Limitless by John Gold (best e reader for android txt) 📕

fixed on the same spot in front of him, and his aura catching all the spells being thrown at him. It was so thick, in fact, that none of them hit their target. Nobody dared get close enough to try a sword on him, though one brave soul hurled a spear. That roused Sagie, but he just sent a message in the chat instead responding to the attack.

Run, run, run, run, run. Get as far away from me as you can. I have nothing left to lose.

It’s an illusion! I’d…

But Sagie wasn’t listening. He raised his left hand, and his aura started to expand, growing denser and denser. Materialized souls started leaping out of it. The same thing had happened during the battle for Airis Castle eleven years before, and precious few of the spirits then had been neutral. Most attacked the players, devouring the living and the dead, while a few even fed on the terror that gripped everyone there in order to gain power. The first wave of creatures was killed by the area attacks aimed at Sagie. Nothing could touch him, however—he had left the bounds of this world.

Utter chaos reigned on the battlefield for about twenty seconds. The scattered players tried to fight back against the hundreds of creatures whose levels went from 100 to 10000 in less than a minute, until a snake-like body finally appeared in the sky. Two kilometers long, with four pairs of mismatched eyes, a crest along the length of its back, thousands of large scales, and an enormous mouth, it was so powerful Femida felt as if she were about to lose consciousness from a whole kilometer away.

Keeper, Tser’Kareni Papir, non-level, non-class, non-rank

 

“Sagie, you monster!” Femida screamed. He’d ripped a keeper into the real world, and it would brush him away like a piece of fuzz if he dared touch it.

Femida was forced to battle with a bone reaper spider. Happily, nobody else wanted to share its spoils, and she was able to watch Sagie fire off an attack on the keeper. The meteor he cast crashed through the crown of the tree and smacked into Tser’Kareni’s shield. She’d thought Sagie had already cast the largest meteor the world would ever see when he destroyed Castle Airis, but right then, she realized she was wrong. The size of the meteor whistling down dwarfed even the keeper. It was more than two kilometers in diameter, the cosmic fireball enough to kill all living things within tens of kilometers in every direction. But Tser’Kareni caught the blow with his magic shield and diffused the shockwave. Even with that, however, it was strong enough to kill anyone who wasn’t behind a shield. Ekron was torn to pieces, if not dead. The rubble Reiji was lying in was pulverized into a fine gravel. In the meantime, Femida was already fighting a royal ogre.

Sagie was between her and the portal cube. The welcoming group from other civilizations hadn’t been scratched, and the keeper was absorbing everything Sagie threw at him without responding in kind. When Sagie hurled a spear of darkness, the flesh on his arm started to rot away from the weapon’s aura. Even the demon Femida was fighting felt the strength behind the attack. She felt as like she was going to faint when the spear took off toward the keeper, and many of the creatures nearby fell down dead from the mental damage. But Tser’Kareni just kept floating around in the sky, quietly taking Sagie’s attcks.

Suddenly, an unfamiliar opponent jumped into the battle. A boney ball of needles hung over Sagie and started attacking him with Space Magic. Its aura was green, and it was fully capable of standing up to Sagie, each attack accompanied by a roar and a quiver running through the ground. A gravitational impulse compactor practically smushed Sagie into the ground.

The first attack ripped off Sagie’s arms and legs, though the next just hit his magic shield. The response came quickly in the form of lightning bolts. Thunder pealed and killed everything still living within forty meters, with even Femida taking near-maximum damage at seventy meters away. Her bones buzzed, her teeth ached, and messages about stun buffs started popping up in the chat.

Gravitational magic, mental spears, and physical force blade attacks didn’t work on the boney sphere. Fire just singed its outer layers of armor. At some point, red sparks started hopping back and forth between the players, and a red bolt of lightning shot right through the magic barrier and buried itself in Sagie. He took damage, his health started to slowly drop, and it looked like the lightning bolt was actually sapping Sagie’s health and giving it to his opponent. The boney sphere was sucking his life away. Still, Sagie’s health popped back up to the maximum. There wasn’t anyone on earth who could do more damage than he could heal. Under his tree, he was more or less invincible. The only thing that could kill him was an arrow to the eye or heart, an attack that could do instant mortal damage. His opponent wasn’t aware of that, so his continued attempts to batter away at the shield and drain Sagie’s life force were ineffective.

Reiji pulled himself out of the rubble that remained from Airis Castle. His voice thundered across the space, being heard by everyone still alive.

“Aurin, stay out of this!”

A man’s voice came from the boney sphere.

“You don’t understand. What he’s doing paints humankind in a bad light. We have to finish the battle before it gets any worse.”

But Reiji disagreed. He’d spent enough time with Sagie to know that his behavior was out of the ordinary, that something was wrong.

“Stay out of this! I’ll take care of it.”

The boney sphere stopped attacking and dissolved into thin air. Femida wasn’t sure why, as she was looking for a quick end to the fight, too. The portal was almost open, and there was less than a minute left before the welcoming ceremony began.

“Sagie,