Millennium Witch

Millennium Witch Chapter 301: Lord of the Abyss

After she withdrew her gaze, a faint doubt welled up in Yvette’s heart. She trusted that she wasn’t the type to hallucinate so easily, just as she trusted that the local lord wouldn’t dispatch such a high-level army for no reason to encircle and suppress a nobody like her who had only just stuck her head out.So someone really had been spying on this place just now, and it had been a god who commanded faith spells. Since this was the Western Continent, that would make it a Demon God, right? But if it was a Demon God, why bother using such a low-level, obvious, and cumbersome method to probe her? And if it wasn’t a Demon God… were there other gods on the Western Continent who could use faith spells…?

Very soon, while Yvette was sinking into thought over that question, back in the military camp, the “Nightmare” Grus, who had been kicked flying, climbed back to his feet.

He looked utterly bedraggled. Thanks to his physique and the high-grade alchemical plate armor on his body, he hadn’t suffered serious injuries, but being covered in dust was inevitable. More importantly, under the impact just now, that armor’s surface had spread with crack after crack, and the mana light within flickered unsteadily. At a glance, it was clearly badly damaged.

“Witch…” Under the tense gazes of his subordinates, Grus drew the black greatsword from his back, his voice turning unusually low. “You… just which royal court are you from?”

In the brief moment between hitting the ground and getting up, he had immediately searched through all the well-known female demon powerhouses of the Western Continent he could think of, but none of them matched the girl before him. And if he wasn’t mistaken, the reason she’d been able to kick him flying wasn’t brute force, but some unknown magic.

What magic was that, exactly? Why had he never even heard of it? And who on earth was this witch? After waiting a moment and seeing that the witch had no intention of answering, a fierce light flashed through Grus’s eyes. He hesitated no longer, drew in a deep breath, and began to growl, “All troops, hear my command!”

“Form up! Surround her!”

“Archers and mages, prepare for long-range suppression! Heavy armor units, get up there—don’t give her a chance to breathe! Drain her mana dry!…” A barrage of orders crashed down, wrapped in the mana pressure of an eighth-tier powerhouse, instantly sweeping away the soldiers’ confusion and fear. Everyone moved at once, following his command, and closed in to completely encircle the witch standing in the open ground.

As for Grus himself, he had drawn the pitch-black greatsword from his back, his expression cold and heavy. Yes, at this point he fully understood how strong his opponent was. Even if he went all out, his own assessment of his odds of victory was barely two in ten.

But he wasn’t alone. Not only did he have Riftscar City Lord Wev and all the elites under his command, he also had his own proud magic-armor corps.

As an eighth-tier demon, he knew very well that an individual’s total mana was limited. Ten thousand standard mana units was universally recognized in the Mortal Realm as the theoretical peak upper limit of mana.

But there was no upper limit to battlefield numbers. As long as the tactics were sound, the coordination tight, and the pressure continuous, even the strongest individual would be worn down and drained in the end—you couldn’t possibly kill every time you swung without spending even a bit of mana, right? So what he had to do now was use the absolute advantage in numbers and formation, plus his own experience in drawn-out fights, to drag this battle into a war of attrition. Even if he couldn’t kill this mysterious witch on the spot, forcing her to retreat would be something he could account for to his superiors.

“Attack!” Soon, Grus roared again, and his burly frame shot forward. The greatsword wreathed in dark-red currents was raised high over his head, poised to cleave down toward Yvette. He was clearly going all in.

But Yvette had no intention of accepting the blow.

She merely lifted her hand lightly and released a semi-transparent orb of light that rippled outward.

The next instant, Grus, together with his unstoppable momentum, vanished from this world without a sound, as if he had never been there at all.

“L–Lord Grus…?” That bizarre scene made the advancing magic-armor soldiers all falter in their steps, but the inertia of years of following orders made them continue to mechanically carry out the push. After all, none of them could believe that their mighty, invincible general would just be erased like an eraser rubbing out a line, disappearing without a trace. Deep down, they were more inclined to believe this was some kind of illusion or spell of deception.

Of course, Yvette really hadn’t killed Grus. Her destruction magic still couldn’t instantly kill an eighth-tier abyssal demon, so what she had actually done was lock Grus away inside one of her unused divine realms.

Then, seeing the other soldiers still carrying out their encirclement orders, Yvette simply raised her hand and released a wide spread of pitch-black rune circles—now she could use annihilation bullets. She wasn’t a bloodthirsty person, but it would be a shame not to take the chance to collect some experimental data.

And so, as the white runes lit up one by one, countless pitch-black bullets, barely visible to the naked eye, poured out from the circles like an invisible storm, turning each demon soldier who drew near into black smoke. In that process there was no pain, no struggle—only heavy armor and weapons hitting the ground with a clatter.

“W-What is this?!” “The witch! It’s the witch’s curse!” “Run!”

