The Return of Lilietta - Chapter 208

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Team. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Chapter 208

She pulled the trigger. Repeatedly.

Sharp gunshots tore through the air. Golden trajectories soared through the gaps in the torn air. Bullets faster than sound reached him from the Great Mage’s blind spot.

Before he could react, an automatically generated barrier blocked the projectiles.

Lillieta had predicted this future. Ethan’s failed attempt to apply tracking scent had been conveyed to her.

The bullet blocked by the barrier exploded. Though not twilight-grade, it was an explosive round with considerable concentrated Ode. The automatically activated barrier, not being very strong, cracked and shook.

Sensing this, Pascal turned his head to look in the direction the magic bullet was fired from. Just like when he had guessed the direction and looked immediately after noticing the glass bottle Ethan had thrown.

As Rita had expected, his face turned to look directly at her. The broken barrier, his face, and her gun muzzle were aligned in a straight line.

Then, the second bullet she had fired pierced through the explosion’s flames, passed through the cracked barrier, and reached Pascal. Into one of his iridescent eyes.

A small harpoon was embedded.

“…!”

It was a magic bullet that had arrived with virtually no time difference. Because Pascal had shown unusually fast reaction speed for a mage, as Ethan had mentioned, it hit precisely.

Exactly as Rita had intended.

As soon as the harpoon embedded in Pascal’s eye, she pulled back Silvergrass with both hands and retracted the connected Ode string.

The string rapidly shortened, and the iridescent eye pierced by the harpoon was pulled out from Pascal’s eye.

Strangely, no blood spurted out at all. Pascal clutched his eye area as if in pain, then extended one hand toward her.

Lillieta kicked off the dirt with her enhanced legs and leaped up into the trees. In the process, she didn’t forget to catch the iridescent eye flying toward her on the string.

What she grasped in her hand felt more like a round stone or glass marble than a human eye. Despite being pierced by the harpoon, it remained smooth without any cracks or breaks.

She didn’t feel the burning heat or the chilling surge of magic power like when she had once held a star. However, she could sense that some tremendous power was sleeping within a thin shell.

But she had no leisure to examine it closely.

Something like a tentacle as thick as a log crashed into the base of the tree she had climbed. The tree broke with a crushing sound and tilted. Rita jumped to another nearby tree before it completely fell.

“You—!”

Pascal, recognizing Lillieta, shouted with a cracking voice. The Black Dragon that had been attacking the Great Mage suddenly turned its head to look down.

The clear eyes of the woman perched like a mountain goat on the narrow treetop met the Black Dragon’s eye sockets that gaped like bottomless pits.

The black thorns covering the dragon’s entire body rippled. With movements that seemed like trembling in fear, or perhaps wariness.

And blood pooled in those dry well-like eye sockets. It rapidly filled up, then overflowed and streamed down. Like a person shedding tears.

“Gi—”

She tried to call his name but swallowed it. She had no such leisure. Pascal had begun chanting a spell with a face full of rage.

There was no telling what would happen if she let the Great Mage cast magic. Rita fired magic bullets recklessly.

The bullets fired in rapid succession poured down on Pascal like golden rain shooting upward from below.

He contorted his face, then cut off his chant and pulled out a massive tentacle from under his robes to block the magic bullets. Since Rita had earlier broken his automatically activating barrier, he couldn’t ignore them.

Watching this scene, she obtained important information in real time.

‘He can’t use magic and monster abilities simultaneously. If he could use both together, he could continue chanting while blocking with tentacles, but he can’t do that. Is it because magic power and corruption are incompatible?’

Then his means of aerial flight was likely not magic either. He had definitely attacked Gid with tentacles while flying earlier. Since he had tried to chant while flying, it wouldn’t be his power as a monster either.

‘It must be a magic tool or ancient artifact.’

She continued firing magic bullets to prevent Pascal from doing anything else while observing him. To figure out where he was carrying his flight device.

Meanwhile, she suddenly heard an ominous cry. Groooooo, the dragon’s roar like thick wind passing through a cave.

Just as Rita looked toward the Black Dragon in alarm, Gnewg’s warning was heard.

[Alert: The ‘Black Dragon’s’ corrupted magic power is surging!]

Thick black smoke was billowing up from the black dragon’s body covered in thorn-like scales.

