Just when it reached a hair's breadth away from accomplishing its ill intention against Roy, his partially tangible body melted entirely into a mist, becoming ghostly.
As the blade passed through Roy's intangible self, Noah snapped his finger
"Boom!" It exploded, and Roy's foggy form was blasted into bits again.
Broken pieces of his misty self were falling down the air left and right like light feathers.
The thought that he got him hard had just popped in Noah's mind when the many wisps of Roy's body suddenly took a flight towards him.
"W-what?! Even this didn't hurt him?!! Is he impervious to physical and magical attacks?" Noah said as he saw that.
The wisps that Roy's body had turned into moved forward and circled Noah again and again with such speed that they developed into a single entity, a tornado!
Noah found himself trapped inside it and felt suffocated, and his expression fell for real this time.
He tried to run out of it, but just a moment after he put his thoughts into action, a sword popped out of the tornado and slashed him, cutting open a gash on his tender, white flesh.
"Argh!" He moaned in pain and stumbled back into the center of the tornado of mist.
『Ding! You slashed open a cut in Noah! He lost 2 HP!』
『Noah: 7/15 HP.』
"Be gone!" Noah pulled out his spellbook to cast rank-1 crystal magic when all of a sudden, a pale, white hand shot out of the mist surrounding him, grabbed the book, forced it close, and snatched it away.
"M-my book!" Noah cried out as he saw it disappearing from his vision and into the swirling darkness.
What happened next wasn't known to him.
Roy opened the subspace and threw it inside.
『You've cut off Noah's connection with Crystal Spellbook. He'll not be able to recall it, sense where it is, or use the spell in it!』
『It would automatically be unsummoned after an hour.』
"Unbelievable!" Roy was shocked to find that out.
One must know that a mage could summon and reverse-summon their spellbooks without a hick.
But just because he put it in his subspace, Noah lost its connection with it for an hour!
Without the spellbook, he couldn't cast powerful spells!
Noah attempted to reverse-summon and resummon his spellbook but discovered that he had lost all connection with it. As a result, he took a defensive stance and used his blood manifestation ability to create floating shields around him. He appeared to be ready to repel any attack.
Roy saw what he was up to, internally laughed, and started raining down attacks on him solely from his blind spots.
Noah was attacked 12 times over a minute.
He failed to dodge a single one and thus was injured from head to toe; his clothes were ruined, and his blood could be seen flowing freely out of his many wounds.
『-1!』
『-1!』
『-1!』
『Bleeding Debuff has been applied to Noah!』
『He will lose 0.1 HP every minute.』
『 Noah's health point has dropped down to 2.9.』
Noah's vision was severely impaired as a result of excessive blood loss.
Not only that, he felt so weak in his knees and heart that he knelt to Roy like a defeated loser.
"Let me live," he begged Roy to spare his life before collapsing forward weakly.
The system's notification rang in Roy's mind.
『Ding! Congratulation. You've Defeated Noah Badulf Baldwin.』
『You will now be rewarded handsomely.』
『Earned +10 Eternal Weed.』
『+200 experience points extracted from Noah and transferred to you.』
『Gained the Secret Knowledge book of the legendary Grandmaster of Shadow, Ninam. It contains the secret to the True Magic, Mana Weaving!』
『Noah's soul has been damaged. His potential as a mage has decreased from an Archmage to a rank-3 mage.』
『With a damaged soul, he will never be able to go beyond the early stages of rank-3 mage.』
Noah's head was just about to hit the ground when the tornado surrounding him assembled into Roy's human form.
A step was taken.
Roy appeared before Noah and grabbed him by the neck, raised him, and looked dead straight into his blurry eyes.
"You shouldn't have initiated this duel if you didn't have the guts to die." Roy whispered into his ears, "Now it's too late to beg for your life." Then, he said out loud, "I mean, if I were in your shoes, would you have spared me? No, you would have struck me death the second you got the chance!"
Roy's grasp on Noah's neck tightened as if he really planned to help him ascend to the afterlife today.
"Stop!"
But just then, such a great deal of aura pressure descended on him that he loosed his hold on Noah and looked around, on alert.
Arlo and a red-eyed man stepped out of the trees and entered his vision.
The Fierce Sword Count looked at Roy with pursed lips, but then he thought that it wasn't a good idea to show him attitude at this moment as Noah's life was in Roy's hand, and he couldn't do anything about it.
Roy had won this Duel of Honor against Noah and hence had the legal right to preside over Noah's life and death.
However, the Count didn't want his second son to die.
Thus, he begged, "Roy, please let him go. Take it as me begging you."
Even though the Count himself begged him to spare Noah, Roy didn't.
Seeing him still grabbing Noah by the neck made the Count nervous, and he eyed Arlo, begging him to change Roy's mind.
"Spare him," Arlo promised. "If he troubles you again, I will deal with him mercilessly."
"Okay! Only because it's you, I will reluctantly let him go." Roy released Noah, letting him fall.
Not only did he return the favors he owed Arlo with this, but he also saved his own life.
If he hadn't spared Noah, the Count would have crushed him to a pulp with his Aura!
Roy had let him go for multiple reasons, but the main one was that he would be attacked and maybe even killed right where he stood by the Count. The way he was being stared at by the Count told him that. Thus, he reluctantly freed Noah. There would be many chances to kill him later on. Not to mention, Noah's potential was already destroyed. He would never be his match.
As Noah was dropping to the ground, Roy treated him like a football and kicked him in the guts, throwing him towards the two middle-aged men.
The Count's eyes twitched when he saw Roy kicking his son towards him, but he jumped forward and grabbed Noah from mid-air before pouring a healing elixir into his mouth and on his body, healing him.
Arlo, on the other, looked at him in gratitude. "Thanks."
Roy eyed the two and questioned, "Since when have you two been here?"
Arlo answered, "We were here long before you two started fighting. It's just that neither you nor Noah noticed our presence because you both were too busy going for each other's throats."
Arlo & Badulf have seen the entire fight and know who was in the wrong and who was in the right.
Noah hadn't held anything back when he attempted to kill Roy.
So when Roy returned the favor, he wasn't held accountable.
They just didn't know how or who started this.
The Count considered it too lowly to punish Roy for fighting back against a person who tried to kill him, even though that person was his own child. That's why the Count hadn't harmed or gone for his life for harming Noah.
Actually, If it were any other person that had injured Noah to such a degree in a Duel of this category, he would've taken them out or suppressed them. But since it was Roy, who was of the Baldwin and backed by Arlo, his blood brother, he didn't seek to trouble him.
Anyway, from the very start, they were planning to intervene to stop the two half brothers from killing each other.
Baldwins were low in numbers; that's why they couldn't afford to lose even a single one.
Authors Note:
Duel of Honor=A Death Fight where you can legally kill a person. Usually used to settle scores and grudges, not kill! How many wants Noah Dead, raise your hand!
