Rivers of the Night-Chapter 419: Choice

Theron stood in silence for a long while, his thoughts moving and churning. He knew that this current "plan" of his, if he could even call it that, was ridiculous. That was because, unlike everything else that he meticulously planned out, he was practically shooting from the hip right now.

He had to be sharp and quick, ready to adapt to anything that came his way because he simply knew too little.

But escaping the Mandate Guild when they assumed him to be a cripple was one thing. Escaping the Harmons when they knew more about him than he knew himself was a different matter entirely. He couldn’t just allow himself to be captured, but he also didn’t have an easy solution.

The man across from him was strong, very strong. In addition, he wasn’t a Water Mancer that Theron could suppress in all ways like he had Elder Kelyne Black, either.

Then there was the matter of the fact he still wasn’t back to 100%, and even if he did go all out to kill this man right now, the results might not be what he wanted. After all, he could just be tracked again, and that would make things even more difficult in the future.

Such a problem could come to rear its ugly head at the most inconvenient times.

Theron took a breath and closed his eyes. For a moment, it looked like he was giving up.

It would be hard to blame him. He knew too little, and weaving the threaded line it would take to get out of this was nigh impossible.

But that steely will inside of him was just the same.

When he opened his eyes again—

BANG!

His palm pressed down with a sudden violent pressure, and Ippe’s chest exploded.

The moment Theron felt the blood, there was a flicker in his eyes, but the roar of the middle-aged man came swiftly after.

"STOP!"

It was too late.

Ippe slumped toward the ground, and a bolt fell from above. However, just as it was to strike Theron, his palm clenched into a claw and he grabbed at holds in Ippe’s torn inner armor. With a twist of his body, he leaned back and threw the corpse upward.

In the same motion, Theron somersaulted back and out of the way, a rain of blood and gore falling as the middle-aged Harmon Clan representative had already closed the distance.

A sparkling field of lightning echoed out in waves. From another perspective, it would have been quite beautiful, almost looking like soundwaves manifested into lines and meshes of golden bolts.

Theron knew that if this field passed over him, he’d have a hard time controlling his body. At the very least, that was what the area-of-effect Spell was supposed to do.

While he had no familiarity with the Harmon Clan’s methods, he could sense a familiar Law within, one related to Vibration. In fact, it was heavily reliant on it.

Using his own understanding of the Law of Vibration and extrapolating, he could guess that this was a non-lethal attack designed to restrain him. In fact, the middle-aged man probably had a more direct method of restraining him that didn’t involve spreading it out over such a large area, which meant...

’Despite his fury, he’s prioritizing my life still.’

That was exactly what Theron wanted to see.

[Shedding Water Skin].

A ripple of delicate blue appeared over Theron’s skin, and just as it seemed like he was going to continue accelerating back, he stomped a foot and accelerated forward instead.

He moved like the wind, and while his body remained heavy due to the inner armor, his actual flesh and bone itself practically became as light as a feather.

The middle-aged man was moving toward Theron at his fastest pace and didn’t expect the sudden change. However, he was still a high-tier Gold Mancer, and clearly a tier of cultivator at least one or two levels above Elder Kelyne Black.

This wasn’t a division in cultivation realm, but instead in foundation and mastery in Laws.

This man wasn’t just any elder in the Harmons. He just might very well be someone who was on the Mandate Leaderboard in the past, and that wasn’t the sort of enemy Theron could defeat right now.

At least not straight up.

The reactions were just as fast as Theron expected. But what Theron also expected was that the middle-aged man wouldn’t expect that his lightning field control-type Spell would be ineffective.

While he was expecting Theron’s body to suddenly shut down, Theron hit a new gear instead—the Law of Stillness, the Law of Repression, the Law of Inhibition, and the Law of Preservation layering out of him in misty waves that neutralized the sea of lightning in a frigid current.

The middle-aged man paused for just the briefest instant.

Theron had noticed it from the start. Lightning was particularly unruly, so Spells utilizing it tended to be exactly like this, extending from the body in a continuous feedback loop. The area-of-effect Spell was spreading out from the middle-aged man in a slow wave that continuously increased its radius, and for that to be happening, the man had to be continuously feeding it his Mana.

That was to say that the middle-aged man and the Spell were body extensions of one another right now. So if Theron suddenly used his chilling-path Mandate to forcefully stop the vibrations, the man’s internal stores of Mana would pause for a moment as well.

Casting more than one Spell at a time was already impossible. Any attack the man was forming now would certainly be physical or related to some sort of treasure.

Casting another Spell after canceling the first was also impossible if your Mana was frozen, even if for but a small instance of time.

Theron’s eyes flashed with bloody murder, his father’s short sword appearing in his hands as he swung at the middle-aged man’s neck with all his might, a long, sweeping scythe of blue extending from it.

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