Regulus of Hogwarts: Lord of the Stars

Old Raoul made the first move, raising his wand and unleashing a burst of gray-green light from its tip, carrying an extremely heavy, corrupting pressure. It was much larger than a typical spell.

Before it even flew close, Regulus could already feel the corrosiveness of the air, like limestone that had been damp and soaked for three days.

He raised his hand and parried, a flash of silver light on his wand, and the gray-green light was shattered in mid-air, scattering into a foul-smelling mist that poured onto the gravel, producing thick white bubbles.

Regulus retaliated with a thunderous explosion, sending a streak of orange-red light ball hurtling towards them.

Old Raoul didn't dodge at all. He raised his wand, and a spinning black shield met the attack. The ball of light collided with it and exploded instantly, the flames and shockwave blowing his robes backward.

The black shield was intact. He cast a crimson spell from behind, and a dense series of spinning blades appeared in the air, slicing towards Regulus.

Regulus swung his wand repeatedly, and silver light spread out in an arc in front of him. The spinning blade struck the Ironclad Charm and shattered into countless tiny lights.

His wrist continued to swing, the wrist causing the staff to draw short arcs, each swing accompanied by a spell.

A dark gray light struck a pile of rubble three meters to Old Raul's left. The rubble exploded from the inside, and fragments scattered outwards from the center, creating a series of fine explosions as they hit Old Raul's black shield.

Another golden chain of light shot out from the tip of the staff, attempting to entangle Old Rol's arm, but he cleaved it in two with a cutting spell; the golden fragments flashed in the air and then vanished.

Then a blue beam of light shot straight toward Old Luo'er's chest. He turned to the side, and the beam grazed his ribs, striking the ruins behind him and blasting a crater half a meter in diameter.

Explosion spell, shattering spell, burning spell, bone-locking spell, massive explosion, petrification spell, obstacle spell—one after another, they were unleashed without pause.

The color of the staff tip kept changing: gray, white, orange, blue, red, gold, yellow. Each color lasted less than half a second before being replaced by the next. The frequency of the spells being fired was so fast that the naked eye could only see a cluster of alternating flashing light at the staff tip.

The parallel processing enabled after Betelgeuse is lit makes this simpler. Previously, after continuously casting dozens of spells, a short break was needed to adjust the magic output, but now that's no longer necessary.

The switching of spell types, the adjustment of power, and the calculation of trajectory are all done automatically in the background. All you need to do in the foreground is swing the staff and release the spell.

The black shield in front of Old Raul was blasted and cracked, but he quickly patched it up as he blocked and counterattacked.

A grayish-brown exhaustion curse flew across the ground, softening the rubble and causing it to sink into the mud.

As Regulus stepped aside, the ground beneath his feet collapsed by half a foot, followed by three black bone spikes shooting out diagonally from the ground. One got stuck where he had stood a second ago, while the other two came from behind, collided with the Ironclad Curse, and exploded into bone dust.

The bone powder spun in mid-air, gathered into a ball, and rushed towards his face. Regulus raised his hand and waved his hand, using magical wind pressure to disperse the bone powder.

In that brief moment, another black beam of light shot over.

It moved with incredible speed, its color was pure black, and it left no ripples in the air it passed through, as if it had devoured all the magic in the air along the way, leaving behind a deathly silent passage.

Regulus used his Sidestep Spell to pull the black beam through his original position and strike the ruins thirty meters behind him.

At the same instant, Old Raul tapped the ground with the tip of his staff, and all the rubble beneath his feet exploded. A dozen or so stones of varying sizes, infused with dark magic and glowing with a dark red light, flew towards Regulus from all directions.

The surface of each stone was seeping with a corrosive liquid, and when it came into contact with the Ironclad Charm, it would leave black burn marks at the point of contact.

Regulus's Unyielding Armor Charm blocked most of them, but the three pieces that came from above and the sides were shattered in mid-air with a Shattering Charm. The fragments flew to the side and disappeared into the night with a dark red afterglow.

But there were two pieces he didn't have time to hit. One hit his left shoulder, corroding a black spot on the surface of the Constant Iron Armor Spell. The other piece grazed past his feet, burning a palm-sized black hole in the ground beneath him.

The two blows didn't hurt him, but they left two corroded weak points on the Constant Iron Armor.

Regulus's figure suddenly disappeared without a sound, and when he reappeared, he was already twenty meters behind Old Raul. The frequency of his spellcasting suddenly increased, and he began to focus on explosive spells.

The explosive imagery of Betelgeuse was compressed into every explosive spell, and the power generated during the explosion was nearly three times greater than that of its normal form.

