Badge in Azure

To other people, magic scrolls were incredibly precious. To Saleen, however, they were just another consumable.

He had acquired too much starline paper in the Imperial City of the Abyss. While such things were extremely common things to astrologers, there were still expensive to ancient mages, though they were not prohibitively so.

Scrolls were more commonly seen in ancient times, so Saleen was like someone who was living in ancient times for possessing huge amounts of starline paper. He distributed them to mages who were close to him, and used them to train mages.

Writing scrolls was a part of a mage’s magical training, and starline paper was almost immune to failure, which made it irresistible to mages.

Saleen was able to get countless mages willing to work for him simply by asking for completed scrolls in return for the starline paper he distributed. None of the mages would ask for money. In fact, they would pay Saleen to get such a privilege.

It allowed the mages to familiarize themselves with unfamiliar magic for free, which deepened their understanding of magic.

Failure in writing scrolls yielded next to no return for the mages. Only success would benefit the mages. Saleen’s mages would create scrolls for him without charge, so long as he was able to provide starline paper for them.

Saleen did not ask for money simply because that was a privilege given to his closest mages. If they had been total strangers instead, they would not get the right to create scrolls for Saleen to begin with.

As such, the scrolls that Saleen took out were all equipped with level nine magic spells. He unraveled them and dropped his altitude further, throwing them down when he was 800 meters away from the ground.

With the level ten holy masters injured and the high level leaders of the knights all wiped out, Theisio was reduced to fighting on his own.

Saleen knew that the power stored within the three godly items was limited, but the amount of scrolls in his possession would drive Theisio insane. He threw level nine magic spells like they cost nothing.

When other mages cast level nine scrolls, they would only be able to cast 24, even at Saleen’s level. However, Saleen’s mental powers allowed him to continuously cast more than 3000 of them.

The Ring of Cosmos had expanded Saleen’s mental powers by 64 times.

With level nine magic spells raining down on them, Theisio was forced to invoke defense territory. If he did not, all of his knights would be wiped clean.

360 evil angels emerged from the Flower of Evil outside the territory and headed straight for Saleen.

Saleen smirked and summoned 360 ancient figures and had them deal with the incoming angels. Both parties consisted of level nine creatures. The evil angels wielded huge curved blades, and the ancient figures were clad in Tainted Blood Armor and wielded seven meter-long spears. The figures were repairable and the angels revivable. Such battles were just fought to buy time.

“How does it feel being cornered, Theisio?” Saleen ridiculed the pope while his people continued to hunt down the knights. The demons and the figures suffered greater casualties, but the knights were the cream of the crop for the Holy See.

Theisio had a massive heartache. “Saleen, you shall…”

“I shall destroy your faith!” The Puppet Constellation above Saleen flickered with starlight. Constellation Wishing nullified the pope’s prophecy spell.

The pope’s territory continued to be hit by the level nine scrolls one after another. None of the scrolls were capable of breaking the pope’s territory, as the pope was level 11.

However, the pope’s territory had to cover the red-robed bishops, and Saleen did not mean for the scrolls to attack Theisio. They were simply meant for using Theisio’s mental powers.

Saleen’s Puppet Constellation was able to do more than provide him with puppets for combat. It also amplified the powers of astrology and earth magic. The equipment was developed by separating Saleen’s territorial powers, so Saleen had effortless control of it.

“Do you really want to do attrition warfare against me, Theisio? You’re backed by the Tanggulasi Empire and I have two countries backing me. Well, how about you just stop here and we’ll see if you, with a thousand years of accumulated wealth, would win over me, a very rich upstart?”

Theisio was getting rather pissed after being continuously provoked by Saleen, but he knew that if he got angry, he would make mistakes, and Saleen was very good at exploiting small mistakes.

He had seen enough of Saleen’s attacks and if it had not been for his men dealing with the attacks badly, he would not have lost so many powerful people around him.

While it would not happen again in the future, the fact that he had lost so many red-robed bishops and grand swordmasters remained, and that made Theisio feel as if his heart was bleeding.

He deemed himself stupid for being intimidated by Saleen then. If he had had a showdown, or simply snuck into the energy barrier, his losses would not be as considerable.The Flower of Evil continued to provide energy for the evil angels. The combat capacity of the evil angels paled in comparison to Saleen’s ancient figures, but they were restored by the Flower of Evil, making them difficult to deal with.

If Saleen’s ancient figures were broken, he would have to infuse constellation power slowly and personally to restore them.

Nicholas did not stop. The teams continued to move as the Flower of Evil spun. Saleen’s attacks consisted of huge rocks thrown downwards as well as the spells.

Saleen was totally unfettered despite seeing his attacks being unable to break the pope’s territory. He summoned over a hundred puppets and had a large magic cannon attached to every single one of them.

