I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 912: System, Drain It All!

Deep in the forest, the fighting had gone entirely to fever pitch.

Boom!

A crimson beam of cannon-fire tore past, grazing the old man’s shoulder.

Behind him a giant tree a good ten metres and more in girth burst apart on the instant, splinters flying wide like a rainstorm.

The old man might as well not have seen it at all.

He stamped down, and the mud blew apart beneath his foot.

Carried forward on the recoil, he flung himself at the man in black before him and drove in a savage punch.

Bang!

The fist came down.

The man in black’s shield held for no more than a moment before it shattered with a roar, and the man himself was struck clean off his feet and hurled backwards, smashing through several great trees before he came down hard in the mud.

The old man shook the blood from his fist and looked with a cold smile towards the leader in black a little way off.

“You old thing…” The leader’s face was overcast. “To have found this place so quickly.”

“Naturally.” The old man’s mouth split in a grin.

“However well you hide, sooner or later the tail comes out.”

As the words fell he turned suddenly side-on, and a pitch-black war-blade swept past, shaving his ear.

The old man caught the edge with a backhand.

Crack!

The blade was crushed to fragments in his bare grip.

The man in black who had struck from behind changed colour on the instant.

The old man brought up his knee.

Boom!

The man’s chest caved in where it struck him, and his whole body went flying.

In the lull, the old man said coldly, “What’s more… someone risked his life to get that intelligence out. How could I let his effort go for nothing?”

Hearing this, the leader’s face turned uglier still.

Because it came to him at once: so it really had been that student who got away who supplied the information.

To make this operation proof against any mishap, and to guard against there being some powerful figure in the military camp, he had gone so far as to transfer away the greater part of his elites, leaving only a portion of his people to deal with the students.

And who could have imagined… things had gone smoothly enough at the military camp, but among the students there had turned out to be a fifth-level apprentice!

What galled him more was that the student’s nerve should run to such lengths.

After killing the clean-up party in turn, he had not only failed to run for his life, he had even disguised himself as one of their own, slipped into the camp, and sent out the position of this place and the intelligence on the array.

“Damned thing…” the leader cursed inwardly.

He was cursing the student, and cursing the subordinates who had made such a poor job of it as well.

A whole pack of them, and they had let a gravely wounded student get away, and had a good number of their own killed into the bargain. They were nothing but a pack of good-for-nothings!

But he knew too that there was no longer any point in regret.

Fortunately, he had long anticipated that someone would come from the military department; after all, their choosing to build the array here had been no less a thing forced upon them.

This passage array made extremely high demands on energy, and the high-quality energy crystals that could truly serve as its core driving source were strictly controlled goods.

On the black markets they had access to, there was simply no getting hold of them.

Only the forward camps the military established kept them in long-term store.

More troublesome still… these high-quality crystals had been set directly into the camp’s foundation plate, and to strip them all out in a short time was next to impossible.

And so they could only build the array where they stood.

And so the exposure of the array’s position was in fact something the leader had expected all along.

At the thought, he could not help feeling a certain relief.

It was as well that, when he first gave the order for the sweep, he had deliberately left a portion of the students alive around the perimeter.

So long as those people were still there, the military would not bring down saturation fire on any large scale.

Otherwise… once the military confirmed that every student in the whole forest was dead, this old thing would very likely not even trouble to come in and look about; he would order the bombardment without a moment’s hesitation and plough the entire forest flat, and them along with it.

At that thought the leader set his teeth hard. “And what if you have found this place?”

He hacked apart an attack coming straight at him.

“It’s true that on your account the array still hasn’t been brought fully online. But the array is finished! Even without being fully opened, its power of suppression isn’t something you can hold up under alone!”

The leader was not wrong. A layer of dark red energy lay pressed about the old man’s body, flickering ceaselessly whenever he moved, binding his movements like so many chains.

“The reason the guns outside don’t dare bring fire down now is that you are still here. We need only drag it out until you’re dead…”

A vicious light showed in his eyes. “A sixth-stage transcendent like you is the finest sacrifice there could be for opening the passage!”

The old man heard him out and laughed instead. “Is that so? Well, that remains to be seen…”

He drove a sudden fist into the man in black beside him and sent him flying.

“Whether the people you’ve laid in ambush at the other camps can hold out that long.”

At that the leader’s face changed slightly.

The old man’s mouth split wide. “My people aren’t to be trifled with.”

“Then we’ll see which comes first: we kill you, or your people arrive!” the leader roared. “Kill!”

A dozen and more elite men in black sprang at him together.

In a moment blade-light, gunfire and energy shocks were all mixed together.

In the space of a few breaths the centre of the camp had turned utterly into a chaotic killing ground.

The old man, ringed in the middle by dozens of them, did not give ground but pressed forward.

Every time he struck, another man in black was hammered off his feet outright.

His fists were exceedingly heavy; at every collision of force the air around him seemed to be split open by an invisible sledgehammer.

