Chapter 491: Art Mystique : Heaven’s Fall
Centuries had passed like a slow poison in the veins of Diavolo Star Giovanna. The man who now stood at the edge of the sacred clearing was no longer the Italian scientist who wandered through the rubble of the Third World War in a torn lab coat.
His face, although retaining an eternal youth due to his mutation, bore the stigmata of a millennial obsession. His eyes no longer sought to quantify the atom, but to pierce the veils of reality through divination and the Mystical Arts.
All his experiments to find Norah had proven unsuccessful, but they had at least allowed him to lift the veil on the identity of her captors.
Through forbidden rituals and dives into the ethereal currents, Diavolo had understood that the King of Spirits, the Taurus Constellation, aided by his seven daughters, the Pleiades, was the instigator of his wife’s abduction.
What he still did not understand was the "why". Why target a mutated human when the whole world had them.
Diavolo advanced toward the World Tree, the Yggdrasil, whose bark pulsed with a provocative golden glow. His leather boots crushed the grasses laden with arcane dew with deliberate heaviness.
"I know you are watching me," said Diavolo in a low voice, but whose vibration made the leaves of the giant ferns tremble. "I have crossed the limits of mortality for this moment. Give her back to me, or I will reduce this sanctuary to ashes."
The silence of the forest was broken by a sudden rustling. Several silhouettes emerged from the canopy and the massive roots of the tree. There were about twenty of them, with a frail and elegant appearance, pointed ears and eyes shining with an elemental glow. They were Mage Elves, the first guardians chosen by the spirits.
Their light robes floated around their slender limbs, and each of them held a staff of living wood or was already channeling mana between their tapered fingers.
"He is back," spat one of the elves, a mage from the Spina clan whose gaze burned with hatred. "You will not defile this sacred place any further with your unholy presence."
Without waiting, the elves launched their first incantations.
< Natural Magic : Roots of the Abyss !>
< Spell : Storm of Sharp Petals !>
The ground exploded under Diavolo’s feet as thorny roots burst forth to restrain him, while a storm of leaves sharp as razor blades rushed toward him. Diavolo did not move his arms. He simply let his 5-star Genesis aura deploy.
An invisible and crushing pressure spread over fifty meters, turning the grass to dust and pulverizing the roots before they could even touch him.
"You are wasting your mana for nothing," commented Diavolo with a mocking smile, smoothing back a lock of his blond hair.
He disappeared in a blur of movement. Despite his mystical power, Diavolo had retained the brutality of hand-to-hand combat, a domain in which the elves were tragically deficient. He instantly reappeared in front of the first mage. Before the elf could complete his next spell, Diavolo seized his face with a firm hand.
"Too slow," he murmured.
He injected a pulse of pure aura directly into the elf’s skull. The internal pressure became such that the mage’s eyeballs burst with a spongy sound before his head fractured under Diavolo’s brute force. He hurled the corpse against two of his companions, knocking them down like wooden pins.
The other mages, terrified, tried to create a wind barrier, but Diavolo was already in their midst.
Gray aura blades that sectioned limbs and throats with surgical precision. The elf blood, of a too vivid red, sprayed the flowers of the Yggdrasil as Diavolo chained elbows and backhands, breaking the frail rib cages in dry cracks of crushed bones.
In a few minutes, the clearing was transformed into a charnel house. The remaining mages, wounded and trembling, retreated toward the trunk of the giant tree. Diavolo joined his hands, his fingers tracing a complex Mudra at a speed that the naked eye could not follow.
"Since you refuse discussion, I will force the entrance," he declared, his eyes shining with a pure Genesis glow.
He began to channel a colossal amount of energy toward the sky. The clouds began to swirl violently, turning to a dark red under the effect of his destructive will.
< Mystical Art : Heaven’s Fall >
< Apocalyptic Meteorite !>
A mass of incandescent rock, saturated with mana, began to pierce the atmosphere, aiming directly at the heart of the forest. The elves screamed in terror, realizing that the man before them was ready to commit genocide for his obsession.
It was then that the air froze. A tornado of bluish wind and frost shards burst from the branches of the Yggdrasil, sweeping the meteorite before it touched the ground. In the middle of this cyclone, a silhouette appeared, floating with divine grace. Her long white hair floated like silk veils, and her mother-of-pearl eyes fixed Diavolo with an unfathomable sadness.
"Norah ?" stammered Diavolo, his hands falling along his body as his heart skipped a beat. "What... what are you doing here ?"
The woman he had searched for for centuries stood before him, but her aura was no longer human. She radiated a power that rivaled that of the Constellations.
"Sorry, Diavolo..." began Norah, her voice a melodious whisper that seemed to come from everywhere at once. "But I can only obey..."
She raised her delicate hands toward the sky. Instantly, the temperature dropped by several tens of degrees. A tornado of lightning, of an electric blue so intense that it became blinding, formed around her before rushing straight toward Diavolo.
The sorcerer widened his eyes. This power... it was no longer elf or human magic.
"This... This is the power of a god."
He knew that even if he used his most powerful mystical shield, he was going to die under the impact.
At the last moment, in a final gesture of survival, he performed a quick Mudra that he had only used in his darkest divination visions.
< Mudra : Spiritual Eye !>
His perception changed radically. The world became a web of energy flows and invisible links. Through the lightning tornado, he saw the truth. Norah was not free. Thick golden mana chains, of prodigious thickness, wrapped around her entire body, plunging deep into the bark of the gigantic Yggdrasil tree. She was only a puppet, bound to the very source of the spirit world.
"What is this ?" he exclaimed, as time seemed to dilate under the effect of his mystical eye.
It was then that he saw a sort of translucent hologram floating right in front of his wife’s field of vision, invisible to everyone except him at that precise moment.
[ System of the Queen of Spirits.
Main Quest : Kill Diavolo Star Giovanna.]
"A system !? What the hell is this shit ?"
The lightning struck him head-on.