VIP Chapter 499: Father vs. Son (2)
*Whoosh—*
Before Carver’s eyes, the smile was shattered by Will’s giant fireball. It passed through the illusionary figures, but it fiercely burned away the table that held his memories. Carver frowned.
“Even though the people here are fake, the items—or rather, the environment—created within this setup are real?”
He grabbed the axe he had placed beside him, lowered his center of gravity, and didn’t intend to dodge the fireball with his “agility.” He swung the axe in a half-circle. Then, he fiercely cleaved the fireball from its core… splitting it!
“Tsk… your weapon has that kind of use?!”
Standing on the other side of the pavilion, the figure who gradually overlapped with the recently vanished Mits was Will, also holding a staff. Carver observed Will. Looking closely, there was something obvious about the opponent who had pulled him into his memories and then suddenly appeared—
Will’s left eye, which was purple, had just bled. Since Will’s primary profession was healing, the bleeding wound seemed to have already healed. However, the trace of bleeding that had slashed under his eye had not disappeared. At the same time… although the “Mits” Carver had just seen had vanished, the garden decorations of the Hysterm manor, which had transformed into his memories, had not.
Carver realized that the “illusion” Will had given him was more like “a certain layer” within a dungeon. Information about Zero Demon City was a mystery, but information about demons was not. In all dungeon intel, demons were known to be adept at mental skills, especially in reading memories and constructing “stages” from them. In this place he was most familiar with, in an environment created by his memories, he was clearing a dungeon.
“So that’s how it is. The illusion just now was from your demon eye’s ability, wasn’t it? Whether it’s…”
As Carver spoke, he suddenly swung his axe.
*Swish—*
He spun his axe, passing through Will and the small garden pavilion in front of him. With the speed and force to break all the pavilion’s pillars, he swiftly moved in front of Will and brought his axe down towards Will’s position—!
“This place, which is from my memory, is still…”
“Tsk…”
Suppressing the pain in his eye, Will used flashy magic to propel himself away from his original spot. He tried his best not to let the instant-cast defensive magic of Iaar’s Ice Array touch his axe. Otherwise… if it were broken too quickly, he would lack something to block Carver’s close-quarters combat with.
“Mits and I were both a dream you gave me, weren’t we?”
*Bang!*
The axe struck down, leaving a crater in its original spot.
*Boom—*
And with the appearance of that deep crater… the small pavilion in the garden of the old Hysterm manor, which Will was very familiar with, collapsed entirely as its pillars shattered from the storm of his axe!
“This… this kind of force, if I hadn’t predicted it beforehand, it would indeed be difficult to deal with…”
Will temporarily hid in a nearby tree, panting. He understood that Carver’s team had been considered the strongest Adventurer team back then, and his own evaluation was also very high. Carver should have other enhancements and magic as a “Warrior,” but he wasn’t using them now, purely using his body for swings. As for the weapon’s ability, Will had only observed that it could enhance its attack against the same defensive magic. Carver not only handled it with ease but also seemed to have almost no stamina consumption. His speed was even comparable to an ordinary swordsman. With pure “brute force,” he could almost be the number one warrior. For someone like Will, whose physical constitution was poor from the start, he found it hard to imagine… how a man with such muscles could have sat in that merchant’s chair at the Hysterm manor back then and listened to reports from those meek civil officials? Wouldn’t he have been unable to resist punching them? Or was Carver’s ability to hold that position solely due to the strength of his fists!?
“If possible, I really wouldn’t want to destroy this courtyard that she and I both liked. This place… is quite beautiful.”
Carver sighed with a touch of artistic sensibility. Then, he rolled up the sleeves of his white suit, revealing the muscular flesh of his forearm under the bright sunlight. A forearm muscle that did not look like that of a “shrewd merchant” at all. It was as Will had guessed in his mind. However, when he had just swung his axe, Will had, for the first time, detected an “anger” in Carver’s tone that he could hardly control. He wasn’t incapable of expressing emotions, but to be on the verge of losing control like this was unprecedented. The image of the most elegant head of the Hysterm Family, which he wore on his face, seemed to have been torn slightly by Will.
“Mits… *qunVI覇蹴捂* (Eight) Ling Temple Spirit Dance, that’s her name, right? Her hair color… seems a bit like mine.”
Will provocatively pushed the hair on his forehead back. His hair color wasn’t the pure gold of Carver’s, nor was it the slightly reddish-brown that Mits had appeared with in the memory. It was exactly in between, perhaps representing…
“The girl who appeared in such an important memory of yours was my mother, wasn’t she?”
