I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 866: Time

Although the first bout had gone badly from the outset, Azrael's expression remained calm as ever.

He merely gave Viola, still standing upon the dueling platform, one indifferent glance, then withdrew his gaze without any sign of annoyance.

The other wizard behind him, however, plainly did not possess that same composure.

“I will go.”

A low voice rang out.

Out of the crowd a powerfully built young wizard had already strode forward. He was precisely the wizard who had come out beside Jessie earlier.

His upper body wore nothing but a short black robe, leaving both arms and his chest bare.

That unrestrained appearance, paired with the aggressive air belonging solely to a combat-system wizard, made him look at first glance more like some berserker come from who knew where.

He trod barefoot upon the stone tiles of the dueling platform, and with every step that came down the hard slabs would give off a faint “crack.”

This was not because his weight was too great, or because he was treading with too much force. All manner of protective arrays had been laid within this garden, after all, and to crush the tiles by simple weight or strength would have been quite difficult.

The real reason was the layer of faint, half-perceptible fluctuation of power that hung about his body at all times.

That power ate away at every substance that came into contact with him.

The moment a stone tile touched the sole of his foot, its internal structure was as though sliced apart, dense cracks surfacing all across it.

Kastilla took one look and introduced him in a low voice:

“Rashid. Peak of the sixth level, majoring in the Law of Disintegration.”

Seeing Jie Ming nod slightly, Kastilla went on:

“His fighting style is a mad one. The Law of Disintegration is in itself a law exceedingly well suited to combat, after all. It can produce destruction directly from within the internal structure of matter, of energy, and of law itself.”

“Wizard artifacts, spells, even spatial structures. Anything he manages to touch may well collapse outright. So do take a little care.”

Viola, who had already drifted back down beside them, suddenly gave Jie Ming a light nudge with her elbow.

“Look sharp.” She lowered her voice, a smile at the corner of her mouth. “Do not embarrass us!”

Jie Ming: “…”

“When have I ever lost face?”

“Am I not reminding you in advance?”

By now Rashid had already mounted the dueling platform.

He looked at Jie Ming and raised an eyebrow, then lifted his right hand and crooked his fingers lightly:

“Get up here!”

His tone was full of undisguised provocation.

Jie Ming, however, only smiled. The ground beneath his feet rippled faintly, and he rose slowly into the air as though borne up by an invisible wind, then came down light as a feather at the other end of the dueling platform.

Taking in the state Jie Ming was in, Rashid's brows drew together. “You intend to fight me with that puppet body?”

Jie Ming nodded. “It will do well enough.”

Rashid's face darkened in an instant.

Both fists clenched, the veins standing out on the backs of his hands, the muscles of his neck drawing faintly taut, and even the blood vessels at his temples surfacing faintly. He looked to have been thoroughly enraged.

In fact, though… his spiritual sea was eerily cold.

Jie Ming's reputation being as great as it was, he was hardly going to truly lose his reason over a single remark.

Quite the opposite: Rashid had already begun calculating inwardly.

This opponent was absolutely not to be underestimated.

According to the intelligence they had gathered, one of the things this Wizard Jie Ming was most famous for was his attainment in knowledge of the spatial category.

So in the fight he would have to take care to restrict space, breaking it without pause, producing disintegration in the spatial structure without pause, so that the other party could not move about freely by relying on spatial magic.

When the fight came he could probe first with ranged attacks, and if that would not serve, then he would have to shorten the distance as far as he possibly could.

Once he was inside close range, the advantages of the Law of Disintegration would come fully into play.

And even if close combat would not serve, he still had a trump card.

That newly developed spell of his had never been used in public. If he truly were driven into a corner, he would use it to turn the whole thing around!

Every sort of battle plan came together at speed in Rashid's mind. At his speed of thought, running through the whole of the combat procedure took less than a single instant in the world outside.

All the while feigning that furious expression, Rashid drew his weapon out of a spatial storage device: a pair of gauntlets sheathed in pitch-black metal armor.

He had just made to put them on…

“Rashid.”

A voice came suddenly from below the platform, and Rashid's movement froze.