An explosive spell slammed into the ruins, creating a crater two meters in diameter. The flames were so bright that even the distant hills seemed to flicker.

Next came the Flame Explosion Spell, mixed with the red light of Betelgeuse. The resulting fire wave rolled down from mid-air, scorching all the rocks within a radius of several meters until they were glowing red.

Forced by the outburst, Old Luo began to move, retreating diagonally backward, stepping into the depths of the ruins, stepping on broken beams and corpses as he retreated.

The black shield in front of him remained intact.

When the Explosive Spell struck, the shield trembled violently, and fine ripples spread across its surface. The ripples then traveled down the black tendrils extending from the bottom of the shield.

The tentacles pierced the ground beside him, vibrating at the same frequency as the shield. The force that had been absorbed was broken into dozens of strands, which then traveled along the tentacles and into the surrounding environment.

Each time the shield received an explosion, the ground shook, rubble was pulverized, clods of earth churned, and cracks burst outwards. Several times, the tentacles went too deep, causing the ground next to it to collapse and create a deep pit.

Old Luo stood amidst the cracks and collapses, pushed back by wave after wave of impacts, his feet moving calmly, each step landing on a weight-bearing spot that hadn't yet broken, as if he had chosen his landing point in advance.

As he retreated, his shield continued to catch him, and his tentacles repeatedly absorbed the force into the ground. His upper body barely swayed. After retreating deep into the ruins, he began to use the broken beams and still-smoking stone walls, each step causing Regulus's next spell to lose a significant portion of its power due to the terrain.

He seized the opportunity to retaliate, unleashing a cloud of gray mist from the tip of his staff, covering the spot where Regulus had just been and polluting the air there.

At the same time, his shadow stretched long in the moonlight, its edges began to twist and then tear. Several strands of black material detached from the edge of the shadow and crawled along the surface of the ruins toward Regulus. They were not fast, but they were silent and without any magical fluctuations, and were almost invisible to the senses.

However, spatial perception can touch them. Where those few strands passed, the spatial structure showed extremely subtle indentations, as if there was a weight pressing down on them, but no physical form.

He raised his hand and cast a fire spell, infused with the explosive will of Betelgeuse, the crimson flames sweeping across the ground.

The flames collided with the wisps of black matter, but instead of burning them immediately, they shrank back slightly, and a layer of black mist surged from their surface, mingling with the flames and biting at each other.

A hissing sound came from the air as several wisps of black smoke tried to spread along the ground. The flames chased after them, entangled them, and burned into their interiors.

The black energy surged a few times, turning red from the inside out, then shattered into small pieces of ash, which floated up and disappeared.

Regulus's second flame had already been thrown at the next crawling shadow. The will of Betelgeuse within the flame was more violent than ordinary flames. It crashed into the shadow and exploded directly. The black energy didn't even have time to contract before it was burned through.

The remaining few black wisps seemed to realize what was happening and began to retreat, sliding along the ground towards Old Luo'er.

Regulus unleashed a massive explosion in their path, ripping up the ground and the black mist along with it. The flames swept over, leaving nothing behind.

He continued bombarding, and old Raoul continued to retreat.

However, Old Raul was no ordinary man. Although his counterattacks were becoming less frequent, every attack he made was aimed at the position that Regulus least wanted to face.

Sometimes it was a spell pressed between explosions, silently passing through the flames and almost hitting his knee.

Sometimes a blob of black mud would suddenly rise from under your feet, and if you stepped into it, the entire sole of your shoe would disappear, even burning through the Constant Iron Armor Spell.

Another time, an extremely sharp bang exploded in his ear, attempting to disrupt his senses.

Regulus dodged and blocked everything, but he couldn't completely ignore it.

This person's dark magic is indeed powerful; even in the current situation, he is still looking for an opportunity.

A green fire arrow emerged from behind old Raul, moving almost twice as fast as the previous spell, and arrived in front of Regulus almost the instant it appeared.

He shifted half a body length to the left, and the arrow grazed his shoulder, embedding itself in the rubble ten meters behind him, instantly turning into white ash.

Before he could react, a second arrow was already hurtling toward his heart. He raised his staff and chopped the arrow in two. The broken arrow fell to the ground, and the flames burned on the ground for a while.

The wizards on the hills saw a very clear picture: two completely different styles of power clashing.

On one side was a silver-glowing boy who waved his wand, and various colored lights shot out in a fan shape in front of him, covering the sky and the other half of the ruins pulsating in continuous explosions and flashes.

