Leo took two steps back, moving as close to Alice as possible.
Even if he no longer had a chance to fight back, he had promised Alice that he would protect her.
Leo would protect her until the very last moment!
Leo kept stroking the energy crystal on his sword, waiting for the witchcraft overhead to descend.
Perhaps this move could buy Alice a little more time.
Leo had already prepared for the worst!
But at this critical moment, Alice's hoarse growl rang out behind him.
"Great Space Teleportation Witchcraft, open!"
Alice's aura surged violently, and all her mana gushed out without reserve.
A spatial rift rapidly tore open under the torrent of Alice's mana.
In just an instant,
the spatial rift widened from a thin crack to several meters across.
Before Leo even had time to blink, countless flaming, semi-illusory figures poured out of the spatial rift like floodwater released from a dam.
Leo recognized these burning spirits!
They were Fire Elemental Spirits!
Every Fire Elemental Spirit Alice summoned possessed the strength of a wizard apprentice!
Countless Fire Elemental Spirits poured out, instantly raising the concentration of fire elements throughout the encirclement to its maximum.
In this environment, fire witchcraft would receive a substantial boost, while witchcraft of other attributes would be weakened to varying degrees.
The moment these Fire Elemental Spirits appeared, they bypassed Leo and surged like a flood toward all the wizard apprentices from Soul Death Knell Academy.
The Fire Elemental Spirits also sensed the suppressive witchcraft overhead, and countless fireballs, fiery projectiles, and raging flames blasted into the sky.
The witchcraft jointly cast by two hundred wizard apprentices was instantly shattered under the attacks of innumerable Fire Elemental Spirits!
Leo immediately felt the pressure lift from his body. Just like that, the sense of mortal danger from being targeted had vanished!
More Fire Elemental Spirits rushed out, charging toward the battle formation the Soul Death Knell wizard apprentices had set up.
Attacks as dense and swift as a torrential downpour instantly blasted a swath of wizard apprentices into black ash.
The remaining wizard apprentices of the Dead Poets Society stared with eyes nearly bursting from their sockets. Their supposedly invincible battle formation had been broken in an instant!
They were fighting back, too, but compared with the attacks from Fire Elemental Spirits that outnumbered them dozens to one, their counterattacks were sparse and feeble.
Although they were constantly taking the lives of Fire Elemental Spirits, those deaths could hardly be considered losses against such vast numbers!
Leo watched the battle. It had become completely one-sided.
They had won.
That meant he could survive.
This roller coaster of facing death and then finding survival made Leo's heart pound wildly. Who would want to die if they could live?
Two hundred apprentices from Soul Death Knell Academy had already driven Leo to despair, yet now, there was no end in sight to the Fire Elemental Spirits Alice had summoned.
These Fire Elemental Spirits were certainly weaker than advanced wizard apprentices, and some were only as strong as low-level wizard apprentices.
But there were so many of them.
Outnumbering the enemy dozens to one was enough to erase any disparity!
Amid his joy, Leo looked at the sea of red filling the battlefield and immediately thought of something.
When he and Gru had once left Purple Flame Academy for a guard assignment, a squad of official-level Fire Elemental Spirits had been guarding the academy gates.
Back then, Gru had told him that these Fire Elemental Spirits had been summoned through a contract the great Purple Flame Stigmata Wizard had signed with the Fire Elemental World.
Recalling this, Leo's eyes widened like brass bells, and his mouth fell so far open that his throat was visible!
Dumbstruck, he turned toward Alice, who was doing everything she could to maintain the spatial rift.
Mana rose around her, her long hair streaming, white as snow, her exquisite features radiating a sacred glow beneath the sunlight.
At Purple Flame Academy, no wizard could summon so many Fire Elemental Spirits!
No one could.
Except, of course, the great Purple Flame Stigmata Wizard!
Looking at Alice, Leo finally understood who she was!
He had known she had powerful backing, but he had never imagined it was this powerful!
No wonder Gru and the others treated Alice with such respect and referred to her as that person's disciple!
If Alice did not reveal it herself, who would dare disclose her identity? Even if everyone knew, they still had to pretend they did not!
At this moment, Leo's understanding of his own importance rose another level!
That the great Purple Flame Stigmata Wizard would send his own disciple to protect him, and even make her forcibly suppress herself and delay her advancement to rank one, meant his resolve was firmer than Leo had imagined.
Faced with so many Fire Elemental Spirits, the formation of Soul Death Knell Academy's apprentices had fallen into disarray, and they were retreating from the battlefield in an orderly fashion.
Leo saw the unwillingness in their eyes as they left quite clearly.
They had come so close to succeeding!
If they had not been so confident at first and allowed Alice to cast her witchcraft,
if they had not wanted to recruit Leo,
if they had not failed to attack immediately,
then they would have won.
By now, they could have been heaping humiliation upon Leo's corpse to their hearts' content.
