There was no specific spell, no intricate construction of magic power. Ian simply spread the fingers of one hand... and slowly closed them.
"Prohibition."
The single, calm word left his lips.
An instant later, an invisible field of absolute rejection exploded outward from him. It wasn't the same protective domain that kept corruption away from his own body; this one was far more domineering. Far more aggressive.
Everything that entered its range, charging monsters, torrents of acid, grasping animated plants, the shrieks of psychic amalgamations, the pull of corruption vortices, even the warped light and maddening whispers, struck an invisible barrier as smooth as glass and as immovable as reality itself.
They were mercilessly deflected.
Repelled.
Erased.
No, it went far beyond simple cancellation.
"He's dark magic itself!"
Saruman watched in horror as the first animated beast reached the edge of the field. Its enormous rune-covered claws, powerful enough to split mountains, touched the invisible barrier, and the runes instantly went dark.
The claws shattered like fragile glass, cracks spreading through its entire body in an instant.
The giant creature didn't even have time to finish screaming before it crumbled into a cloud of lifeless gray dust, completely devoid of magic.
And it wasn't the only one.
The torrent of acid slammed into the field like a flood hitting an invisible dam.
Not only did it fail to advance another inch, an even greater force hurled it backward, splashing the monsters charging from behind and throwing them into chaos as the corrosive acid ate through their own bodies.
The psychic amalgamations' piercing shrieks vanished without the slightest ripple. Instead, the creatures themselves began evaporating like morning dew the moment they came within range of the field.
The corruption vortices fared even worse. Their ominous suction collapsed instantly, and the spinning masses twisted apart, dissolved into harmless mist, and were violently pushed away.
'An upgraded End of All Curses. Sorry, Avada Kedavra, you're taking the blame again. Let's call it Avada Ends All.'
Since it mixed in dark magic, Ian once again chose to be cautious.
Naturally, the two ancient youths had no way of understanding what he was thinking. To Saruman and Kag, Ian had merely made a simple gesture and spoken a single word.
Yet that single action drew an insurmountable line of death around him. No matter what form an attack took or how powerful it was, the moment it entered the 'Prohibition' field, it was erased without exception.
And he still wasn't finished.
As if even this level of passive defense felt too troublesome, a trace of impatience finally flashed through Ian's icy eyes, the kind of annoyance someone would show toward a fly that refused to stop buzzing.
His left hand continued sustaining the Prohibition field while his right hand never stopped analyzing the magic array. At the same time, he began chanting another incantation.
This chant was even older and more obscure than the last, every syllable making the surrounding air tremble, as though resonating with a deeper law of the universe itself.
"...All things... return... to silence..."
As the chant continued, his left hand slowly pressed downward.
'Boom!'
A far greater, utterly irresistible force of decay spread outward from Ian like invisible ripples of death.
This withering was completely different from the casual wave of decay he had used before. It advanced more slowly, but far more absolutely, as though reciting the final destiny that awaited all existence.
Wherever the ripples passed, whether it was monsters climbing from the earth, psychic amalgamations emerging from the shadows, corruption mist drifting through the air, distorted rays of light, or even the dark crimson veins writhing across the ground, anything that possessed vitality, madness, or corruption visibly lost its color, its life, and even the very meaning of its existence.
The monsters froze where they stood before rapidly shriveling, weathering away, and collapsing into dust.
The psychic amalgamations silently vanished, as if they had never existed. The corruption mist was purified and scattered, and the living veins covering the ground turned gray and lifeless, becoming nothing more than cold stone once again.
The entire plaza, along with a vast area surrounding it, was swept clean by the ripples of the 'Law of All Things Returning to Silence'.
It was as though the highest forms of purification and death had been cast at the same time. Every trace of madness and corruption was forcibly suppressed and erased.
Only absolute silence remained, a silence so complete that even the whispers had disappeared.
"Oh! My God! He really is the kind of wizard who can hunt gods!" Kag believed it now without the slightest doubt.
Saruman was too stunned to speak.
