Manaless Mage-Chapter 313: It’s the same…

Harry slowly stood up, his expression twisted into a deep frown.

His brows knitted together, his blue eyes sharpening with a strange glint.

The lightning that lingered around his body crackled once before dispersed into the air.

’I knew it...’ He thought grimly, his gaze scanning the empty treeline around them. ’There’s someone, no, a group... watching us.’

He’d felt it earlier, faint and almost negligible at the edge of his perception.

A strange shift in the air. The kind that didn’t belong to natural movement or beasts or stray spells. At first, he thought it might’ve been residual pressure from Miranda’s storm.

But it wasn’t.

It was something else. Something colder.

If his perception and mana sense weren’t so steong, they would have easily evaded his senses.

He hadn’t acted earlier because he wasn’t completely sure. The sensations were too fleeting, too expertly concealed.

But now...

The sudden spike attack.

The absence of drone surveillance.

And worst of all, the ominous fog beginning to settle in like a slow infection, curling around the dark spikes.

His eyes narrowed further.

’Yeah. No doubt about it now. There’s a foreign artefact in play... something that’s jamming the drones.’

He’d noticed when the scoreboard drone had suddenly gone dark mid-fight. It was subtle—most students wouldn’t have caught it—but he did. Not just that one either. All of them. One by one, they’d blinked out like candles in the dark.

As if something was cloaking the entire section of the forest. Not just through illusion, but through some weird suppression.

Harry raised his right hand slowly, calmly. Then he pointed a single finger at the empty air in front of them, eyes cold and unreadable.

"You can come out now," He said flatly.

There was no power nor anger within his voice, and the silence that followed made it seem like he was only speaking to himself.

However, he could tell the one he was speaking to had already heard his voice, and was simply pretending not to.

Miranda stood behind him, still too stunned to speak. Her green eyes, normally sharp and proud, were locked in horror on the dark spikes that jutted from the earth like spears from hell.

They kept pulsing like they were alive, the thick tendrils of black smoke coiling around them unnaturally.

It didn’t rise like regular smoke—it slithered like it had a will of its own.

She could also see the grasses around the spikes slowly wither and die, like the spikes themselves were poisonous.

Her lips trembled.

"That smoke..." She whispered.

Her legs shook slightly, barely noticeable, but Harry picked up on it.

"That smoke..."

She muttered it again, almost under her breath this time.

Harry glanced at her. A bead of sweat trailed down the side of her cheek, and her fists were clenched so tightly that her knuckles had gone white. But it wasn’t from battle. It wasn’t even from pain.

It was fear.

Deep, instinctive fear.

’Has she seen this before... or something like it?’ Harry thought. ’That confirms it. Whoever’s doing this didn’t just come to interfere. They came with a message, but why target Miranda?’

Suddenly, a low, crisp sound echoed in the air.

Crk.

Crk-crk.

The sound was subtle, like the snapping of dry twigs underfoot.

And then, slowly—like roaches crawling from beneath the walls—figures emerged from the shadowed edge of the woods. One after another.

They were all hooded and draped in thick black robes, which seemed blacker than night itself.

Their hoods covered their faces completely, only giving space for the twisted grins on their mouths to show.

One figure stood in front, taller than the rest, and the evil grin on his face seemed to reach both ears.

He tilted his head slightly, then stopped, just at the edge of the clearing.

Harry’s gaze hardened.

Miranda’s pupils shrank.

"That... power..." She muttered, her mouth parting in disbelief.

Even if she didn’t have a powerful mana sense like Harry, she could still tell from the familiar tingling sensation in her bones what kind of power that was.

"The power of darkness, or rather... the dark guild," Harry finished for her, his tone level. "Didn’t think they’d show up here, of all places."

He turned his body slightly, shielding Miranda with his back.

She hadn’t moved.

Her eyes were fixed on the black smoke still rising from the spikes.

Her body trembled again.

"That smoke... I remember it. It was the same..." she choked out, "The same..."

Harry didn’t respond, only narrowing his eyes at her.

’She’s clealrly familiar with their power, has she encountered them before?’ Harry wondered, the frown on his face deepening in confusion.

[I think so... she seems really traumatised.]

The frown on Harry’s face deepened at Leon’s words, but his gaze never left the robed figures.

Another thing he learnt during the time he spent in Leon’s memories was the ’institution’ called the dark guild.

Just as the name implied, they were a guild that operated underground, hidden from the rest of the world.

However, they had one duty which they could even sacrifice the world to achieve... and that was to open the world for the demon king to arrive!

Though what he learnt from Leon’s memories might not really apply to now, due to them being extremely different timelines. freeweɓnovēl.coɱ

But still, he was sure the part about them trying to cause chaos in the world by bringing the demon king would still be the same.

"Hmm..." The lead figure stepped forward, his robe rustling against the wind.

Then he spoke.

His voice was raspy, yet reverberated unnaturally, like it echoed from somewhere else entirely. A place darker. Older.

"Harry Ainsworth," He said. "You seem to know a bit about us... even our name. You’re also one of our targets... perhaps, this is fate."

Harry’s lips curled into a smirk. "Ohh. That doesn’t matter to me, just know none of you are leaving here... alive."

The figure ignored the jab.

Instead, he raised a pale, gloved hand.

Dark magic gathered at his fingertips. Black tendrils, flickering like flames, coiled around his wrist.

"The False Sun will fall," He said solemnly. "The shackles of this world will break, and the ashes of the one true god will rise again."