Sleeping Player (Project Chrysalis Book 3) by John Gold (novel24 TXT) 📕

the crown of the tree, too. And what happened to the mysterious opponent who killed Sagie?

The saints, having changed their tactics, prepared a group of divine avatars to get in close and try to kill the lich. Sagie, sensing the divine magic, headed in that direction. Stopping at the very edge of the field, he cast eleven dead suns at the same time, combining them into a single wave that engulfed houses, land, and the domes of the municipal buildings.

The saints formed up into a wedge and threw up maximum divine strength shields that would work until the saints’ strength ran out. And seeing how much time they’d invested in building their divine magic, there wasn’t a single spell in existence that could do that much damage. Right then, three black suns smashed into the divine shield, incapable of destroying it. But no sooner had hope of salvation appeared in the saints’ hearts than an enormous black sphere appeared on the tail of the three suns. It buzzed with the power its creator had placed in it. Paying no attention to its wimpy predecessors, it annihilated the divine shields as if they’d never been there in the first place. The aura of death alone was enough to kill all the avatars hiding behind the saints.

Stone shattered, the ground collapsed underfoot, and the nearby buildings crumbled under their own weight. Only the black sun swirled off relentlessly in the direction of the mountain.

The strident cry of the lich rang out over the city. Nobody was left to stand against it. The two remaining operators activated teleportation beacons for the suppression group, and the emperor sent in troops to destroy the undead. An entire legion of elite troops joined the battle.

The Golden Hand’s operational headquarters was outside the city, in a hut on a cliff that offered a fantastic view of Lone Tree Valley as well as the whole city. That was where Leon’s saints teleported to. A group of support mages had already created two strengthening seals designed for fifteen people, each of them using single-use stationary mana storages. The mages were all former soldiers, and the location chosen for the headquarters had been an important strategic position—it was the perfect spot to start an artillery bombardment.

Nate took over command of the suppression forces.

“Use mental attacks. We won’t damage the lich, but we may be able to save the legionnaires’ lives. He’ll lose coordination in his attacks—the mages on the rooftops can use that. Set up earth shields right in front of him to cut down his view. And use Space Magic to keep him pinned there. If he changes his body again, I want a fire attack on the trunk of the tree where they come out of.”

He reminded them once more that their job was to keep the lich in place and mitigate the damage he was doing. The legionnaires would take care of liquidating the target.

The emperor’s forces took over the flanks, maintaining formation and hacking away at the roots trying to latch onto them. The undead’s accuracy suffered significantly, and quite a few of his spells started missing. No matter how strong a mage he was, fifty million stunning and disorientation were too much to ignore.

Still, the lich regained his form less than ten seconds later. Paying no more attention to the mental attacks, it took him just five seconds to find where the bombardment was coming from. A powerful gravitational blow did absolutely nothing to Sagie. His magic shield took the colossal damage, and he was able to replenish it in between the scattered shots he was taking at the saints.

The legionnaires, by then, had gotten a hundred meters from the lich and were preparing to attack when they were hit by a dragon breath. Even thirty meters away from where it hit, the heat changed their minds. Their commanders decided to wait for their opponent’s strength to subside.

Sagie’s eye was caught by the lone hut from which two saints were preparing to hit him with a targ hammer. Their spell distorted space and gravity, collecting the weight of all the material objects in their field into a single gravitational ring, and the hammer pounded home across a ten-meter circle. For ten seconds, the target took fifty million damage a second. Few examples of anyone surviving a strike like that had ever been recorded, and they were all high-level monsters or divine beings.

Lightning streaked out of the crown of the lone tree to smack into one of the stationary mana storages. The explosion was so strong that it brought down the entire cliff, and not one of the saints survived.

Less than a second later, a column of light blazed into the lich and erupted in an explosion that destroyed Sagie.

New liches were already climbing out of the tree when something like white lightning pierced the trunk from roots to tip. Stopping by the spot the undead had crawled out of, the unknown creature struck the trunk with its hand, burying it up to the elbow in wood.

“Ars lux. Anima contritio.”

The liches froze, twitched, and stopped. Having not had enough time to climb all the way out of the tree, they froze like lifeless dolls. An insufferable light poured from under the bark, and the tree quickly turned black. Darkened leaves rained down on the legionnaires.

The unknown mage disappeared. Just a flash was all the people watching saw on their screens, and then the mysterious rescuer, who was dressed as a light mage, was gone without a trace.

Silence reigned in Leon’s headquarters. Everyone just stared at the remains of the tree and the attack group.

The results of the battle were depressing: the mobile respawn point was destroyed, as were two of the four negators. Only the two support squads guarding the other two negators had survived. Sagie had killed four saints himself; his rescuer had taken out