Unfortunately, there were no such ifs.
Fire Elemental Spirits continued pouring from the spatial rift as though there were no end to them.
Leo looked through the spatial rift. The other side had long since been dyed fiery red by countless Fire Elemental Spirits, and the fire elements were so overwhelmingly concentrated that there was no room for any other element.
Leo did not know what world lay on the other side, but it was certainly a dangerous one!
Alice's aura was weakening. The mana she had just fully replenished with a Black Pearl Potion was about to reach zero in fewer than five breaths.
Fortunately, the wizard apprentices from Soul Death Knell Academy had already fled. As expected of a major guild with over two thousand years of history, they could still extricate themselves even when faced with an enemy they could not defeat.
Of the two hundred wizard apprentices, more than one hundred and fifty had escaped alive from the encirclement of Fire Elemental Spirits that outnumbered them dozens to one!
They had lost only fifty wizard apprentices!
"Crack, crack, crack."
Cracking sounds came from the unstable spatial rift as it neared closure. Alice began to sway, the result of severely overdrawing her mana.
The next second, Alice's eyes closed, and she instantly passed out.
Before losing consciousness, Alice felt a pair of strong arms catch her.
By the time Alice woke up, thirty percent of her depleted mana had recovered. Her head was still a little dizzy, an aftereffect of severely overdrawing her mental power that would take several days to recover from.
Alice looked around. She was in a very clean cave. Not far away, Leo was crouching on the ground with his back to him, letting out exclamations from time to time.
"What are you doing?" Alice asked curiously.
Hearing Alice's voice, Leo turned around and saw the now-awake Alice watching him with curiosity all over her face.
Leo smiled like a child and pointed to the wizard ring in his hand. "You've been unconscious for three days. I had nothing to do, so I decided to see what good stuff these wizard apprentices had in their wizard rings. I have to say, they had quite a lot."
As he spoke, Leo placed a pile of fifty wizard rings in front of Alice. They had all belonged to those killed by the Fire Elemental Spirits, so they belonged to Alice. Leo had not touched a single one.
As for the wizard rings in Leo's hands, those belonged to Adelaide and his companions.
Although he had not yet examined Adelaide's wizard ring, the most important one, the rings of the other six apprentices had already left Leo thrilled.
Aside from the large quantities of materials and wizard coins, there were one hundred and thirty-two academy badges alone.
These were all money!
Leo knew that the six academies had organized this tournament to make them slaughter one another, reducing the number of apprentices and concentrating resources in the hands of high-quality apprentices.
But when those resources were concentrated in his own hands as one of those high-quality apprentices, it felt incredible!
Praise the six academies!
These six wizard rings alone were worth over a million wizard coins. Leo felt as though he had struck it rich!
"Oh, carry on, then. I'll recover first."
Alice could not relate to Leo's joy at opening what amounted to free mystery boxes. Money was merely a number to her, with no special meaning!
She had never worried about such things!
"All right, you rest. I'll keep going."
Only Adelaide's wizard ring remained. Leo moved a little farther away, afraid he might be unable to stop himself from shouting and disturb Alice.
But the moment Leo saw what was inside Adelaide's wizard ring, he still could not help exclaiming in surprise, "What's this doing here?"
Regardless of whether he had disturbed Alice, Leo immediately took out what he had seen.
It was a large, plump, pitch-black bomb, ellipsoidal in shape, every part of it unmistakably in Earth's style.
Leo wondered whether his eyes were deceiving him and could not help reaching out with a trembling hand to touch it.
It was just as the rumors described, just like the footage shown on television. Even with Leo's extraordinary perception now, there was no mistake.
It was that thing!
But why would something so important be in Adelaide's wizard ring?
Earth had been torn apart. Shouldn't a weapon of mass destruction like this have exploded?
Why had it appeared before him intact?
Leo's mind raced as he stared fixedly at the seemingly harmless bomb in front of him.
If even a weapon of mass destruction like this could survive Earth's destruction intact, that meant more things could have survived.
Perhaps...
Perhaps...
Leo panted heavily, too excited to calm himself, his mind filled with wild thoughts.
Those memories that should have lain dormant surfaced again without warning, flashing before his eyes frame by frame with incomparable clarity, as though afraid Leo would forget.
Leo tenderly stroked the weapon of mass destruction before him. His memories of Earth had grown increasingly hazy.
Often, it was not that Leo did not want to remember Earth, but that he was deliberately forgetting.
Birth, school, growing up, work, friends, family-all of it had been on Earth. Those were the most precious and happiest memories of a person's youth.
It was as though they were the tenderest part of life, the most precious treasure that could never be erased.
But Leo had already spent more time in the Wizard World than he had on Earth. Those memories brought him not happiness, but more often pain.
Every image that flashed through his mind was like steel needles stabbing relentlessly into Leo's heart.
Forgetting was Leo's choice of escape!