Chapter - 626

'White Ladies are weak to fire. According to the gazillion books I consulted recently, they burn like gasoline. I don't know what kind of relationship these two have, but if they coordinate their attacks I'll be in a pinch. I must even the field.' Lith thought.

The Mage Slayer ignored the White Lady's grievances and jumped at Lith's spell, incapable to see past the meal served in front of itself. Lith dispelled his air dome and struck with the Gatekeeper sword infused by darkness magic, the only element Mage Slayers couldn't feed upon.

The creature was unable to scream, but its eyes went wide open as the enchanted metal pierced through the orange gas, creating a gaping hole the size of a soccer ball on its chest for a split second.

'Solus, wasn't his heart supposed to be there?' Lith asked. Their vengeful heart was the source of all the powers a Mage Slayer had and also their weak point. Only a physical weapon could destroy it, but finding it wasn't easy.

The undead could move it freely inside their gaseous body, even while they were fighting.

'Yes, it was. Now it's in the nether regions.' She replied. Lith's Life Vision was blinded by the magical gas that made up the Mage Slayer's body, but her mana sense was keen enough to follow the heart's movements.

The White Lady had never stopped hurling new water. She was using it to shape a water cage to drown Lith. He was an adult, so he was bound to taste like horseshit, but beggars couldn't be choosers.

Lith blocked the lunge of the Mage Slayer, interrupting both its attack and its spell while unleashing a stream of lightning from his hand. The electricity traveled through the water and entered the White Lady's mouth, setting her ablaze from the inside.

It wouldn't have been so easy in normal circumstances. The starvation had turned her flesh into dried meat, making it even more inflammable than a White Lady already was.

The undead turned into a pyre while screaming in agony. It took her less than a second to be reduced to a wet pile of ashes.

Now that Lith could focus on a single opponent, he conjured a thick layer of spirit magic around himself. It would be useless against a gaseous opponent, but the enchanted blade the Mage Slayer was using was physical.

Lith used spirit magic to envelope the sword more each time it clashed with his Gatekeeper, making it slower as his grip over the blade of the enemy became stronger. The Mage Slayer wasn't able to use fusion magic and with its sword being constantly pulled in random directions, it was unable to complete a single spell

Soon the second undead was at Lith's mercy.

Spirit magic kept its blade locked in Lith's left hand while the Gatekeeper in his right hand cut through its body so fast that its heart was perfectly visible, no matter where the Mage Slayer moved it.

Lith cut the heart into small pieces and kept cutting it until the smoke stopped regenerating. Unfortunately, the sword disappeared as soon as the undead was vanquished.

A Mage Slayer's physical body actually consisted of two parts: the heart and the blade.

'It's very odd, Solus. According to the books, the sword should be an exact replica of the blade master's weapon. Yet in the pictures we found, their enchanted weapons had nothing special. I'd remember so many runes.' Lith thought.

'Yeah. It's likely due to Huryole being very ancient. If the Mage Slayer was centuries old, maybe so it was the Forgemastering process they used when it was still alive. It's too bad that conjured blades have no pseudo core. We might have learned a lot.' She sighed.

'Look at the bright side. If the path in front of us continues to be straightforward, those creatures would have reached the exit in no time and then we would have been forced to come here to slay them.

'Not only did we save ourselves a trip, but also we might get deeper inside the city than anyone else ever managed to!' Lith replied, regretting his words the moment he thought them.

'Way to jinx it, Lith.' Solus chuckled, hoping that for once they would be lucky.

Before moving on, Lith searched the room. The dormitory was a long rectangular room, and least 100 meters (330 feet) long with four-poster beds lined up against the wall. In front of each bed there was a dimensional chest, ready to be imprinted.

'This is even odder. According to Professor Wanemyre, a magical item that's not imprinted can't last long. Then how can these dimensional chests be in perfect condition?' Lith thought.

'Maybe they are also full!' Solus said.

