing everything on its path, whereas the orc’s had been like a fire fueled by his hatred that consumed the darkness on its wake.

"Am I?" Zolgrish replied with a smug voice. _{freewёbnoνel.com}