The four human Lords had yet to barge into his room, but they began to move upon sensing that Michael tried to open the Runic Gate.
A burst of energy was all it took to break open the door and invade Michael's room. Yet, instead of finding Michael standing in the middle of the room, possibly cowering in fear, all they could see was freezing mist.
Michael filled the entire room with a burst of freezing mist. Simultaneously he retreated to the wall opposite the four Lords and executed Extraction to remove the wall blocking his path. Once the walls were removed, a chilly gust wafted through the room. Michael ignored the gust of air and dashed outside.
As he hastily stepped through the hole in his room, the bright light of the afternoon sun greeted him. He stared at the vast expanse of the ancient city and kicked the ground hard to leap out of his room on the sixth floor. Michael twisted his body to look back at his room where he saw the four Lords peeking out of the hole in the wall. The corner of his lip curled upward, a dozen compressed Glacicles forming around him. The Glacicles shot in all directions and burst apart, attracting the attention of civilians and passersby.
Simultaneously, Michael manifested several Qi Swords beneath him. He turned his body back and kicked the Qi Sword under his foot. He propelled his body several meters ahead before his altitude started to decrease. Another Qi Sword manifested beneath him, allowing Michael to run in the air, further attracting the attention of the people watching him jump through the air.
'That should be enough to scare them away,' Michael thought, only to realize too late that the four Lords didn't care about the attention Michael attracted. Since they had already been exposed by Michael, they might as well finish their job.
The female Lord appeared in front of Michael all of a sudden. She didn't teleport in front of Michael. Instead, she used brute force and bits of energy to propel her body forward. All she had to do was kick the ground and turn herself into a human missile. The woman passed by Michael with ease and kicked the air underneath her lightly to come to an abrupt halt. She circulated energy through her body and turned to Michael with a faint smile on her lips.
Michael expected the woman to fall at any moment, but that never happened. She stayed afloat as if the air underneath her was solid ground.
He frowned but adapted rapidly. It took a quarter of a second for him to execute a ten-fold layer of Enhancement onto Spirit Eyes right before unleashing Spirit Domination in its strongest form. The woman raised an eyebrow in response, however, she was unaffected otherwise. It was like Michael's Spirit Domination was nothing more than a mosquito bite to her.
She raised her right hand,and in response a forcefield of energy condensed around her. Hundreds of violet strings shot out of her right hand. They burst forth much faster than Michael could react and coiled around the youthful Lords.
"Urgh," Michael groaned as the violet strings cut into his flesh. His arms were tightly pressed against his body and his legs were tied up. However, the most worrisome were the strings that coiled tightly around his neck. A single wrong move and his head would be separated from the rest of his body.
'So that's the power of a Tier-5 Lord?' Michael wondered, his heart beating wildly.
Spirit Eyes analyzed the properties of the violet strings rapidly, and it didn't take long before Michael coated his entire body with Extraction. He applied several layers of Enhancement onto Extraction and added Insert to insert the enhanced power of Extraction into the violet strings, draining their energy while also extracting their weakest properties.
The violet strings were extremely powerful, but once the weakest link in their structure had been removed, they turned much less threatening. Unfortunately, that didn't really apply in Michael's case. The violet strings were creations of a Tier-5 Lord's Soultrait. Even if the violet string would have been a low-ranked Soultrait – which it certainly was not – a Lord at the 5th Tier possessed a ridiculous amount of Soul Power. That was something Michael realized with a glaring clarity now that he encountered the power of a Tier-5 Lord.
Despite being overpowered and him being barely able to insert a massive amount of Extraction's power inside the violet strings, the woman's eyes widened in shock. She felt that her strings were being ripped apart from the inside and that energy was being sucked out of them. It was the first time a Lesser Lifeform was able to do something like that to her, but it was not uncommon for her prey to put up a fight against her Soultrait. Even mental attacks against her weren't anything new.
The woman exerted a technique that weakened Extraction's effectiveness against the violet strings drastically. Thereafter, she tightened the strings around his body even further. They cut deep into Michael's flesh, resulting in several deep cuts and eruptions of blood all over his body.