'I told you to look at the bright side, not to start daydreaming. This is barely the third room. We might as well be like the hundredth visitor or something.' Lith still imprinted one of the chests to probe its contents.

It contained a chamber pot, some kind of odd looking pajamas, and a set of items for personal hygiene.

'This place must be very old if they expected the residents to use chamber pots. It means they had yet to discover how to use mana crystals to obtain tap water.' Lith thought.

Their path kept being straightforward only for a few more rooms. Lith found a training weapons warehouse, an office filled with paperwork written in an unknown language, and a canteen bigger than the village of Lutia before they met a crossroads.

At that point, Lith checked his pocket watch and started to draw a map. During his past visits, he had never managed to get very far due to his busy schedule and the abundance of monsters.

According to the army's information, every time a monster was killed, it was sent back to square one, near Huryole's core. Also, the city was built on multiple levels and all the rooms would be shuffled every time the labyrinth rearranged itself.

Lith had no idea what floor the city core was on, nor where the good stuff could be stored. Yet the prospect of finding ancient artifacts and study the pseudo core of a being capable of resurrecting its minions without taking away their free will drove him to continue his search.

After several more offices, pantries, and even an inner garden bigger than a football stadium, Lith was about to run out of time. He started to run and avoided searching the rooms hoping to find something useful.

When he stumbled into a Forgemastering lab, Lith knew that it would be his last stop. There were so many enchanted items to almost blind their magical senses. The Forge in the middle of the room was made of an unknown metal.

One second it was white with black veins all over it and the next second it was black with white veins. The Forge was solid, but its surface constantly changed, as if there were two colliding forces battling for dominion over it

Lith struck it with the hilt of the Gatekeeper, making it emit a crystal clear sound he had never heard before.

'Solus, this thing isn't made of Adamant, right?' He asked while placing his hand on the Forge and using Invigoration.

'Nope. I have no idea what it is, but its mana flow is magnificent.'

Lith couldn't agree more. Unlike his Adamant Forge, the one in front of him was able to draw in the world energy and compress it to the point it almost had a pseudo core even though it wasn't enchanted.

Lith tried to lift the Forge, but it weighed too much, even for his inhuman strength.

'Damn! Without dimensional magic, we cannot store it nor warp it away!' Lith inwardly cursed non stop.

'You could make it float with a spell, but this thing is too big to get it out of here by crushing through the walls. The cursed object that oversees this place would kill us before we manage to escape.' Solus said.

Lith tried to lift it with a spell anyway. Much to his surprise, an external source of mana blocked his spell and the room started to rumble as an earthquake was about to bring down the roof. The quake stopped the moment Lith let the Forge go.

'Let's run away. There's enough mana surrounding us to kill you in the blink of an eye.' Solus warned him. Lith waited a few minutes and resumed searching the room only when Solus confirmed to him that the hostile mana was fading.

Even if it was very old, it was still a Forgemastering lab. After working for two years at the White Griffon, Lith knew how such places were built. He ignored the open cabinets and went straight for the test room, where any competent Forgemaster kept his prototypes.

A weapon rack full with all kinds of swords covered in blue runes was waiting for him.

'Yes!' Lith started picking them up, but after the first blade the rumbling resumed, forcing him to put them back in their place except for one. A second attempt to collect more than one sword confirmed his intuition.

"Okay, fine! They all have the same spell on them after all." Lith's sour grapes claim was followed by a quick read of the textbooks stored in the libraries. Once again, he could only pick one or pay the consequences.

The problem was that they were all written in gibberish and he was dangerously running out of time. The only silver lining in Lith's situation was that even if he was unable to understand the words and all the magic circles depicted were unknown, the basics of Forgemastering were still the same.

Lith and Solus were instantly able to tell the tier of an enchantment just by looking at the complexities of the drawings and the number of pseudo cores each spell was devised to handle.

They picked a small book that was filled with only complex tier five Forgemastering spells.

"Let's just hope they actually have a practical use. With my luck, they might as well be just teaching spells…" Lith choked on those words, finally realizing why the Huryole seemed so familiar to him.