On the other side was a black figure, flashing in the gaps of light, constantly retreating and shifting to the side. Each time it disappeared and reappeared, it carried with it a chilling black aura.

That person used very few spells, and each attack was economical. Every spell sent chills down people's spines. Even from a mile or two away, several spectators couldn't help but take a few steps back.

The two have completely different styles; one is like someone who demolishes houses, and the other is like someone who poisons a well. One makes the battlefield brighter and brighter, while the other makes it dirtier and dirtier.

Nearby, Silas's men were still cleaning up the remnants, and occasionally flashes of light from explosions would come from the outside, illuminating half the sky before fading into darkness.

Regulus liked this rhythm, and the more old Raoul held on like this, the more he wanted to push the pace even higher.

But the old guy was incredibly resilient; his defenses repaired faster than he'd expected, and his recovery mechanism was bizarre.

As he backed away, he stepped on a corpse, half-buried, with blood still seeping from its chest.

Then Old Luo stepped on it, and the corpse deflated, the flesh quickly sinking in, and blood was squeezed out of the orifices, leaving several deep black marks in the firelight.

The whole process was ridiculously fast; it took less than a breath to finish before the corpse was reduced to a thin sheet of skin spread across the ruins, so thin that the edges of the stones underneath were visible.

Old Raul's magic power surged, and several wounds on his body visibly shrank, even his black shield thickened.

Regulus had considered blowing up the corpses or those who were about to become corpses first, but the ruins were too deep, and there were even more people buried under the ground that the Disintegration Curse had turned up.

Some were killed when Silas and his team were clearing them out, while others were knocked in by the first impact. They were scattered and buried deep.

Old Raoul seemed to know everything. Wherever he went, a few tendrils of shadow would emerge from under the stones, spreading outwards from his feet, crawling into the cracks of the ruins, into the base of half-collapsed walls, into the fissures in the ground, and under piles of corpses.

Some of the living people were far away and hadn't died yet. They were caught by the shadows, and by the time the shadows returned, those people had dried up completely, their faces sunken into their skulls, their fingers bent into chicken claws, scattered in the ruins, looking no different from the charred rubble around them.

Regulus saw it clearly; they were eating.

The ruins were filled with corpses and half-dead people. As long as there were people who let him step on them and pass by, his magic would keep replenishing itself.

If you keep bombarding him like this, you won't be able to wear him down even if you fight until dawn.

Therefore, we need to break through his defenses completely in one go, attacking from all directions simultaneously.

Regulus continued to unleash more attacks, and some spells began to miss their mark, flying into the ruins and disappearing.

Those vanished spells entered the spatial network.

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Seventeen anchor points formed simultaneously in the space between him and Old Luo, the passage was completed at the same instant, and the closed loop closed the moment the anchor points lit up.

He didn't even spend time on the construction process, nor did he need to construct anything. Once the spatial coordinates in his mind were confirmed, the seventeen anchor points simultaneously fell from the void and landed on the preset nodes.

The anchor points are anchored inside the spatial structure, and the passages travel through the folds of space, invisible to the naked eye. Spatial perception can detect a slight fluctuation, but in the background noise of this level of magical confrontation, no one will notice that disturbance.

Between direct attacks, Regulus fed ammunition into the network, his right hand holding his wand constantly unleashing a barrage of spells. With just a slight tilt of his wrist, several explosive spells veered into the network entrance and disappeared inside.

From the outside, these spells looked as if they had been deflected by Old Raul, or lost their aim in the high-speed battle, and were scattered deep in the ruins, where no one would care.

In fact, each one steadily entered the closed loop, rotating along the channel at an increasingly faster speed, storing and compressing energy, and repeatedly accelerating within the enclosed space.

They were all explosive spells: Thunder Explosion, Explosion Spell, Big Explosion, Flame Explosion Spell, Powerful Explosion Spell, Chain Explosion. Each one was infused with Betelgeuse, injecting the star's heat and expansion into the spell's magical structure.

The ammunition in the closed loop was increasing, and the passage between the seventeen anchor points was being stretched by the magic of the spell, causing it to heat up and the spatial structure to tremble slightly.

Regulus's continuous bombardment suddenly stopped. The silence that followed was extremely abrupt on the battlefield. The chanting and explosions that had been going on for several minutes suddenly stopped, and only the sound of the wind and the sporadic sounds of battle between vassals in the distance remained above the ruins.

Old Luo's pupils contracted instantly.

The next moment, all seventeen exits opened simultaneously, and all the stored explosive spells were released from all directions at once.