That was… Mentor Azrael's voice.

“Come down.”

Rashid was stunned.

And his own mentor's next sentence left him utterly dazed.

“You have lost.”

“…Eh?”

Rashid stood where he was, his face all bewilderment. He looked down at his gauntlets, then over at Jie Ming across from him, and then slowly turned his head.

“Teacher?”

Azrael offered no explanation and only looked at him calmly.

Rashid's gaze swept the surroundings once more.

At some point he had not noticed, the atmosphere of the entire garden had changed.

Gaze after gaze had gathered upon him.

Shock.

Sympathy.

Astonishment.

And even a measure of… some strange pity.

The exchanges of mental energy around him had grown suddenly and unusually frequent besides, countless pieces of information passing back and forth in the briefest span of time.

Rashid opened his mouth, and a powerful sense of injustice welled up in him all at once.

“Hold on… I have not even got my weapon on yet! How have I lost already?”

“Are you all simply taking it as read that I cannot beat him, purely because the man opposite is Jie Ming?”

“If it actually came to a fight, who would win and who would lose is far from settled!”

“Besides…” He gripped the gauntlets tight. “I still have a new spell I have not used!”

As though he had seen the grievance in the man's heart, a strand of Jessie's mental energy dropped soundlessly into his consciousness.

An image of a battle, clear beyond compare, surfaced at once before Rashid's eyes.

“This is…”

Watching the memory his senior brother had passed to him, his pupils contracted abruptly.

Within the image, the fight had, of all things, already begun.

“When?”

The self within the image had already begun to act, exactly according to the plan he had laid a moment ago: break the space, close in, restrict Jie Ming's movement, and then…

Attack!

Spell after spell, each carrying the power of disintegration, surged madly toward Jie Ming.

Nor did Jie Ming sit still and await his death. Bolt after bolt of light shot abruptly out, yet attacks of that kind were shattered by the power of disintegration on the instant.

But Rashid's figure flickered, and he had already charged to close quarters.

The fist came thundering out.

Bang!

Jie Ming's puppet was smashed apart outright.

A trace of delight surfaced in Rashid's eyes.

But in that very moment… the whole image suddenly began to run backward.

The shattered puppet congealed anew.

The wreckage scattered across the sky flew back the way it had come.

The space that had been blasted open was restored whole again.

And Rashid stood once more in his original position.

“…”

Watching it, his pupils dilated bit by bit, as though he had realized something.

A second time.

The fight began again.

This time Jie Ming knew every one of his movements in advance, and very quickly pressed Rashid down into a losing position. In the end… Rashid still spent everything he had to force his way into close combat.

Gritting his teeth, he played his last trump card: that new spell of his that he had kept hidden so long.

“Great Collapse.”

He spoke the name in a low voice.

Within the image, the whole of the dueling platform was disintegrating, for all the great number of arrays protecting it.

Space, elements, energy… every structure began to come apart at once, and the terrifying Law of Disintegration swallowed everything up like a tsunami.

But in the next moment… it all flowed backward once more, returning to the beginning.

As though everything that had just happened had never existed at all.

Having watched through to the end of the mirrored memory passed to him, Rashid went completely rigid, a bead of cold sweat sliding slowly down his temple.

At last he understood.

Why his teacher had told him to come down.

Why the gazes of those people around him were so very strange.

Throughout the academic exchange conference, everyone had known that Jie Ming's talent in spatial studies was astonishing.

But nobody had ever imagined… that his time law had reached such a degree as well!

The time law Jie Ming had mastered could already return the state of existence of a localized region directly to an earlier point in time, and that even included the enemy himself being carried backward along with it.

Power of that sort… how did it differ from simply loading a save in a game?!

Rashid raised his head stiffly and looked toward Jie Ming at the other end of the dueling platform.

That face still wore its gentle smile.

Up on the platform, Jie Ming had already withdrawn the Ash Return to Origin Hand, and the grey-white radiance dispersed slowly.

He bowed slightly to Rashid. “You were gracious.”

Then he turned, his figure swaying lightly, and drifted down from the dueling platform.