He was in no hurry and simply let the huge cannons fire slowly: three shots a minute.

The magic cannons were not a high level, and they were only capable of level nine attacks. However, every single shot carried the power of many level nine spells attacking at the same time.

With the magic cannons added to the fray, Theisio felt the power within his God Grace Staff being depleted at a far quicker rate. While the cannons would eventually get busted, it would only happened hundreds of shots later.

Over 100 magic cannons meant that tens of thousands of attacks could be cast, and that made them all the more terrifying compared to level nine scrolls.

“Lord Pope, just leave. Saleen won’t be able to do anything to you!” the remaining level ten red-robed bishops said. All of them sustained severe injuries and were incapable of using any skills, so they figured that they would meet their doom in the cemetery.

The only unknown factor was if their souls would be able to enter heaven after dying in a place like that.

Theisio was even more unwilling to give up his people after hearing the red-robed bishops. Furthermore, he was still getting power from the bishops to sustain his defense. If he ran away alone, he would lose the use of all the powers.

“I’m absolutely not giving up on you!”

“Oh please, Theisio. If I were able to kill you right here, right now, would you still choose to defend your people instead of running? I know you have skills for escape and you’ve got them prepped, am I right?”

“Quit your prattling, Saleen.”

“Why, I’m having fun prattling, Theisio. I didn’t expect you to shirk from my challenge despite having advanced to level 11. When I’ve gotten to a level as high as yours, I wonder if you’ll turn and run like a dog when you see me.”

Saleen no longer sounded like a mage; he did not even sound like a noble or royalty anymore. Such crass words made him sound like a Sikeqinyan merchant instead.

Theisio got truly angry. How did I get so screwed up at the hands of someone like that?

Saleen’s lightning icicles were not restored yet. There was no need to use level ten or level 11 scrolls for ranged attacks. He had more level nine scrolls to spare, with some even gotten from the Grandmaster.

In Grandmaster’s perspective, level nine scrolls were bestowed to his troops. One could only imagine how large his stock of such scrolls was.

He was in charge of the entire rear end of the army, and one distribution to a regiment at the rear cost him tens of thousands of scrolls. Consumption of scrolls was extremely huge when the armies went to war in other planes.

Theisio’s party continued to dwindle in number. Nailisi had Sul attack while she held onto the Grey Memory, on guard against hidden powerful ones among the knights.

The other two teams behaved in a similar manner. The ones with comparative low level commanded their troops to hunt the knights, while the ones of high levels supported them from behind, to ensure that nothing would go wrong.

Theisio shrunk the size of his territory to the minimum, protecting only the holy masters. The knights were in deep trouble.

Anyone who encountered such predicaments would be very frustrated. Theisio had powerful godly items and his level was even higher than Saleen, but his skills enabled him to ignore level differences. That one shot from the Crystal Finger was something that Theisio never wanted a taste of ever again.

However, Saleen simply caused Theisio to waste his power with scrolls after he refused Saleen’s challenge.

Saleen was right in saying that he was an upstart and that he was in a match with Theisio to see how among them was more wealthy.

“Theisio, you fail at being a qualified enemy.” Saleen continued, “I found how easy it is for me to take care of your people. There is a saying among the Sikeqinyans that goes, ‘any trouble that can be solved with money is no trouble at all’.”

Saleen began to boast with impunity. He discovered that using the movement skills that he learned from Jalin was effortless when he was under the Puppet Constellation. While his control was not as fine as Jalin, he was able to use it unparalleled when running away.

Theisio was utterly incapable of keeping up with him, and was only able to use ranged divine spells for attack. Saleen’s Thundering Sound skills also made him virtually immune to Theisio’s prophecy spells.

“My lord, leave us. It would suffice if you were able to escape, Mobilize the oracles to destroy Metatrin City to avenge us!” The holy masters tried Theisio again.

Theisio was actually troubled. He wanted to escape, but the Magical Element Tower blocked the exit and he needed sacrifices from his people to move the tower aside.

However, there was no way he could ask for such a thing. He only deemed it necessary to sacrifice the holy masters when things were dire.

The Flower of Evil continued to spin, and no one dared to stop them from the front, so Nailisi and the others resorted to tail from the rear. If Theisio had been able to thoroughly utilize the power of the Flower of Evil itself, Saleen would have run into the energy barrier a long time ago.

The hunt was difficult for the side that hunted as well. The knights were organized in a squadron of 40 units, and every one of them was able to enhance their powers by one whole level all of a sudden. There were over 1000 demons dead so far.

All of the demons were painstakingly selected and were all clad in devil flying armor. They were a step away from grand swordmasters in terms of combat capacity.

However, when such demons had to face knights using Heaven Knight skills, one thrust of the spear was all it took to take them out. The knights were giving up their lives but nobody cared, as they would enter heaven after death anyway.