“Lord Grus is dead! We’ll vanish like that too—with nothing left!” Very soon, as they watched comrade after comrade turn into black smoke for reasons they couldn’t understand, and with their backbone inexplicably gone, a surge of terror began to spread through the ranks.

Whether it was the magic-armor corps, or Riftscar City’s forces, or even Riftscar City Lord Wev himself, all of them, at that moment, turned in unison and bolted for their lives.

If even Lord Grus had been so easily “erased,” then the witch’s vile power had already exceeded the limits of anything they understood. If they didn’t run now, were they supposed to stay and be buried with him?

Thus the rout burst forth like a dam breaking and could not be stopped. In just a few minutes, the camp that had been bristling with killing intent was empty, leaving only the lonely cold wind still stirring the banners over the abandoned formation, carrying a faint, sorrowful keening.

Yvette simply stood where she was, watching quietly, with no intention of slaughtering them to the last. She had already collected over a hundred new data points and was more than satisfied. Chasing them all down just to kill them would be too cruel, even for her. Besides, she wasn’t from the Eastern Continent anyway. In her eyes, the demons still counted as people—they just didn’t look very human. After that, she lifted her head again, her violet-aster eyes turning back to the sky. There was still nothing there.

A few minutes later, Yvette entered one of her divine realms and saw Grus hanging suspended in a pure white space.

Unlike outside, at this moment he seemed to have realized something. His face was full of terror, and the instant he saw the witch appear, he tried to drop to his knees and beg for his life.

Unfortunately for him, Yvette couldn’t spare him. Not because she particularly hated the man—in fact, when she’d first learned the magic-armor corps was coming to wipe her out, she’d actually intended to subdue them, bring them to Riftscar City, and keep them around as hired muscle and general labor.

But after noticing there might be an even more mysterious onlooker behind the scenes, and considering how suspicious the very appearance of Grus and his army was, she’d changed her mind.

She needed to get to the bottom of whatever was hidden behind all this, and the safest way was to use Shadowtouch to directly devour and deconstruct Grus’s memory core and obtain every scrap of information that might be useful.

So no matter how he begged, Grus was doomed to die today.

Soon, after devouring the burly abyssal demon and paying the price of several thousand points of Aberrant Mana, a flood of memory information from Grus appeared in Yvette’s mind, sealed up like volumes of books, waiting for her to browse.

Of course, this “memory book” wasn’t that large. To conserve Aberrant Mana, she only read Grus’s memories from the last half year, and right away she locked the content she viewed onto the period when she had come to the Western Continent. From that section of memory, it didn’t take long before she “saw” the scene of Grus receiving the order to exterminate the witch. Great Lord Helarit, a fellow abyssal demon, had indeed given the command, but both his expression and tone had been distinctly odd and perplexed. And when Grus voiced doubts about the mission, Helarit had directly hinted that this was coming from “higher up.”

So who was “higher up” above the local lord?

There was only one possibility: the sole royal court that currently ruled the northern part of the continent, and the one who ruled the Abyssal Court—the “Lord of the Abyss.”

Murmuring that title to herself, Yvette began to sort through the information she had finally obtained about the current state of the Western Continent.

After the demon seraph descended and announced the stripping of the Night Demon King’s throne, the Western Continent had fallen into a whirlpool of power vacuum and inter-racial conflict. After more than a year of chaos and slaughter, it had finally settled into a tripartite arrangement of divided rule——

The “Abyssal Court,” led mainly by abyssal demons and occupying the entire northern Western Continent; the “White Night Court,” formed by the remaining old royal forces together with some smaller races, struggling to survive; and the “Burning Blood Court,” centered on the blood race and flame demons, drawing in many factions dissatisfied with the current order. But unlike the Lord of White Night, who hailed from the old royal line, or the Lord of Burning Blood, who had once been the Second Demon General, the Lord of the Abyss was a new star who had only suddenly risen to prominence in the last year or so.

He had streaked across the sky like a shooting star, seizing control of the entire north with overwhelming force, and for a time had been widely regarded as the Demon Gods’ chosen next Demon King. In others’ eyes, all the current military actions were just going through the motions while conveniently cleaning up the remnants of the old era.

Yet such a suddenly emerged, origin-unknown, and seemingly divine-realm-level mysterious powerhouse had turned his attention to her this quickly?

Wasn’t that a bit strange?

After all, she hadn’t told anyone she was coming to the Western Continent. Her departure point, route, and timing had all been top secret. On top of that, the Western Continent’s information networks were even worse than those of the Eastern Continent—they didn’t even seem to have a widespread alchemical communications network. However you looked at it, that sovereign had no reason to discover her tracks within just a few days of her stepping onto this land.

Unless a Demon God was tipping him off.

But if it really was a Demon God, then with a Demon God’s rank and control over information, any necessary details would have been passed along as well. Why would they still need such a low-level probe, one that basically picked a fight on purpose—there was no way a Demon God knew nothing about her strength, right? That would be absurd.

So whichever way she looked at it, everything behind this seemed riddled with contradictions.