Warlock Apprentice

Angor felt his vision going blurry for a moment as he stepped out of the mist together with Sunders.

The first sight that greeted them was several dozens of wizards standing in a line, looking at them with hostile expressions.

Greya was busy dealing with several attacking wizards, while Nausica and the others had been captured and left at one side. An old wizard with a white beard—Qetesh—was preparing to use a powerful mind-reading spell against them, which would undoubtedly damage their brains.

Due to Greya's effort when she would occasionally throw an attack at Qetesh, Qetesh's spell had not turned Nausica and her partners into mentally-handicapped victims yet.

Sunders' arrival changed the tide of the battle almost instantly.

With a simple gesture, countless illusions rose around him, which overwhelmed everyone nearby.

Most wizards immediately stopped moving as their visions were blocked by terrifying illusions. Meanwhile, a flaming Nightmare was galloping through the air, which convinced those who managed to resist the illusions into not doing anything stupid.

The Nightmare was now rushing straight toward Qetesh, while Qetesh could only watch helplessly as the horrifying creature aimed its horn at his heart.

An ice barrier suddenly rose in front of Qetesh's position and blocked the Nightmare's charge. At the same time, a figure covered in icy air materialized alongside the barrier.

"What is the meaning of this, Mister Phantom?"

"My meaning?" Sunders pretended that he was confused at those words. "Are you asking me? Really?"

Payne was now waiting beside his ice barrier, while a small black ember was burning in one of his hands. He managed to stop Sunders' Nightmare, but it took him some time to fully extinguish the dark flame left by the creature, which burned his hand for good.

Several drops of blood fell from his wounded hand. The drops of blood were frozen solid before they shattered on the ground.

"I see that you're well prepared to ambush us. Am I right, Doctor Anglo?" Sunders glanced at the man in glasses, who was also restrained by illusions.

Anglo adjusted his glasses. "I warned them."

He did.

But Payne did not listen.

"You planned to assault members of my organization, and I meant to retaliate," Sunders said to Payne.

Payne grimaced. Of course he knew that those people who came out earlier might be together with Sunders. But he checked and only found apprentices and even a mortal among them, so he decided to give the order and attack them. But a witch who had been hiding her true strength managed to buy enough time for Sunders to arrive.

"They are just a bunch of apprentices. Surely you will not care too much about their lives, Mister Phantom?"

"That's for ME to decide. You attacked Brute Cavern, and you should be prepared for the consequences."

Sunders smirked and summoned a dozen more Nightmares around him, which then began to bolt through the illusions.

Payne was a little panicked now. "Mister Phantom! Are you sure you would fight with all of us, including wizards from other organizations? Besides, we never harmed your members for real!"

"You haven't harmed them yet, because you lot are too weak and pathetic to do the job fast enough."

As the nightmare creatures threatened the wizards, more black embers covered the air.

Meanwhile, Angor fully activated his sequence of gravity and approached Qetesh's position. He then engulfed his friends including Spivet in his gravity power.

Payne saw Angor moving and tried to capture him so that he would have another chip on the table when negotiating with Sunders. However, another Nightmare was on top of Qetesh behind him, which forced Payne to turn back and protect Qetesh so that his colleague would not get impaled on his watch.

With swift moves, Angor and Toby worked together to drag everyone to safety behind Sunders.

Greya also left her enemies and joined Sunders. While moving, she intentionally knocked over several trapped wizards who attacked her earlier while cursing loudly.

"You only mentioned possessed people and parasites waiting for us, but not these irrational a-holes." She spat on the ground. "Well, I outperformed my job. It wasn't easy, mind you."

Sunders glanced at her without speaking, while Angor whispered a thank-you.

Greya put an arm around Angor with a bright smile. "See that? Your student behaves better than you!"

Sunders pulled Angor into his Gravity Garden. Losing her support, Greya almost fell to one side.

"Damn you, you silent crook!" Greya cursed again.

…

Angor was a little surprised when he noticed what had happened. After recollecting his senses, he moved to a small room nearby.

He knew Sunders meant to tell him to return to his body since they had left the darkness. He should not expose his soul when there were wizards fighting, as a damaged soul could not be cured easily.

Instead of going for his body immediately, he first took out two objects, which he had been carrying. One was Sunders' "blood sphere", and the other was a transparent, diamond-shaped crystal, which had been releasing a strange energy signature around it.

Angor could read the particular signature too. It basically told him to "consume" it. Right now.

When in his soul form, the strange energy appeared alluring like the best gourmet meal in the entire world. Angor couldn't help slavering even though he was not a food lover and that his soul couldn't produce any saliva for him to drool.

He received the crystal from Spotty. Earlier, when Sunders gave up on capturing Spotty and was going to leave, the puppy dragged Angor to one side and carefully spat out the object into Angor's hand.

The dog tried to do it when Sunders was not looking. However, the gentleman had no problem seeing everything. Sunders did nothing other than giving the crystal a simple glimpse.

When he took Angor away, Spotty returned into the dark mist and vanished.

Angor didn't know what was currently going on outside since he was the only one being pulled into Gravity Garden. But he knew his friends would be fine since both Sunders and Greya were there to watch them.

Despite the fact that every particle of him was telling him to accept the crystal's "suggestion" and swallow it, Angor managed to persuade himself into giving up so that he did not invite trouble by eating something he didn't know about.

After removing all possessions carried on his soul, he returned to his body, which was being maintained in a fluid chamber prepared by Sunders.

The first few moments felt strange, probably because he spent too much time as a soul, and his body felt a lot more restrained and heavier.

After warming up a little bit, he placed the blood sphere and the strange crystal into his bracelet before leaving the room.

Sunders did not summon him yet. With nothing else to do, Angor took a seat in the outdoor library and inspected the crystal carefully.

The temptation he felt from it was almost gone as soon as he returned to his body. He could still sense the pulses of signature that told him to eat the object, but it was no longer so demanding.

He took a guess that the crystal was something meant to be used on souls. He neither knew why Spotty gave this to him nor could he understand who Spotty was.

Wait…

After killing Hookdick, the puppy "consumed" Hookdick's corpse. Or rather, Spotty was eating Hookdick's soul sequence.

Hookdick had been training at somewhere called the "Soul Soil", which granted him a very weak level of soul sequence. This was probably what Spotty was absorbing.

Angor did not worry too much about the matter because it might be one of Spotty's strange abilities, about which he could never comprehend anyway.

But this might be a useful clue for figuring out what this crystal was. Could it be that Spotty accepted Hookdick's soul sequence, which underwent some sort of reaction in Spotty's stomach and turned into this item?

It was a wild guess, but Angor's instinct told him that this might be the right way of thinking.

If so, then Spotty could take someone's law sequence that they gained from Sorcerer's Gardens and transfer it into a consumable item. This was never heard of in the wizarding world.

A law sequence was a priceless power sought after by all wizards because it could not be gained through talent or effort. One needed extreme luck to obtain such blessing, such as how Angor and Toby somehow gained the sequence of gravity from Sunders' Gravity Garden.

But Spotty's ability had completely busted this restriction… on condition that Angor's guess was correct.

Angor flinched when he imagined how an evil wizard could get his hands on Spotty and hunt for lucky apprentices who received law sequences so that they could forcefully take their gifts away.

No way. There's got to be limitations. Spotty cannot possibly absorb sequence powers freely.

Isabelle once told him that in Origin World, wizards could freely craft Mystery items and divide them into different ranks. He believed that Spotty might be considered an extremely high-leveled Mystery item in this case.

Then he shook his head to remove the concerns from his mind. It remained to be found out whether this crystal was something related to Hookdick's soul sequence.