"I think you don't realize the predicament you're in. I might not be allowed to kill you, but I can still cripple you. As long as your War Rune is intact nothing else matters," The woman responded, crimson eyes peeking out from underneath the veil of invisibility.
Michael groaned in pain, his eyes gleaming brightly as he stared at the woman in anger.
The three male Lords appeared next to the woman at some point. They didn't seem particularly tense or alarmed as they looked around the ancient city with little to no interest in the happenings around them.
"To think that we're the first to take action. That's quite the surprise," One of them said nonchalantly, while another one chimed in.
"Right? I expected everyone to be after this idiot. He's a golden goose, yet nobody bothered to claim him. Morons!"
The woman's lips parted, and she was about to speak when she noticed something. Her eyes narrowed and her focus returned to her little prey. Michael's resistance grew stronger while they wasted time in chitchat. The power that had invaded her Soultrait grew stronger suddenly, and the resistance of her repulsion technique deteriorated with every passing second.
A golden gleam surfaced underneath the blood that gushed out from the numerous wounds over Michael's body, exposing faint stigmatas.
Michael opened his mouth as if he wanted to say something, but no words escaped his lips.
"Stop resisting, you brainless id—...." The woman cursed, further tightening the violet strings around Michael. However, this time, Michael didn't groan in pain. All he did was grin as the string pierced deeper inside him.
Something deep inside him commenced to rumble violently, but he didn't focus on that sensation. All he did was smile at the woman in front of him.
'I think you're the brainless one.' Michael thought, not quite sure why the four Lords were so confident in their attempt to kidnap him. They were – quite literally – in the center of the ancient city, and it didn't look like they were in a rush to leave, at all.
Their 'meticulous' plan of arriving undetected to capture Michael might have worked out just fine, but who said that they were going to make it back?
"Do you like pain or what? Does it turn you on, you kinky bastar–..." The woman asked, her expression turning into one of disgust. But just before she could finish her sentence, she noticed something again. Why were they still in the ancient city? Their plan succeeded so why were they still here?
Her head flicked to one of the other Lords, her eyes filled with confusion.
"Summon the motherfucking portal, you idiot!" She screamed at one of the Lords, but he didn't react. He didn't summon the portal that was supposed to safely transport them out of the ancient city, and he didn't turn around to her, or the others, either. In fact, he didn't action a single muscle in his body.
"What the hell is wrong with you, James?!" One of the other Lords asked, his laid back attitude replaced by a sense of worry. They had to leave as soon as possible, otherwise, they would be caught even before they could finish their mission.
The Lord grasped James' shoulder and pulled him back with some force, but James didn't move an inch. He utilized some greater force to shake his partner in crime out of the supposed trance, but James wouldn't turn. All he managed to do was tear out a piece of James' shoulder…his frozen shoulder when he grabbed it hard.
All of a sudden, James' body commenced to crack. Deep spider weblike cracks formed all over his body and clothes. Mere seconds later, James' body explosion into thousands of chunks, frozen to the bone.
James was dead – frozen to death long before the others could notice anything – and so was their easiest means of escape gone too.
It was only at this point that the three remaining Lords noticed how cold it was. The temperature around them had dropped below zero in an instant and it didn't look like the temperature would increase anytime soon. In fact, it was getting chillier by the second.
The three remaining Lords tensed up upon seeing their comrade die without any warning. Their heads flicked in all directions to find the culprit, and it didn't take long before they found her – Alice Zenovia.
She stared coldly at the three Lords, her whole being exuding a frightening killing intent that encompassed the center of the ancient city in its entirety.
An ice-armor coated her whole body and she was tightly gripping a lengthy glacier-blue longsword in her left hand.
She raised her longsword and slashed in the Lords' direction, releasing a crescent-shaped blade of compressed ice with fearsome velocity. The three Lords were forced to make their move. They evaded the blade of ice by a hair's breadth before their eyes locked on their new target.
"Let's deal with her first!"
