"I've already been trying so hard to fit into this world. Why did you have to appear before me?"
Leo's pain-filled eyes were tightly shut as he sank into agonizing memories, unable to pull himself free.
But the next second, Leo's eyes snapped open. All trace of anguish vanished, and he turned an utterly rational gaze toward the weapon of mass destruction before him.
This was the most destructive weapon created by human civilization on Earth.
Just one was enough to flatten a city!
In the Wizard World, what level of wizard would it take to launch such an attack?
As far as Leo currently knew, Gru, a Level Two Body Refinement Wizard, could not do it. Even Nox, who had captured him and Alice, could not do it.
Could a Level Three Great Wizard do it?
He did not know.
But even if a Level Three Great Wizard could do it,
that meant that although Earth's civilization had not followed the path of developing the physical body, its understanding of atoms certainly had its own distinctive strengths!
"As expected, the power of a civilization isn't as simple as what meets the eye. No civilization is meaningless, however weak it might be, even if its existence in the long river of history lasts less than a single splash."
Countless images flashed rapidly through Leo's mind, and the thoughts arising in that instant stirred his entire memory into turmoil.
Tenderly stroking the weapon of mass destruction, Leo could not stop trembling. This was not fear, but excitement.
The brainstorm continued. Like a madman, Leo took out his experimental notebook and recorded every image and thought that flashed through his mind.
An unknown amount of time passed before Leo filled an entire experimental notebook. Densely packed data and conjectures filled every page in chaotic disorder.
Not only would outsiders think it was a child's scribbling, even Leo, once clearheaded again, had to examine it carefully to guess what he had written at the time.
Yet Leo was smiling. These were all the finest gifts his homeland had left him!
"What's wrong?"
Alice, who had recovered to peak condition, had come to stand beside Leo at some point. She was looking curiously at the ellipsoidal weapon of mass destruction before them.
Although Alice did not understand its principles or construction, and did not even know what it was, standing beside the weapon of mass destruction gave her an ominous sense of danger, as though needles were pricking her back.
This was life's most instinctive response, a mechanism that warned oneself upon encountering danger!
There was no reasoning behind it. Her instincts simply warned her that it was dangerous, and she should run!
But after seeing Leo cry and laugh like a madman at the sight of it, Alice still came over and asked with a rare show of concern.
"I think I've discovered a path. A path my homeland left for me."
Leo smiled more happily than ever before. It was a smile that truly came from his heart.
"Congratulations, then."
Alice did not ask Leo what path it was, but congratulated him all the same.
She knew Leo's identity, and understood him better than anyone else. Ever since Leo had unleashed that sword strike, Alice's attitude had been changing constantly.
"I've fully recovered. Next..."
"Rumble! Rumble! Rumble!"
Just as Alice was about to speak, the rumble of a thunderstorm suddenly came from outside the cave, like a thunderstorm that had abruptly erupted over the sea.
Leo and Alice exchanged a glance, and their expressions immediately changed. They sensed a change in the elemental presence in the air. This was not an ordinary change in weather, but a shift in the elemental tides caused by large-scale witchcraft.
The two instantly appeared at the cave entrance. Only then did Alice discover that the cave lay in a sheer cliff halfway up a tall mountain. Several crooked trees happened to conceal its entrance, making it an excellent hiding place.
But Alice had no interest in asking how Leo had discovered this place now. Like his, her gaze was drawn to the changes on a distant mountain peak.
It was a thousand-meter mountain, lofty and imposing.
Now, the entire summit was shrouded in thick, pitch-black clouds. The enormous cloud bank kept rotating, constantly drawing in all the surrounding clouds.
Countless silvery-white arcs of electricity darted through the black clouds like roaring lightning dragons, lighting the ink-black mass with flashes of snowy white.
Alice moved the staff in her hand, and an Ice Mirror appeared before them. In less than two breaths, a jumble of images appeared on it.
Alice touched the Ice Mirror with a finger and made slight movements, adjusting it repeatedly. Soon, an image of the distant battlefield appeared on the mirror.
This was precisely the Ice Mirror witchcraft that relayed images of the battlefield through the moisture in the air.
Although there was no sound, the images alone were enough to astound.
"Crack! Crack! Crack!"
As though a god had flown into a rage, countless massive pillars of lightning struck straight down. Each was as thick as a thousand-meter ancient tree, smashing the boulders on the summit to pieces.
In just a few breaths, the entire summit had been shaved several meters lower.
Even dozens of kilometers away, the tremendous thunderstorm made their ears ring and their scalps tingle.
In the image, the entire mountain was trembling, and countless rocks rolled down its slopes. Had the mountain not been so solid, natural disasters such as mudslides and landslides would already have occurred.
All the elemental presence within dozens of kilometers was drawn over to sustain the lightning pillars' relentless attacks.
The lightning pillars, as thick as thousand-year-old trees, bombarded the summit over a thousand times before they began to weaken. By then, a full fifty breaths had passed.
But this was not the end of the attack. It was the beginning of the next wave.
Torrential rain crashed down with the force of the thunderstorm, scouring the entire mountain.
It would be a mistake to assume the downpour was less powerful than the lightning bombardment. In the image, Leo could clearly see lightning as fine as strands of hair spreading through the heavy rain.
Water conducted electricity.
