I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 896: Taking Control of the Battlefield

Jie Ming pulled back a long way before he finally drew his battered Dharma Form back in.

He released a puppet and recalled what was left of the Black Giant and dragonblood mushroom-man legions, and only then did Jie Ming have the time to look his own condition over carefully.

The inner world within his body was already a shambles. Even the cross-space energy transmission system had thrown out fine cracks from being driven past its load.

Fortunately the inner world was large enough that its foundation had taken no harm.

After thinking it over a moment, Jie Ming cast the Ash Return to Origin Hand and patched it in a few places, restoring it, barely, to the point where he could go on fighting.

He had no intention of letting his injuries mend completely all at once. This counted, after all, as a rare chance to temper himself, and a measured amount of damage would advance both the Body Forging Method and the Internal Circulation together.

That done, Jie Ming found a relatively steady piece of shattered floating rock, settled back against it, and looked into the depths of the battlefield.

Out there, Wizard Noren and Grand-Mentor Anton Buchanan had taken the fighting over completely.

Grand-Mentor Anton turned into a knot of dark gray streaming light and slammed into the densest part of the silver-gray fleet.

Boom!

Before the warship’s shields could finish layering, its entire bow had already caved inward, the armor breaking apart like paper.

Grand-Mentor Anton’s figure came out through the hole he had punched, and without the slightest pause crashed into an eighth-level mecha beside it.

The mecha’s armor and frame collapsed at once; before its energy core could self-destruct, the shock of the impact had already shaken it apart.

There seemed to be nothing elaborate about his methods at all. He simply rammed in and came out the other side, and every movement carried off a whole swath of mechanical units.

It was not that the enemy had not tried to stop him.

Energy barriers of every kind closed in from all sides, seeking to trap him at their center; spatial anchor runes were driven into the void in dense ranks, meaning to freeze the line of his movement.

Several warships even started up some unknown sealing device in concert, dropping a net of dim blue light over him.

Yet not one of these measures could truly touch that figure of his.

Boom!

Grand-Mentor Anton blasted a fist straight through the sealing light-net, and what power remained in it shattered against that layer of near-absolute Law Fixation on his skin, unable to leave behind so much as a trace.

Watching the way Grand-Mentor Anton fought, Jie Ming could not help being struck by it.

He had once thought that on the defensive side he had already gone far enough. The Body Forging Method plus adaptive evolution let him shrug off the overwhelming majority of uncanny attacks.

But set against Grand-Mentor Anton, it was not the same thing at all.

He himself took the blow head-on and then won immunity by adapting to it; Grand-Mentor Anton simply stood at a level where the other side could not take effect in the first place, and by “Law Fixation” consigned every gaudy trick alike to nothing.

As the fight wore on, those mechanical units learned their lesson. They no longer dared use their assorted special attacks, and could only trade energy blows with Grand-Mentor Anton honestly.

Tens of thousands of streams of eighth-level cannon fire struck Anton at once, and the glare swallowed him whole in an instant.

But when the glare dispersed, Anton still stood where he had been, without a single scorch mark on his robe.

“My turn!”

He grinned, spread his five fingers, then snapped them shut into a fist.

Rumble!

Across a wide stretch around him the mecha burst apart together, their surface protection having produced no effect whatsoever.

One could only say that meeting force with force really was the sole way of handling an eighth-level wizard, which did not mean it was any use.

After all, a wizard had been polishing his own output multiplier without pause since his apprentice days. In a head-on contest of output, how could mere eighth-level machinery ever out-push a true eighth-level wizard?

Wizard Noren, on the other side, was different; his way of fighting was another kind of scenery altogether.

Wizard Noren stood at the rear of the battlefield, watched the enemy jumping in swath upon swath, and merely raised a hand and waved it lightly.

Hum…

Points of light filled the sky, flying out from his sleeve and taking shape in midair as spears of light numbering in the millions.

The direction their blades pointed was a whole mass of escort mecha in the middle of assembling.

The spears of light came down, and that entire mass of mecha lost its voice in the rain of light, breaking apart at the midsection one after another, then devoured by the chaotic elements of the void.

The mechanical units opposite mounted their counter soon enough.

Several warships jointly started up a layer of analysis field with a dim green sheen, rapidly taking apart the rules by which the spears of light were composed, and in the space of a blink laid down a targeted layer of sealing barrier.

Wizard Noren gave that barrier a glance, his expression without a ripple in it, and raised a hand to draw.

Hum…

The spears of light dispersed in an instant, and the energy within them converted into an array so vast that it covered nearly half the battlefield.

As the array came down, the warships and mecha within its span went rigid together, their movements lagging by a second.

That one second of lag was enough.

Countless annihilation rays, fine as strands of hair, hung down out of the array, running through every motionless target and hollowing them out utterly from the inside.

At once a new fleet completed its analysis of Wizard Noren’s new method and opened a targeted energy backlash field to disrupt the array’s activation.

But seeing this, Wizard Noren had not the slightest interest in playing out the decryption with them.

One method sealed off, he changed to another at once, a supply without end, every one of them as though it would never repeat.

“The utterly intricate and the utterly plain,” Jie Ming said silently to himself.

Between the two of them, Wizard Noren and Grand-Mentor Anton displayed both faces of the wizard civilization’s combat system exactly.

One wore an opponent’s analytical capacity to death with an inexhaustible succession of spells; the other crushed everything head-on with the simplest, crudest force.

And it was precisely these two diametrically opposed extremes that let Jie Ming understand the combat logic of high-level wizards through and through.

He thought of the question that had been nagging at him all along: in outlandish fields such as curses, the uncanny, and soul corruption, the wizard civilization’s methods seemed comparatively “crude.”

It was not that high-level wizards were deficient in these areas; it was that whatever type of wizard one took, the principles of his ultimate methods all converged.

Essentially, even a school of wizardry that specialized in curses, once it fought in earnest, still made its main means of battle a matter of “enough strength sends the brick flying.”

But after seeing the posture in which these two eighth-level wizards fought, Jie Ming had it worked out.

Internally, because there were Law Solidification Domains and abilities such as Law Fixation, the higher a wizard’s level, the poorer the practical effect of all those showy abilities became.

Externally, the true opponents were the ninth-level creatures of other civilizations, and there was not one ninth-level creature that lacked the quality of “whatever it wills comes to pass.”

Facing an enemy of that level, any technique that required extra rules was as good as nothing at all.

So whether the matter was internal or external, raising the intensity of one’s output was the only general solution.

Those below took their example from those above, and so the combat style of the whole wizard civilization naturally grew simpler and cruder as well, every school in the end having to return to the road of contesting sheer bulk.

The fighting was still going on, and reinforcements on the other side were still arriving without pause.

Jie Ming could now be all but certain that what he had faced earlier really had been no more than the vanguard.