Above, left, right, behind, underfoot, 45 degrees to the upper left, 30 degrees to the lower right, slightly to the left of the rear, and directly above the head—every outlet is uttering incantations.

There were dozens of rounds, all of them containing multiple rounds of ammunition stored in a closed loop, all of them explosives infused with the imagery of Betelgeuse.

The exits move within the spatial structure. The seventeen points move irregularly along their respective orbits on the sphere centered on Old Raoul. Each point's path is unique, and the distance between them fluctuates within a dynamic equilibrium range. The angle between any three adjacent exits always remains within a range that prevents the defense from covering them simultaneously.

The underlying mechanism of this motion pattern is a numerical solution for a seventeen-body motion, which is maintained in real time by Regulus's mental strength. The coordinates of each exit and each frame are being recalculated.

I couldn't do it before, but I can do it now.

Old Raul's defenses were built facing forward, and after several minutes of frontal bombardment, he had piled all his defensive resources on the direction facing Regulus.

When light from dozens of directions appeared around him at the same time, he only had time to push the black shield up and to the sides, and there was no time to make up for the protection on his feet and back.

The explosions occurred at the same instant.

The orbs of light rained down on him from all directions. Some hit the black shield, while others bypassed it, drilling into the blind spots of the defense from behind and under his feet, exploding wave after wave.

A huge fireball exploded in the sky above the ruins.

Orange-red, bluish-white, dark red, bright yellow—fireballs of various colors mingled together, their light flashing alternately, explosions accumulating, and the fireballs growing larger and larger.

The diameter expanded from a dozen meters to thirty meters, then fifty meters. The air was repeatedly crushed by the impact of the continuous explosions, producing a low-frequency, continuous roar.

The seventeen exits were still moving and spewing spells. The temperature inside the fireball continued to rise, the rubble was melted, and orange magma flowed down from the bottom of the fireball.

The wasteland for miles around was illuminated, and the moonlight paled in comparison to the fire.

The spectators on the hill saw a huge orange-white ball of light hanging above the ruins, its light illuminating the bottom of the clouds, casting shadows dozens of meters long from under everyone's feet in the direction away from the fireball.

By the time the sound reached the hills, it was no longer an explosion; the continuous low-frequency rumble compressed the air into a solid state, creating a physical thrust when it hit the body.

The entire wasteland was shaking.

The crowd on the hill erupted into chaos. Some people covered their heads and lay on the ground, some covered their ears and opened their mouths, and some ran a few steps in the opposite direction before stopping and looking back.

The young wizards in the front row were pushed backward by the shockwave, and the light of the Ironclad Curse shattered on the ground. The silver shield, the golden runes, and the blue magic barrier lit up layer by layer.

Even some spectators who lacked fighting skills pulled out defensive gear and covered themselves with whatever they could find.

One and a half minutes later, the network timeout expired.

With the ammunition depleted and the magic at the seventeen anchor points exhausted, the passage collapsed after losing its support, the closed loop was severed, and the spatial network collapsed.

The roaring sound abruptly stopped at the end of a minute and a half.

The fireball above the ruins began to shrink after losing its new energy supply, and the orange-red light retreated from the edges inward, revealing the billowing black smoke inside.

The thick smoke was pushed upwards by the heat, rolling into a huge mushroom cloud that shot straight up into the night sky from the ground.

The entire wasteland was illuminated as brightly as daytime for a moment, and then quickly darkened again. The stark contrast between extreme brightness and darkness made many people's vision go blank.

It took a long time for the smoke and dust to slowly dissipate.

Old Luo was still standing.

Its entire body was charred black, and black blood flowed from more than a dozen cracks, dripping onto the scalding ground and rising in small wisps of white smoke.

My left arm was hanging limply, my shoulder joint was misaligned, and the bone was protruding from my shoulder socket, creating an unnatural angle.

The black shield was shattered, and the robe was burned to ash, covering his body. His exposed skin was covered with a layer of carbonized crust and cracked burns.

The newly repaired skin and flesh on his face were ripped off by the explosion, exposing the fascia of his cheekbones and jawline once again. This time, even the fascia was burned along with the skin.

But he was still standing, his legs braced on the cratered ground, his boots burned away, his bare feet bare, the skin on the soles of his feet charring.

As the smoke and dust completely dissipated, his brown eyes pierced through the darkness and landed on Regulus, who was standing forty or fifty meters away.

He looked down at his body, at his dangling left arm, the charred skin, and the reopened wounds.

Then, using his intact right hand, he changed the grip of his wand from an attacking position to one with the tip pointing downwards, resting it against his chest.