Chapter 178: This will kill you a little (1/2)

”No...” Layn muttered, watching how the ball of fire rose from the spot where he left his girlfriend at. ”No, that doesn't make any sense,” he told himself as he rushed towards the scene.

'They know that I would kill them all if a single bead of hair would fall off her head,' he thought, trying to figure out just what could've happened. But as Layn got closer to the place where the massive fire-magic had yet to settle down, he saw that all the logic in this world had no meaning against idiots.

Irea was alive. That was the most important thing. But outside of that, there was hardly anything positive that Layn could tell about her state.

Her hands were burned dark. The skin was scalding off her arms. All the soft hair that Layn loved to play with was gone, leaving only the bare skin. In fact, the top of her head appeared to be in the worst state after her hands, with red bubbles marking it all over.

Yet, despite all those injuries, Irea held her place and her hands in the same position.

'What happened here?' Layn asked himself, forcibly stopping his jump short of its initial distance. Without any idea what just happened, he couldn't carelessly waltz into the place.

”D-dear...” Irea attempted to speak out, only for a spasm of unbelievable pain to shake her entire body. But even as this torturous experience exploded in her mind, she held her burn-out hands extended forward. ”I-I stop-ped t-them,” she said in a breaking voice. Even though her face was scarred almost beyond recognition, Layn saw how the corners of her lips moved up in a smile of satisfaction.

Layn wasn't angry. He wasn't furious, shocked, or even mad. His head and soul were completely devoid of any emotions right now. In a sense, one could say that Layn's soul left his body, leaving just an empty marionette.

But there was one thing that was different about him. The power that he never bothered to showcase or flex to others was no longer restrained. All the energy that Layn stored in his cultivation now returned to its usual place in his aura.

The world itself around the archmage started to crack.

”You dummy,” the archmage said, slowly approaching the girl. In his eyes, there was no love or affection. But there was no worry, anger, or fury either. It was the dead look that only some of the few veterans and survivors of massacres could have.

”Boss...” A silent voice reached Layn's ears. He had to seriously search around the burnt-out area to find a shape that shouldn't belong there.

”Pavrien?” Layn asked, turning his head towards the messy shape of darkness sprained on the dark ground. ”What happened?” Layn asked the dying man without even an iota of feelings in his voice.

”I-I tried to stop them,” Pavrien spoke up weekly, barely capable of moving his lips.

Tom approached the man, seemingly ignoring Irea altogether.

”D-dear...” Irea called out after her partner. Her eyes filled up with a flood of desperation, loss, and longing.

”DON'T YOU FUCKING SPEAK!” Layn shouted. But this wasn't your usual shout. With his aura already brimming with mana, it seemed as if his shout sent a shockwave traveling in all directions. Whoever was hit by the wave had his ability to speak sealed completely.

They could still move their mouth. They could push the air out of their lungs. But their vocal cord were all immobilized by Layn's order.

'To think that I would use the primal magic so easily,' Layn coldly noticed. There was no happiness in his soul, even though he just did something that required extensive preparations on a damned whim.

Then, he placed his hand on the burned-out body of Pavrien. From the looks of things, he was the one hit the worst by the attack. And the simplest way to figure out what happened was to ask the person that seemingly knew that.

”Regenerate,” Layn said. 'Since I'm already in the zone,' he thought, going for yet another instance of the primal magic.

Primal magic in itself was the simplest kind of magic one could ever encounter. It didn't require structures. It didn't even require extensive knowledge to pull off.

The problem with primal magic that made it one of the least popular arts in the magic academy was one of its requirements. The one thing that someone has to do to achieve was the perfect understanding of what wanted to do.

By invoking the primal magic of the explosion, one would only be able to pull it off if he had a perfect grasp of all the natural laws that made the explosion happened. If one missed even the tiniest element of the picture, the magic would simply fail to act.

In Layn's original timeline, primal magic was only used by the specialized staff. Layn also got to use it once, but for the sake of keeping him from becoming the absolutely strongest being in the entire world, he was forbidden from using it ever since.