R'lyeh's furious counterattack looked utterly laughable in the face of such overwhelming power and absolute laws.
The endless horde it had unleashed to wear Ian down hadn't even earned a fraction of his attention. While continuing to analyze the magic array, he casually erased every last one of them.
That kind of power inspired awe, and felt almost unreal.
Saruman and Kag stood frozen in disbelief. They had expected a grueling battle of attrition, expecting to see the legendary wizard gradually wear down beneath the relentless tide of attacks. Instead, reality struck them far harder.
This wasn't a battle of attrition at all. It was still a one-sided cleanup operation, executed with terrifying efficiency.
The young legend hadn't even truly attacked; he had simply maintained a defensive field and recited a single incantation, and R'lyeh's carefully prepared offensive had vanished without accomplishing a thing.
His control over magic, his understanding of the world's laws, his command of the rhythm of battle, all of it had reached a level they couldn't even begin to imagine.
Against someone like this, strategies such as overwhelming numbers or exhausting the enemy through attrition were nothing more than bad jokes.
Even R'lyeh's maddened will seemed to hesitate after suffering one crushing defeat after another. Silence settled over the plaza, with only the trails of starlight flowing from Ian Prince's fingertips and the lingering echoes of his ancient chant remaining.
As the young Saruman watched the black-clad figure calmly continuing his work amid absolute stillness, a thought unlike any he had ever had before slithered into his mind like an icy serpent.
Perhaps R'lyeh, or rather, the sleeping Cthulhu, wasn't refusing to use stronger methods. Perhaps these were simply the strongest methods it could currently employ under the threat posed by the young legend.
Or perhaps, faced with a legendary wizard who was completely immune to corruption, wielded laws of absolute destruction, and had come with the clear intention of killing it... even the Great Old One, while still asleep, was struggling to respond.
"...Is this really a hunt?"
The thought sent a chill down Saruman's spine. If even the 'Dominator of the Old Ones', the being described on the stone tablet, could be pushed this far by a fifteen-year-old legendary wizard... then just how terrifying was this mysterious boy's true strength?
Of course, Saruman couldn't help thinking about something else as well.
If Ian was talking about killing Cthulhu while it was weakened, then what kind of monster had Cthulhu been at the height of its power?
The mysteries only kept multiplying, snowballing into something larger and larger.
And what role could two insignificant observers like them possibly play in a game that had already surpassed their understanding?
"I think..." Kag finally spoke, "I think he's our hope."
"...Maybe."
For once, Saruman couldn't even bring himself to mention just how frighteningly dark a wizard Ian seemed to be.
He was afraid of scaring his companion. Besides, when faced with an absolute gap in power, they had no choice but to keep hiding... and keep watching.
For a brief moment, the plaza fell silent. But R'lyeh's brief pause wasn't surrender; it was the oppressive stillness before a storm.
Its repeated failures, the annihilation of its Spawn Legion, the complete failure of corruption, even the ripples imbued with the Law of Returning to Silence... none of them had managed to affect their target in the slightest.
Each failure was like an icy needle stabbing into the colossal will sleeping in the deepest reaches of the city, caught between dream and reality.
Its anger, silent yet powerful enough to shake the foundations of this twisted dimension, gathered like a colossal tsunami brewing beneath the sea, filling every stone of R'lyeh, every breath of air, every shadow.
This time, no new monsters emerged from the ground or the void. Instead, the entire environment itself began to awaken. Everything around them grew vastly more alive, and immeasurably more hostile.
The buildings surrounding the plaza, the massive green monoliths built with impossible, non-Euclidean geometry, began oozing even more slime.
The viscous liquid flowed together as though it were alive, producing a constant rustling sound like billions of tiny creatures crawling over stone.
In the dim light, the buildings themselves seemed to writhe and shift, as if enormous beasts were stretching limbs that had slumbered for countless ages.
Their shadows grew ever more grotesque, opening like gigantic jaws waiting to swallow anything in their path.