And just as everyone’s attention was fixed upon the old man…

A slight, thin figure swept soundlessly past along the edge of the camp.

It was Jack.

He had more or less worked out how things stood: the reason Gavin had been hunted was in all likelihood that he had learned the coordinates of this array.

Jack’s eyes were fixed on that great tower, or rather on the several rows of large energy crystals beneath it.

Those crystals were larger than the energy crystals he had come by before by who knew how many times over, and every one of them gave off an energy fluctuation that set the heart pounding.

But then Jack’s gaze moved upward, to the array core set in the metal array, which had drawn in all those energy cores.

Jack licked his cracked lips. “All that energy, if the System absorbed the whole of it…”

After the enhancement, how strong would he be?

At the thought, his heartbeat began to quicken.

Jack hesitated no longer. Taking the instant when the fighting in the centre erupted, he kept his body low and felt his way carefully towards the great metal tower.

In the middle of the crowd, the old man under siege seemed to sense something, and his mouth suddenly split in a grin.

“Kill!” the old man roared abruptly.

Boom!

His aura swelled violently all at once.

The body that dozens of men in black had already held down forced its way into eruption in that single instant.

The earth caved in beneath his feet, and on the reaction the old man drove straight into the press of enemies like a tiger loosed from its cage.

Bang, bang, bang, bang!

Four men in black had no time even to react before their bodies burst apart under the unceasing succession of fists, blood and shredded flesh scattering through the air.

“The struggles of a dying man!”

The leader was startled at first, and then began to laugh savagely.

“It seems you are the one who can’t hold out! All of you, press in!”

But in the very instant he gave the order, a sense of danger, intense to the utmost degree, rose up in him.

The leader’s pupils contracted sharply. “Something’s wrong!”

He saw only a figure closing on him fast; at some point he could not name, that old thing had already charged right up in front of him.

And then, a fist!

Boom!

The leader threw up an arm to block in haste, and the terrible force sent him staggering back a dozen paces and more in an instant.

And it was precisely by seizing the moment when the old man’s sudden eruption drew every eye that Jack reached the position he had settled on.

With his enhanced body and his control, the three men in black charged with guarding the core area had not so much as noticed him.

A cold gleam swept past.

Thuck!

Three bodies fell almost at the same moment.

“Enemy!”

“Someone’s broken in!”

At last someone had noticed the disturbance, and shouts of alarm and fury ran through the camp in a moment.

Jack paid them no attention whatever.

Before he broke cover he had already made his preparations.

The black metal block had long since been taken from around his neck and bound fast to the hilt of his knife with hemp cord.

Jack raised his head and looked at the core within the great metal tower, wrapped in layer upon layer of runes.

“You’re the one.”

He sprang with all his strength, gripping the knife in both hands, and drove straight at the core like an arrow off the string.

“Stop him!”

The men in black rushed in wildly, but it was already too late.

At the very moment the point of the knife touched the core, Jack issued the command in his mind. “System, charge at full power!!!”

In an instant the whole world seemed to fall suddenly silent, as though a pause button had been pressed.

Jack could even see, perfectly clearly, a fragment of metal turning slowly in the air.

The next second.

Boom!

A terrible surge of energy erupted from within the core.

The leader’s face changed. “Impossible! The array core has a complete force field protecting it! A little animal like you…”

But however he raged, it altered nothing.

The energy in the core, brilliant before, was decaying at a furious rate, and the runes were going dark one after another.

Hum…

The great tower shook violently, and a great deal of its metal structure began to buckle.

“Core energy is falling!”

“Cut the connection, quickly! The core mustn’t be allowed to collapse!”

The men in black had all begun to panic as well.

Jack held the hilt in a death grip as strand after strand of pure energy poured wildly into the metal block bound behind it.

“Drain every last drop of it!”

As the last rune went out, the huge metal tower gave a shudder.

And then…

Rumble!!!

The whole array began to collapse from the centre.

Ring upon ring of mechanical structure snapped in succession; the great tower heeled over with a roar, and countless metal fragments flew out in every direction.

The runes that had covered the whole camp went out in great swathes in that same moment, and turned at the last to ashen grey energy dust.

Nothing was left but countless broken parts falling out of the air.

The leader stared blankly at the sight, his lips trembling in spite of himself. “How is it possible…”

The core protection of this array was enough to withstand even a full-strength blow from a sixth-stage transcendent.

When the old man had dropped out of the sky earlier and come down on the array core, it was this protection that had held him off.

That blow had indeed affected the opening of the array, but the protection had genuinely blocked the greater part of the attack!

And now… it had been stabbed out of existence by a student with a single knife?!

But the leader no longer had time to look into why.

Because in the very instant the array collapsed, the old man who had been held down slowly straightened up.

He worked his neck, then closed his fists, and his knuckles cracked one after another.

He raised his head, and his gaze settled on the leader in black.

On that face, all smeared with blood, there appeared a smile that chilled a man to the bottom of his heart.

“Now… let’s settle accounts.”

The leader in black: “…Shit!”