The furniture's design was outdated and he had met the rooms in a random order, but too many things inside the lost city reminded him of the White Griffon academy. Lith would have liked to put his intuition to the test, but there was no time.

He used his flight spell to backtrack, moving as fast as he could while checking the map to not get lost. Solus couldn't help him this time, she was too focused keeping watch against possible threats.

'Watch out! Something big and powerful is coming our way!' She warned him. Lith turned to his right just in time to see and incredibly handsome man with emerald hair and purple eyes came from around the corner.

'Powerful I can believe, but big? Also, what's wrong with his hair? Did he come out of an anime or what?' Lith didn't slow down and set up several barriers, just in case the newcomer was hungry like all the creatures Lith had met during his explorations.

<"Wait! If you help me to get out of here, I'll reward you handsomely!" > Said the green haired man in a forgotten language. Seeing that Lith wasn't even listening, he charged forward with inhuman speed, shapeshifting into his real form.

An emerald scaled dragon the size of three-storey noble house started to give Lith chase, using air magic to support its gigantic wings and gain more speed.

< "I said wait!"> The creature roared while desperately trying to catch up.

Lith had never seen a real dragon before. His first reaction was surprise, immediately followed by his survival instincts kicking in.

'How bad is our situation?' He asked.

'Bright blue core inside the stronger body I have ever seen! Shapeshift?'

Lith was losing ground, so he had his hybrid form's wings emerge from his back.

One of the perks of the Orichalcum Skinwalker was that it was able to revert to its liquid form at will, so even if dimensional magic was sealed inside Huryole, Lith had no need to take it off to be able of shapeshifting.

The wings allowed him to go as fast as the dragon since his much smaller figure had an easier time maneuvering along the corridors. Lith only needed to fold his wings to go through a door whereas his alleged enemy had to revert back to human form.

The emerald dragon was flabbergasted and overjoyed seeing a fellow dragon, so he attempted to speak in draconic.

< "Wait, I mean no harm, little brother. We can get out of here together!" > Too bad that draconic was a guttural tongue so filled with power that it would hurt the ears of a normal human, making them bleed.

Lith took it as some kind of sonic attack and moved even faster.

< "I said stop!"> Outraged by the blatant lack of respect from the lesser dragon in front of him, the emerald dragon breathed bright blue Origin Flames against Lith.

"Thanks, sucker!" Lith replied hurling a jet stream of Origin Flames of his own which countered the enemy attack and produced a conflagration that further enhanced his speed whereas it forced his enemy to stop.

The emerald dragon couldn't cross the raging firestorm in front of himself without risking to die.

'How can a lesser dragon produce such a powerful flame? I only fired a warning shot, but he still managed to block it. Father Leegaain must have become even stronger if even such a hatchling can reach that kind of skill.' He thought.

Lith was back to the straight path, so he could put away the map and focus only on his speed.

'How much until the reset?' He asked.

'Less than five minutes.' Solus's reply made Lith curse.

'That's too much time! I don't want to fight a dragon. I don't even know what they are capable of.'

Lith moved outside the barrier, using his army amulet to call for reinforcements. General Vorgh went pale hearing about the emerald dragon.

"Good gods, him again? The strike team will be there as fast as they can. Do not engage him unless the barrier is at risk. Fighting alone would be a suicide."

Lith nodded while preparing for the worse. Little did he know that the conflagration caused by the Origin Flames had damaged Huryole's walls, making the cursed object overseeing the city react with extreme prejudice.

The emerald dragon was currently fighting for his life against an endless barrage of spells which prevented him from moving even one inch forward.

Vorgh and a full platoon of Spellbreakers arrived less than a minute after Lith's call. They patiently waited for the enemy's arrival, casting several arrays one on top of another and using the barrier's power source to boost their spells.

When the reset time arrived, the whole stone dome surrounding Huryole trembled and the emerald dragon was sent in a remote corner of the city.