Hearing this question, Carver didn’t continue his attack.
“Oh, speaking of which, I’m truly sorry. I haven’t even mentioned her name in front of you. It’s indeed tragic for a child to not even know his birth mother’s name.”
“It was you… you hinted to the servants… so I not only don’t know her name, but I don’t even know her appearance, don’t know… don’t know what kind of person she was—!”
Will, uncharacteristically, felt a surge of… anger. He had never even met his “birth mother” in this world, Mits. But for some reason, seeing Mits in Carver’s memories, engrossed in magic, exploring dungeons, only to move forward to uncover something… Mits, who shared common ground and goals with Carver… who existed as an “eternal partner.” He saw a shadow of Shuna. Thinking about Carver’s later story, how he eventually “betrayed” such a person… In the later story, Carver was no longer the lover whose eyes lit up only in her presence. He had not only deceived many people emotionally but also physically…
“Perhaps because I thought… you didn’t need to know?”
Carver’s light laugh interrupted Will’s thoughts.
“You…!”
Seeing that Carver wasn’t provoked into anger by the mention of the person in his memories, Will turned to mockery—
“You’re so strong now, but back then you were so weak? You even got bullied by people at school and needed girls to stand up for you…”
Before Will could finish speaking, Carver leaped up and charged towards Will, who was still on the tree.
“A certain child with poor physical conditions and who always ranked last in sword skill tests is criticizing me now?”
“Tsk.”
Will scrambled down from the tree in a flurry.
“Hey, hey, if you want to be precise, I was only at the bottom, not failing the exam like you—!”
The moment he jumped down, Will’s staff was not idle. The agility of magic was slightly inferior to that of a warrior, but the few sentences of conversation had already given Will time to cast a counter-magic— Targeting Carver during the “end-lag” phase after his axe strike, Will seized this moment, and his meteor shot out from his staff again. But… he watched as Carver’s axe cleaved his meteor apart, while he himself remained unharmed.
“You wouldn’t know. The heads of the Hysterm Family are often like this… perhaps you could call it ‘late bloomer’? Do you know how the unit ‘Xi’ used to measure magic power originated?”
“Xi, Hysterm… could it be…”
“That’s right. Tracing back to the earliest, it was the damage caused by a basic fireball spell by a certain founder of the Hysterm Family.”
Carver dragged his axe elegantly. Behind him, the large tree was split in two from the middle and fell.
—This combat power is too low!
—Such low combat power could become a unit of measurement… although the magic textbooks don’t mention it…
—Do people from the Hysterm Family have a predisposition for rising from weakness?
However, more than this, Will wanted to know…
“You split magic with that axe?! How… can such a weapon exist?!”
“This… do you think melee warriors can only foolishly dodge magic when fighting?”
Carver pointed to his axe. The “brand” on it was glowing faintly. His axe seemed to become brighter and brighter during use, as if it were being honed while fighting.
“After killing a certain plant BOSS with exceptionally high magic sensitivity, it gained this ability…”
*Whoosh—*
Carver said, sliding his axe slightly.
“It has enough force to directly break the core of your magic—especially fireballs, which are already outdated in my era.”
Carver did not indulge in the “beautiful illusion” he had just witnessed here. Although Will was confident, the illusion he provided was already a very beautiful segment of Carver’s memories. Facing Carver’s axe, which combined speed and force, he once again blocked with Iaar’s Ice Wall. But…
*Crack.*
“Tsk…”
Will saw the Ice Wall shatter before him but it was enough for him to move to a safe distance. Then, listening to the axe strike—
—Damn it, this level of Ice Wall is no longer enough.
Will calculated. He had one more magic spell from Iaar that he could use as a shield.
“That magic doesn’t look like yours. Indeed. You’re someone who likes to rely on women, aren’t you?”
“If you had given birth to me a bit stronger, I wouldn’t have to fight you with so many unrelated systems and mentally taxing things.”
Will had completely entered defensive mode, even casting an acceleration spell on himself. He was waiting for an opportunity. Not just to stall Treya for controlling Zero Demon City, but also for himself… Before that…
“Besides, you also rely on women, don’t you? You and Mits, you seemed to know each other very early, childhood sweethearts, leaning on a great mage’s leg from a young age~”
He had to use more sarcastic trash talk to distract Carver from his attack.
“If you want to know about your birth mother before you die, you can just ask directly. There’s no need to mock me to satisfy your unsatisfied gluttony just now.”
Moreover, Carver seemed to be a person who was particularly easily lured by things from his beautiful memories.
