The Runic Alchemist

Before Damian could even take a second to curse his damned luck for being just at the right position for their bald leader to come crashing, the land beneath Damian's feet pushed upwards and blocked the red sword.

'A mere dirt wall stopped the attack..?'

But no it was no simple wall, it was much more polished than that. Almost to the quality of modern world quality bricks. Even after several seconds of his timely rescue, Damian still couldn't stop shaking. The burned knight broke the wall with an overpowered slash but the bald leader already caught up to him by then and had demanded his attention on his sword.

Damian on the other hand just could not forget the slo-mo scene of the monstrous knight coming for his head and maybe he never will for the rest of his life.

Damian could see the bald leader getting pushed back with each powerful sword strike, after all the bald leader was only a second ranker and the burned knight third ranker, not to mention he seemed far more skilled with sword than the bald leader who was technically an Esper. The fact that the bald leader could go blow to blow with this guy was already admirable.

The bald leader seemed like an Esper with a phenomenal control over the earth element. It looked like the land beneath his foot and he were of one mind.

All the cool effects were wasted in just defending from the burned knight's relentless powerful sword slashes though, which literally exploded on contact with the dirt structures. The burned knight tried his best to push the bald leader away to finish his job with Anthony and Sam but the bald leader somehow defended the trio with an inch of their life every single time.

Finally getting the grip on himself and stopping his shaking foot, regaining control over his body, Damian grabbed Anthony and ran like hell towards their target – The nearest wall. The bald leader was trying his best to save them and they staying there each second longer would only put him in more and more disadvantageous position.

The burned knight was having none of it though as he clashed against the bald leader with a fury of a demon in his eyes. Sending the bald leader flying with one extra powerful double handed horizontal slash he roared, shaking the air itself. And with his wild scream came the suffocating pressure of his ridiculously huge aura.

Damian and Anthony were more than 100 meter away from him and yet they were feeling the weight of a mountain on their shoulders pushing them down.

Anthony immediately fell flat on his stomach with Sam right next to him. Damian however stood tall under the heavy pressure, his feet digging deeper into the ground below.

'Hell! This again...'

Damian had nightmares about this crushing feeling for days after he escaped from it in Ravensong. However just like every other helplessness inducing problems in his life, Damian had also thought about this one for days and nights in search of solutions. And as they say, 'Search like hell and you shall find the freaking god himself one day.' Damian had also found a way around this oppressiveness.

The only problem was, it wasted a lot of his mana and he needed every single point of it to get out of here alive.

Not wasting a second to make a decision Damian calmed his mind and reached deeper in his inner self. Beyond flesh and blood and moving organs there it was, the burning fire like tangible source of pure liquid mana. At least that's how Damian imagined it based on the feeling he experienced every time he did this.

Sending a trickle or two of thin mana threads out was difficult but no big deal, the thing he was trying to do however required his full attention, insurmountable focus and precision. Doing this without his mana sense was impossible.

From every sweat pore on his body Damian pushed out a mana cluster, making a big connected layer made of these clusters of mana all around his body. The hardest part was to keep it as thin as possible and not waste any more mana than necessary, this was already using half of his mana if he did it right.

It was not a one time thing though, the layer of mana was constantly pushing back the thick aura of the burned knight, exhausting itself in the process. So Damian had to keep releasing the exact amount that was being used up by the oppressive aura. The process was extremely complicated and demanded focus that could split a mind in half, but it did the job.

Damian regained control over his body and could move about freely.

Without wasting a single second, adding another burden to his already exploding headache Damian started drawing a runic circle on air with his world shaper hands.

The fight was even more one sided now then it was a minute ago, the aura of the burned knight was not strong enough for the bald leader to be frozen on the spot, but it did effect his movements. Each stone blade was a tad bit slower, each defensive wall came a little short, each attack of his ground manipulation a second late to catch it's target.

It was barely a relief that the bald leader was fighting from a distance otherwise the exchange of swords would have signed his death warrant long ago by the fierce burned knight with his red glowing sword.

Step by step the burned knight was getting closer though, and the bald leader was exhausting his mana at twice the rate than before to make up for the reduced speed and keeping the burned knight at a distance. The burned knight blasted one wall after another, thwarted sharp stone blades as if it were toys and kept charging forward.

They were all done for if this continued. It was just a matter of time now, unless the bald leader had some kind of hidden trump card which Damian guessed he didn't otherwise the fight would be over by now and not providing a show out of it to gather the whole headquarter outside to surround them while they fought.

There was still a chance to run in the direction of the wall though, most knights were just coming out of the crashed site and had yet to surround them fully, they were just standing there watching the fight.

"Goddammit! I guess desperate situations calls for a desperate measure...."

Damian was halfway through drawing the [Wormhole] spell to power it with fourth of his mana pool which might just be enough to make the other point of [Wormhole] extend nearer to the wall in the distance. But instead he dissolved the runes and started drawing another one instead, pointing it towards the burned knight.

Damian did not believe in loyalty to his kingdom and all that bullshit but he was not an ungrateful bastard. Anyways even if he successfully managed to create a wormhole and escape, the burned knight would chase him throughout the city with the bald leader dead.

And so Damian suffered the head splitting headache some more and successfully created another big green runic magic circle, then aiming at the burned knight Damian launched the spell.

The area surrounding Damian and Anthony suddenly picked up the wind speed and got sucked into a transparent big sharp structure barely visible to the naked eye. And a second later it launched with a loud sound of air splitting in half and rushed in a direct horizontal line keeping the charging burned knight in the center.

Good thing about research, it was never a waste of time. Even the smallest new details you learned will always show it's usage or lead to a bigger unknown facts down the road. Damian had spent hours trying to decode the individual runic characters that he drew daily with three identical spells [Water blade], [Stone bullet] & [Air blade].

The progress wasn't much in the field he was hoping to learn but in the process of doing it Damian understood the spells so thoroughly that he thought he could do this one spell in theory one day.

This was also his first time seeing a modified [Air blade] spell that took ten times the mana as source compared to it's normal version. The result..?

A giant single blade of air 10 meters long, sharp as sword and fast as hell. The sound.. well he really forgot to think about sound at all, that was a miscalculations. The half transparent look though was expected, since you can also notice simple air blade if you really focus onto it, it was just transparent is all but when you look past it the result was blurry.

The look on both fighting knights was priceless, if nothing else that alone was a reward enough for Damian.