Pain surged from the severed stump of his left arm in searing waves that crashed into Lucian's head, making his nerves spasm and his skull feel ready to burst. Yet Lucian paid it no mind at all. Clenching his teeth, he accelerated and in an instant circled around to face the flesh puppet knight head-on, dodging its great axe and slamming into its body.
His intact right fist swung out in a savage punch, striking the metal faceplate that covered the puppet knight's face. With a dull clang, the black metal visor dented slightly, while the skin on Lucian's right hand split open, blood seeping through.
The great axe swept back in a return cut. Lucian dropped low, evading the blow, then dissolved into an afterimage once more as he circled the flesh puppet knight, leveraging his enormous speed advantage to repeat the same sequence: dodge the axe, crash into its body, hammer the faceplate with his right fist…
One punch, two punches, three punches. The dents in the black metal visor grew ever more pronounced, but Lucian's right hand was turning into a mangled ruin. Every impact felt like ten thousand steel needles piercing into his bone marrow.
Four punches, five punches, six punches… Lucian seized another opportunity and crashed into the flesh puppet knight's chest. Using its tall, massive body and thick, cold armor as a fulcrum, he twisted his waist, rotated his hips, drove his shoulder forward, and channeled every ounce of his remaining strength into one devastating punch.
With a deafening crack, flesh and blood sprayed from Lucian's right hand, exposing stark white bone beneath. The black visor shattered completely, its fragments spinning through the air like scattered shrapnel!
Beneath the ruined faceplate, a ghastly face was revealed—pale, covered in sinister black patterns, as though stitched together from patches of different skins.
The punch's momentum was far spent. Carrying the brutal ferocity that had shattered the metal visor, it smashed directly into that horrifying face, reducing it to pulp.
Stripped of its metal armor, and being merely a formal-rank knight puppet without any intelligence to speak of, how could the flesh puppet withstand Lucian's full-powered assault—especially when its head was the weakest point in its defenses?
From the very beginning, Lucian had intended to end this quickly. Acting on his knowledge of flesh puppets, he had deliberately chosen a direct, head-on confrontation to smash through its skull!
Amid the spray of blood and flesh, metal fragments clattered to the ground. The great axe slipped from the puppet's grasp and embedded itself in the stone floor. The flesh puppet knight, clad in its heavy black armor, buckled at the knees and crashed to the ground with a thunderous thud, its ruined head hanging low—motionless, never to move again.
In Carina's clear green eyes, she saw Lucian's reflection: his linen tunic stained with blood in a dozen places, his left arm missing most of its length below the shoulder, the severed end still writhing and spurting crimson. His right fist was stripped down to bare bone, blood dripping steadily onto the floor. And yet he turned and walked back toward her with an utterly nonchalant air, like a knight who had just waded through a blood-soaked battlefield.
*Is he truly a mage?* The sheer force of that image struck Carina to her core. The contrast with before was almost too staggering to process.
Then she watched as Lucian took a few steps, bent slightly, and used his right hand—already beginning to heal—to wrench the extraordinary great axe from the ground. He then strode rapidly toward her.
*He's coming toward me?*
A thick, metallic scent of blood flooded Carina's nostrils, making her head swim. She watched as Lucian tucked the great axe under his left arm and reached out with his right hand to press against the collar around her neck.
Guttural, halting words—difficult to pronounce and impossible to replicate—rang out beside Carina's ears. Combined with Lucian's current appearance, he looked every bit like a demon summoned from the depths of an abyss.
Lucian concentrated his focus. Just as a knight would when activating a magical artifact, he used his willpower in place of spiritual energy to recite the spell he had devised after analyzing the structure of the Anti-Magic Collar. At the same time, the bloodline power in his right hand pierced into the collar's critical mechanism.
A silver-white arc of electrical serpents lashed outward. Carina convulsed slightly, but almost immediately the Anti-Magic Collar emitted a sharp *click*, and all her pain vanished.
Seizing the moment, Lucian gripped the collar and hurled it far away.
In midair, the Anti-Magic Collar snapped shut on its own!
Lucian could only pry it open briefly. He didn't dare invade its interior to erase the old witch's spiritual imprint—that would alert her while she remained in the underground ruins!
The moment the scalp-numbing sensation faded, Carina immediately felt her spiritual energy surging back at tremendous speed, rapidly filling the parched riverbed within her.
The return of her most precious possession filled Carina with elation. She bowed her head in gratitude, repeating: "Thank you, thank you…"
"Enough!" Lucian cut off her thanks without a shred of sentimentality, his voice hoarse from excessive blood loss. "Remember the incantation I recited. Then use your spiritual energy to stimulate the spot on the Anti-Magic Collar where the three patterns—the sunflower, the thorn demon tree, and the twelve signs of the zodiac—converge…"
Though one could sense the layout of the Anti-Magic Collar's patterns by instinct, with his left arm severed, the searing pain and dizziness from blood loss were battering his mind. It would be easy to press the wrong spot and be electrocited into unconsciousness. Since there was another mage present, there was no need to take that risk.
As a mage, memorizing incantations was the most fundamental of abilities. After Lucian taught her three times, Carina could repeat the words flawlessly. Beside them, Adam, Alva, and Brad understood that their only hope of escaping their Restraining Bracelets lay with Lucian, and made no move to rush him.
Carina entered a state of casting focus, calmly reciting the incantation as her spiritual energy resonated and surged outward, piercing into the specific point on the Anti-Magic Collar around Lucian's neck.
Bands of flickering lightning coiled around Lucian's body. Long since habituated to the shocks, he didn't go numb. The moment he heard the *click*, his right hand—already poised at his neck—seized the Anti-Magic Collar and flung it away, a full second faster than Carina could have extended her left hand!
Spiritual energy surged like a rising tide. Lucian discovered that both his soul and his spiritual energy had reached the fifth rank. This didn't seem to stem solely from the electrical stimulation—there were clearly many other factors at play.
There was no time to dwell on it. Lucian activated a third-circle necromantic spell within his soul: "Mending."
Ever since