'Are they trying to prevent me from having a safe place to return to after they cornered me?
I guess that's quite a nice plan.
But that would only work if they truly succeeded in putting me in a corner in the first place.'
Kayn knew that he would end up in his current situation from the start.
Being surrounded from all sides by the demons, his ability to escape was constricted significantly by the wind demon and the earth demon.
But Kayn wouldn't even decide to do something crazy like chasing the scattered demon army one by one and ending up with broken armor, blood, and wounds all over his body if he didn't have a goal in mind.
And with his mana pool and mana comprehension rising up tremendously before and kept rising until moments ago when he ate more or less 40 souls, that goal was of course related to another new spell that he had just comprehended.
To buy time for himself to cast the spell, Kayn created a thick ball made of ice that surrounded him from all sides.
He didn't only summon an ice dome that left his feet open to attacks from the ground, Kayn made sure that the ice construct he made really protected him from all directions, even his feet.
The second the ball of ice materialized, the bombardment of attacks continued as even the thick ice began to crack the second it finished manifesting due to the number of attacks being sent by the dozens of demons.
But the ice construct certainly did its job in buying Kayn the few seconds he needed to cast the spell.
For the first time ever, Kayn used all four of his hands just to cast a single spell.
Just like how the ice demon used both of his hands to control the countless ice spears and the wind demon cast a strong wind domain that created a no-flight zone, Kayn had also come up with a spell that needed all of his concentration and mana to cast.
The moment his ice shield circle crumbled from the bombardment of spells, the new spell that Kayn had created from all of his recent advancement manifested itself into the world.
"Ice Spikes Frozen Hell"
All the mana inside Kayn's body was absorbed into the single set of runes that Kayn had just manifested.
And for a full second, not a single drop of mana was left in Kayn's body as the runes absorbed them all in a short, single second.
For that second, Kayn felt his body weakening. Even his ice armor felt heavier than usual as Kayn was barely able to keep his body standing tall.
Fortunately, the demon heart worked its wonder as mana began filling Kayn up once again, albeit at a significantly slower rate than before.
Having all the mana inside one's body sucked completely was certainly an unpleasant feeling, especially for a demon.
'But damn hell it's worth it.'
Kayn didn't even have to worry about dodging any more spells as all the demons in the area, even the two elemental demons began to panic when they sensed the amount of mana that had gathered in their surroundings.
And by the time it took for them to sense the mana, it was already too late for the demons to do anything about it.
Starting from the ground, a few meters around Kayn, thousands of ice spikes simultaneously rose from the ground, spreading over a radius of 35 meters.
No matter what was in the way, whether it was an earth wall, a rock on the ground, and the demons that surrounded Kayn from all sides, everything was met with a barrage of ice spikes that came from the ground.
Each one of the ice spikes was at least as tall as Kayn, meaning two and a half meters tall ice spikes appeared out of nowhere and stabbed everything that happened to stand right above them.
The rocks on the ground flew upward from the ice spikes, the earth walls that the earth demon summoned had crumbled into pieces, and all the demons that were inside the range of the spell had multiple spikes made of ice piercing their whole body.
With multiple ice spikes appearing in a single spot, the demons that were lucky enough to only get their feet stabbed by the first spike were cursing their luck as the second or the third one found their way to stab their heads.
Even the most lucky ones, those that somehow were blessed by the universe to have greater luck despite being a demon and were only stabbed in non-lethal areas, couldn't survive for long.
Just like any other ice spell, the ice spike delivered icy mana that invaded anyone who came in touch with it, freezing these 'lucky' demons and eventually killing them.
The demons would either die from the spikes stabbing their vitals or turn into ice statues.
Not a single one of the demons that were inside the range of the spell was spared from the ice spikes.
But of course, being the annoying demons they were, the wind demon and the earth demon had made it out somehow.
The wind demon once again used his quick decision-making skills and his wings to narrowly escape the spell.
The second he felt mana spreading all over the area, the wind demon put down the no-flight zone as he took flight himself. Getting away from the ground.
The earth demon wasn't as lucky because he didn't have any ability that could react fast enough to the ice spike.
But an earth demon being an earth demon, he used his body's natural toughness to its advantage as the earth demon cast a spell the second he felt the mana.
The ice spikes were still a beat faster than his spell manifested, but the earth demon was able to avoid the ice spikes penetrating deep into his body by raising an earth pillar from beneath his feet.
Kayn saw this as a golden chance to end one of the annoying elemental demons' lives.
But what he found after trying to cast a spell baffled him.
Kayn tried to conjure up the runes for a fortified ice spear, but when he tried to draw the mana from his body to his hands, he found that not enough mana had actually gathered in his body.
Kayn hurriedly tried to sense what happened to his own body and soon found out that nothing was particularly wrong other than the fact that his heart had become really, significantly slower in gathering mana.
'Is this because of the nonstop spell casting that I did back to back without any rest? Did I really overwork a demon's heart…?'
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Author's Note: This story has been deemed unsuited for Webnovel's platform by the editors, so I will upload the remaining stockpile I have, then write another book, hope the few readers I have in this novel will give my other one a try, see you all~~!