The corrupted magic power seeping out visibly thick and the dragon shedding bloody tears while looking at her. The Black Dragon trembled all over with its mouth gaping open as if panting.

Rita intuitively understood what that appearance meant.

‘It’s going berserk!’

Pascal seemed to make the same judgment, visibly brightening before suddenly looking flustered.

“Finally… no, wait.”

He glared at Rita with his one remaining eye wide open. She knew why the Great Mage was acting like that.

‘To regress to a more distant past, he’d need to take the star and dive into that rampage.’

But that star—or more precisely, the aurora-colored stone that might be a star or a star’s medium that had been embedded in Pascal’s eye—was now in her grasp.

Pascal’s face contorted like a demon’s. Rita moved according to her intuition.

She manifested a gun barrel with Ode in her left hand that wasn’t holding the gun. She fired what she guessed to be the star as a bullet with her bare hand. In Gid’s direction.

All of Pascal’s consciousness focused on the ‘star’ being shot toward the Black Dragon. He frantically flew through the air trying to catch up with the ‘star.’

In that moment, Rita found the magic tool Pascal had been using for flight through his urgent movements.

‘Inside his robe, at the belt on his lower back.’

Through the fluttering hem of his clothes, Pascal touched that area, something glinted, and his flight speed increased.

While firing the ‘star’ with her left hand, she fired processed magic bullets from Silvergrass with her right hand. Rapid fire.

The consecutively fired magic bullets were blocked by tentacles that the Great Mage extended as if annoyed.

The same pattern as before. She had expected this.

One of the magic bullets that hit the tentacles exploded like fireworks. It was a barrier-piercing round. Pascal looked back in apparent confusion, but his movements couldn’t be faster than bullets.

The explosive round that arrived a beat later bounced off the barrier temporarily formed on the tentacle. Instead of being blocked by the tentacle, it became a ricochet with a deflected trajectory. That trajectory reached the Great Mage’s lower back.

“…!”

The flight magic tool shattered with a small explosion. Pascal began falling downward. He frantically chanted a spell. Probably flight magic.

Rita turned her head away from the Great Mage the moment he began falling.

The ‘star’ she had fired like a bullet with her left hand was caught in the Black Dragon’s grasp. It seemed he had reflexively caught it when something came flying. Since her purpose was just to throw it, she hadn’t put much power into it, so it wouldn’t have been difficult.

The Black Dragon looked down at the tiny stone placed on his palm through bleeding eye sockets.

She fired a harpoon round at that ‘star’ which was as small as a grain of millet compared to the massive dragon’s hand.

The small harpoon accurately hit the ‘star’ between the dragon’s thick thorns and the corrupted magic power billowing like dark clouds. She immediately rewound the connected Ode string.

She intended to retrieve it. It would be dangerous for the current Gid to possess that aurora-colored stone.

However, the result was completely different from her intention.

When something embedded in what he was examining and tried to move, the Black Dragon gripped it tightly. Then the recoil from the Ode string shortening didn’t bring the ‘star’ toward her, but instead launched her body toward the ‘star.’

Everything happened too quickly.

Though Rita immediately stopped the Ode string’s contraction, it was already too late. Her body, small as a mouse compared to the dragon, was pulled along as if fired.

The pitch-black thorns covering the dragon’s body suddenly loomed close before her eyes. The corrupted magic power swirling around the dragon wrapped around her entire body.

She gathered Ode in her left hand to cover her mouth and twisted her posture in midair, trying to somehow avoid being skewered by the thorns.

In doing so, she belatedly realized. Iridescent light was exploding from the Black Dragon’s clenched fist.

“Ah.”

With a short moan, she was caught up in the ‘star’s’ explosion. In the monster’s rampage, just as it had been in the Ash-covered Era.

Light and shadow flickered.

Something exploded soundlessly. No, it compressed. Instead of tremendous power radiating outward, it converged toward a single point. In that process, both dragon and human were sucked in together.

Pascal, who had been falling, cast flight magic and stopped just before impact. Then he looked toward where the Black Dragon had been.

“…Damn it.”

There was nothing there. No Black Dragon, no woman.

Only a stone slowly falling through the empty void remained, glinting like a crafted jewel.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Team. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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