Abe the Wizard

417 After the Matter…

As his fellow “colleagues,” Wizard Anthem and Wizard Edmond both knew how strong Wizard Cliff was. They knew how much equipment he had on him. They knew how frightening he could be in a fight. In fact, even if it was the two of them against just him, they were almost certain that they would lose.

Yet, here Cliff was. He was a dead man split in two. He never had a good relationship with them, but it was always sad to see someone you know for such a long time to pass away like this.

Wizard Anthem sighed, “Let’s, uh, let’s just retrieve his body for now.”

Wizard Edmond took out his portal bag, then placed Wizard Cliff’s corpse in it. He then began to ask.

“So why did Cliff leave his magic tower?”

Why, indeed. When Wizard Edmond asked that, he suddenly realized something. Wizard Anthem, too. They both noticed something, and they both looked at each other.

“The intelligence agency!” They both said to each other.

Soon, they arrived at the short hill. Unlike before, all the buildings that were here were gone. It’s like a gigantic monster stepped over it or something. Everything was either destroyed, or some of the areas were simply just bare.

“Wha- Where’s the magic tower?!” Wizard Anthem screamed. When they went to where Cliff Magic Tower used to be, all they found was a giant, deep pit with no end to its bottom.

They didn’t know what to say. They didn’t know what to think, either, really. They’ve always been very jealous of how Wizard Cliff built his own magic tower. They didn’t have enough men on their side, so they could never pillage the mourning stones in the same way as Cliff did.

Now, it was all gone. The most powerful magic tower in the Kingdom of St. Ellis disappeared. It was out of their sight without even a single trace. But how? A tower was not a small toy. The Cliff Magic Tower was fifty meters tall. Needless to say, it was not something that can be easily moved.

Was it a super large portal bag? They’ve never heard of anything that big to fit a building. Ok, maybe the legendary ones, but those were owned by the most powerful royal families in the world. Besides, if the killer was powerful enough to end an advanced wizard by himself, why bother with the magic tower?

When the two looked around, they could see that the whole area was excavated—yeah, excavated. From what it looked like after Wizard Cliff was killed, the killer went back to find all the loot that he could. The magic tower was, perhaps, one of the stuff that he took away.

This was absolutely ridiculous. It was like the killer was poor or something, so he had to scavenge everything that his eyes laid upon. There was no way that the royal families would do something like this. They were the royal families. There was no need for them to go through this kind of length for Wizard Cliff’s personal belongings.

Wizard Anthem said after he finished looking around, “Let’s have the professionals in our guild look after this.”

“What professionals?” Wizard Edmond pointed at the ruins in front of him, “They’re all dead, don’t you get it? The whole intelligence agency was here before. They all died. We’ll have to get people from other cities.”

Wizard Anthem said with a traumatized look, “Yeah, let’s just get whoever we can. Can we leave this place now? I feel like something’s terribly wrong here.”

“Oh, no. You sensed something?” Wizard Edmond asked. He was also starting to look very scared. Whether there really was something wrong, they decided that they should just get back and report what they saw.

As two white lights flashed out, the two advanced wizards disappeared from the scene. The Cliff Magic Tower, or it was so used to be, was now quiet once again.

At a giant castle faraway, a wizard was speaking to an old wizard in the center of a room.

“The seventh is now dead!” the wizard exclaimed.

The old wizard wasn’t quite sad about it, “Good. I thought that scum would die on the battlefield after he becomes rank 17 or 18, but, well, who would’ve thought? Dead on the Holy Continent! That’s just pathetic if you ask me.”

The wizard replied, “Still, he’s a part of our lineage. We’re the only ones that can discipline him. And now he’s ended up like this; it’s really our responsibility. For the time being, I’ll tell the sixth and fifth to head back.”

The old wizard gestured to tell the wizard to leave, “Yeah, yeah. I’ll leave it all up to you. I’m old, you know? If I don’t keep ranking up, I’m just going to die from natural causes.”

Right now, Abel didn’t know that his troubles hadn’t ended yet. He was heading to Liante City, the crossing point between the Kingdom of St. Ellis, the Kingdom of St. Pierrt, and the Kingdom of St. Anwall.

He didn’t go there to look for trouble. If anything, it was quite the opposite. Even after gaining possession of the Cliff Magic Tower, he was still very much a wanted man. Since Liante City was owned by three of the kingdoms, even if the authorities found him, they would still need permission from all three states to officially declare an arrest.

So why didn’t he go there before, then? It was quite simple, actually. When Cliff was alive, all he cared about was making Abel his prisoner. After he failed to do so, the measures he put up became more desperate and extreme. If he knew that Abel was heading to Liante City, it would be very easy for him to head there, even without a teleportation circle.

Now that Cliff was dead, Abel was free to search for the property he had inside Liante City. He could just live there for the time being, at least until the St. Ellis Wizard Union decided to give up on investigating after him. With the intelligence agency gone, he didn’t think that there would be anyone insane enough to go after a master blacksmith.

Abel didn’t choose to head back to the duchy of Carmel immediately. He decided to stay in Liante City. It was mainly to show his goodwill to the St. Ellis Wizard Union. More importantly, he wanted to prove his innocence by not going back. Well, it’s not like anyone would think that a rank 6 wizard would kill a rank 16 wizard, but he wanted more alibi to prove that he wasn’t the one to go after Wizard Cliff.

Now, then. As the center of the human world, Abel had always wanted to take a tour around Liante City. He was inquisitive about this place. It was the city that his good teacher Morton had always admired.

From what Morton told Abel, the laws in Liante City were very strict. That being said, it was the dream city for the wizards, because that’s where all the things they wanted could be found. Now that Abel’s “accidentally” got himself a property here, he was no longer bound by the “10-day-limit temporary residence rule” that was set in here.

As he flew on White Cloud’s back, Abel began to reminisce about the fight he had with Wizard Cliff. As dominating as he was, he was starting to have a more careful view of advanced wizards. If there was anything that he learned from this fight, it’d be the fact that advanced wizards were extremely hard to kill.

While it didn’t take much time for him to end up cornering Wizard Cliff, there was a lot of time that he had to dedicate to setting up his strategy. For starters, he had to gather enough summoned creatures that could be threatening to Cliff. That wasn’t easy. Even the spiritual guardian knight captain was almost destroyed by Cliff’s lightning attacks.

After that, Abel had to lure Cliff into his trap. Not only did he have to look up the geography of the battleground, but he also had to guess where Wizard Cliff would escape to. And it’s not like everything would go as planned. There were many instances where luck was extremely important.

To put it simply, it was a hard fight from start to finish. One mistake was all it took for Wizard Cliff to turn the tables.