The endless whispers filling the air suddenly intensified. What had once been a murmur became an unceasing flood of hatred, curses, insane temptation, and blasphemous knowledge, crashing directly against the minds of every intelligent being.
"Oh! Again?"
It was the same old trick... just turned up several notches.
Saruman felt his mental barriers trembling beneath the psychic storm. Clear hallucinations began ringing in his ears as voices urged him to give up resisting and become one with this eternal madness, to understand the 'Ultimate Truth'.
Even worse, space itself began to change, its already chaotic structure becoming even more unstable.
Everything in sight blurred and doubled. Distances stopped making sense: a stone pillar only a few steps away might suddenly feel impossibly distant, while the shadow of a building far across the plaza seemed ready to lunge at his face the next instant.
Even the ground beneath his feet became unreliable. One moment it felt like solid stone; the next, like soft, slippery mud. Sometimes he even felt something gently tugging at his legs.
"I even hate myself!"
An overwhelming sensation washed over both Saruman and Kag. It felt as though the entire world hated them, rejected them, crushed them.
They no longer felt like simple intruders; the awakened city itself regarded them as germs that needed to be eradicated.
R'lyeh appeared to have abandoned the idea of creating more soldiers. Instead, it had turned the entire environment into a weapon, intending to use pure malice and chaos to physically and mentally crush, and ultimately assimilate, every outsider, Ian included.
Yet the person standing at the very center of that vortex of hatred barely reacted at all.
Ian Prince didn't even bother looking up at the increasingly horrifying surroundings, nor did he make any additional effort to defend himself against the psychic storm that had become almost tangible.
The domain surrounding him remained as steady as ever, effortlessly rejecting all corruption, whispers, spatial distortion, and physical hostility.
It was as though Ian stood inside a perfectly silent, perfectly stable transparent bubble. The raging chaos outside was nothing more than a silent play performed behind glass.
His full attention remained fixed on the magic array beneath his feet. The network of energy channels traced in starlight was almost complete, and the matching process between the three-dimensional runes and the array's energy nodes had entered its final stage.
"He's threatening that ancient being now!"
Saruman noticed that Ian's fingertips occasionally trembled ever so slightly as each tiny movement embedded another three-dimensional rune into a critical vortex within the formation. Every successful placement sent a faint but unmistakable ripple through space itself.
His movements were steady, precise, efficient. There wasn't a single wasted motion, nor the slightest hesitation caused by the apocalyptic scene unfolding around him.
That level of concentration, that ability to completely shut out everything happening around him, filled Saruman with almost hopeless admiration, and fear.
Just how strong did someone's mind have to be? How absolute did their confidence need to be to remain as calm as if they were simply conducting research in their own laboratory?
Kag's voice echoed through their mental link, trembling with disbelief. "He... he really doesn't care? This whole city looks like it's about to come alive and eat us!"
Saruman answered bitterly, "Perhaps... in his eyes, R'lyeh's rage isn't fundamentally different from its earlier attempts to harass him. None of it is a real threat. His objective has never changed, the magic array. Everything else... is just background noise."
At that moment, Ian stopped moving. The final rune, the largest and most complex of them all, floated before him, slowly rotating until it aligned with the huge, twisted star-shaped symbol at the center of the array.
"Done."
A faint glimmer flashed through Ian's eyes, as though something had finally been confirmed. He raised both hands, his left hovering over the star-shaped symbol, his right forming a complicated gesture as though twisting an invisible key. His lips moved, calmly uttering a brief incantation that somehow carried the power to pry open space and time itself.
"Let the Position of the Stars be the key. Let the Gap of Dreams be the gate... Open."
Of course... Ian had neither of those things. But not having them didn't stop him from using them.
After all, wizards were creatures who turned the impossible into reality. No key? No Gap of Dreams? So what? As long as he acted as though he had them, reality could simply be fooled into cooperating.
Whether that was completely unreasonable... well, reality could take it up with a wizard's legendary "if I think it works, it works" power.
Ian, after all, was being perfectly faithful to what it meant to be a wizard.
(End Of This Chapter)
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