The Golem Mage

"Ahhhh, you damn monster!" Red roared, realizing that avoiding a clash with Alec was no longer an option, he unhooked his battle axe from his back with his left hand, despite the pain etched across his face, his resolve was clear as he lunged at Alec, swinging his axe in a wide horizontal arc.

"Finally grew another pair of balls!" Alec taunted, tapping the hilt of his Changdao with his left thumb, sending the blade slightly upward just as Red closed in.

[> Mid Tier Spell – Iaido <]

Time seemed to slow around Alec as he vanished into a blur, passing Red in an instant.

Just moments before, he'd been standing squarely in front of him—yet now he stood behind him, back to back, and his left hand still holding the sheathed blade down as if he'd never drawn it at all.

To the stunned onlookers, it was as if a Tier 6 mage had just broken the natural order, surpassing a Tier 7 being in both speed and technique, they couldn't even track his movement.

Only the eerie stillness and Alec's composed posture hinted that something had happened.

Then they looked at Red.

He stood exactly as before, frozen mid-stance, but three heartbeats later, a collective gasp rippled across the field as his body split cleanly in two, from the top of his skull to his crotch—his halves falling apart like butchered meat.

The leader of the Goblin army was dead, and the morale of the low rank goblins crumbled on the spot.

Though the mid ranks tried to stand their ground, Alec could already sense it: their fear was beginning to show, all he had to do now was push it further.

As Alec turned, he noticed his golems already flanking him, shifting his gaze from them, he saw the Third Elder hovering nearby, holding the severed heads of both Griz and Fizzle by their hair, dragging them through the air.

The elder's Naginata had morphed into a glaive shape with a much broader blade—its sheer width alone fed Alec's imagination, making it easy to see how the elder had so effortlessly cut down his opponent's head.

What truly caught him off guard, however, was the sight of Zack clashing with a Tier 7 goblin alongside the Fourth Elder.

Alec couldn't help but shake his head, he'd clearly asked the wrong person to lead the Tier 6 mages, Zack didn't want leadership, he wanted to test his full strength, and Alec couldn't entirely blame him for leaving his role to Brandon.

Looking down at the mid-rank battlefield, Alec took in the shifting tide.

"Kid, you've done it. Look—they're already starting to retreat," the Third Elder said, resting the heavy golden glaive on his shoulder, while his left hand still gripped the heads of Griz and Fizzle, their faces frozen in shock.

"Yeah," Alec muttered softly.

The ease of victory felt anticlimactic, he couldn't decide how to feel—he had never imagined a battle could end so easily.

"Take the win. You've probably grown too strong for a Blood Moon battle in a mid-tier city to pose any real threat. Look on the bright side, you helped preserve the lives of many mages today, not a single high-rank mage died," the elder said.

Alec glanced at him, brows furrowing.

"This man… Do you have the ability to read minds?"

Alec said as he took a step back with a comical expression, earning a deep chuckle from the elder.

"That's because your thoughts align so easily with your gramps. You're that easy to read when your face lights up like his, and when I say align, I mean with the sane Patriarch… not the cold one," the elder added, his words carrying a deeper, weightier meaning.

-

And just like that, Estonia city recorded its fastest Blood Moon victory.

Because afterwards Alec ordered Titan and Legion to assist in the mid-rank battle, and with their arrival and the summoning of their minions, the battlefield quickly descended into a more gruesome bloodbath.

While Titan and Legion's forces didn't dominate as effectively as the Hive Queen's guards, their presence further tipped the scales in the humans favour, and there was no debate—that this round's MVPs were undeniably the Gordons again.

As everyone had witnessed first-hand how their intervention had brought the battle to such a swift conclusion.

Without waiting for the City Lord's closing speech, the Gordons began collecting the corpses of enemies they claimed as their kills, when they were done, Alec appeared to store the bodies in his space ring, but in reality, he sent them into the amulet world.

Since the corpses were dead, there was no system point fee, and his space ring was nearing capacity anyway.

Since the amulet world was their final destination regardless Alec just simply skipped a step—though from the outside, it looked like it was his space ring he was putting it all in, which caused those watching to have the illusion that his space ring had a very large capacity, leaving many observers quietly puzzled and intrigued about how the Gordons had gotten such for their young master or their newly acquired wealth.

-

With the end of the Blood Moon battle and the extension of the war exemption granted to his clan, Alec finally felt secure enough to leave for the academy, upon hearing of his departure, even his grandfather emerged from closed-door cultivation, claiming his path to Tier 8 was still distant.

The old man shamelessly even asked Alec for some Tier 7 cultivation pills if he had any to spare, promising to repay the debt with his full effort.

Unfortunately, Alec couldn't help him as he had still not hunted in the third level of the Beast forest yet, but something his grandfather said lingered in his thoughts.

Regardless, that was in the past now, as the entire clan had gathered to see Alec and his team off as they returned to the academy.

Even Endrick and Sophia seemed to have grown fond of the clan, it had been a pleasant holiday, but it was finally time to return to the academy.

The only setback was the sharp increase in the fee required to use the city hall's teleportation circle, so high that Alec couldn't help but suspect the City Lord was using the opportunity to take a jab at him.