On the mountaintop battlefield, the downpour directly dispersed the lightning pillars, delivering electric shocks everywhere the water flowed. The targeted attacks from before had effectively become coverage without a single blind spot.
Leo found it hard to imagine what kind of Wizard Apprentice could hold out in such an environment!
Yet all they could see in the image were attacks. So far, not a single Wizard Apprentice had appeared!
Had they not been able to sense the shifts in the battlefield's elemental presence, they might truly have mistaken it for a natural phenomenon!
First came over a thousand relentless lightning bombardments, followed by indiscriminate electric shocks through conductive torrential rain.
Putting himself in their place, Leo was certain that if he had been enduring those attacks, he would have died at least three times by this stage.
The downpour lasted a full hour, only ending after almost all the rain held in the surrounding clouds had fallen.
At the same time, this also meant that the various elemental powers in the air had been nearly exhausted.
Such sustained, tremendous consumption had depleted the concentration of elements in the air, leaving the battlefield's surroundings sparse and empty of elements. Elemental power from other areas was constantly surging toward it.
The flow of elemental energy surged like tides, whipping up fierce winds that swept through the surroundings again and again like a storm.
Small trees were snapped off and carried away by the storm, while vast swathes of poorly rooted vegetation were torn up and flung into the air!
This was a disaster caused by the aftershocks!
Was the attack over?
Not yet. Before the surging elemental tides arrived, the mountaintop battlefield suddenly turned white.
It was snowing.
The downpour had carried away a great deal of heat, and the air still held abundant moisture. Just a little guidance from elemental power accelerated the process of weather change.
Blazing summer turned to bitter winter in a second. The snow had been falling for only a few minutes when countless ice crystals appeared.
The next second, the ice crystals condensed into ice spikes, ice swords, and ice blades, indiscriminately attacking the entire summit.
These attacks from shaped ice crystals seemed unremarkable, but every strike was more powerful than a heavy artillery shell. Watching the image, Leo estimated that every attack from the shaped ice crystals exceeded 100 points of attack power.
After enduring lightning pillars and torrential rain, followed now by plummeting temperatures, blanketing snow, and ice attacks, the already devastated summit could bear no more.
With a rumbling crash, the summit collapsed.
Only when the mountain collapsed did Leo understand why so many Wizard Apprentices had spent hours continuously attacking this place.
The mountain was hollow inside, and over a thousand Wizard Apprentices within were desperately maintaining its structural integrity.
But the instant the mountain collapsed and they were exposed,
the outcome of the battle was already decided.
More shaped ice crystals poured down in a dense barrage, shooting frantically through the breach left by the collapse.
In an instant,
a third of the thousand-plus apprentices inside the mountain had their bodies pierced through. Some apprentices struck multiple times were torn to pieces by these weapons formed from ice.
As large numbers of apprentices inside the mountain died, the entire mountain could no longer hold together and collapsed completely.
This created even more openings, allowing more attacks to strike inside.
Nearly a hundred breaths-the shaped ice attacks continued for a full hundred breaths. They lasted so long and came so densely that almost no elemental presence could be sensed in the air.
Leo took great, deep breaths to ease his tension. Only when his nerves relaxed did he realize his entire body was soaked.
Leo had not even noticed when he had broken out in a full-body sweat from tension!
Was he afraid?
Of course he was.
Even a hundred of him could not withstand an attack like that.
With the battle over, Alice put away the Ice Mirror and sighed. "That was more than two thousand Wizard Apprentices attacking simultaneously. Large-scale combination witchcraft. Those are combination skills only used on expeditions to other worlds."
"The attackers should be Heluoluo Wizard Academy, and the defenders Big Ben Wizard Academy. Heluoluo Academy deployed at least two thousand Wizard Apprentices."
For a long time, Leo could not recover from the impact of the battlefield scenes he had just witnessed.
The 150% combat power he had taken such pride in had already been shattered by two hundred apprentices from Soul Death Knell Academy.
Now he had witnessed large-scale, organized combat involving thousands of wizards.
Never mind 150%-even 250% would not be enough to withstand an assault of such intensity.
Over the course of the battle, an entire mountain had been flattened.
"You've long known the fundamental purpose of the tournament. It's simply to reduce the number of apprentices and select outstanding ones."
"Apprentices like those just now, who can skillfully use large-scale combination witchcraft, are also among those selected."
"In expeditions to other worlds, the ultimate outcome has always been decided by these large armies of wizards, without exception."
Perhaps because she knew Leo had learned her identity, Alice revealed a few more secrets.
After all, her tutelage was enough to give her knowledge far beyond ordinary Wizard Apprentices. If she did not tell Leo these things, there was no knowing when he would learn them.
"What are you going to do next? Keep hunting other Wizard Apprentices?" Alice asked, looking at Leo.
Ever since Leo had filled an entire notebook with data like a madman back in the cave, Alice had suspected his objective would change.
Sure enough, just as Alice had thought,
Leo forcibly suppressed his unsettled feelings and said, "I've made a new discovery. It's very important to me and concerns my future path as a wizard. I won't take part in the hunting from now on. I'm going to stay here and conduct some experiments to verify my conjectures."
"All right. I'll stay with you."
Alice's answer was just as Leo had expected. Since the order had come from that great Purple Flame Stigmata Wizard, Alice could only follow him and protect him.