Chapter 1345

: Deathly Deception (Part 2)
The Winged Skull’s calculations were simple. Anyone who stood in Saleen’s way was to be dealt with one way or another. Any warriors who saw them subjugating those mages were basically dead. There were a handful who were being ganged up on by abominations, and they were hardly able to save themselves.
The Winged Skull had no intentions of helping those warriors out. By letting all them die out, no one would have been left to talk unnecessarily to Safilos.
When Safilos was gone, all four of those mages had fallen to the ground, and he probably did not know that those four mages were actually still alive. After being transformed into death wizards, their appearances would have gradually changed.
He would not have been able to recognize them even if they were his own sons.
While the Winged Skull seemed to be brutish with their way of going about things, they were actually rather meticulous. There were more abominations emerging after that, and all dead bodies had been tainted, rising from the floor.
It was only then that the Winged Skull called and put the jade skeletons and the four death wizards into the spirit space, before flying up to the cave above with Rafel.
It would not have been difficult for Rafel to dispose of those abominations as well. However, there were simply too many of them, and there would have been no end to it. Rafel possessed too few area-of-effect attacks, and she was reluctant to waste them. But then again, killing those things one by one seemed boring as well.
Meanwhile, the Winged Skull was reluctant to waste the spirits there as well. The magic door behind them was shut tight. If the abominations intended to attack it, it would have taken them considerable effort to do so.
While the four death wizards were indeed powerful, the Winged Skull recalled all of the sudden that those four had not been transformed for long, and their appearances were hardly any different from when they were still alive.
Even if the Winged Skull were to use Deathly Disguise on them, it would not have been able to fool everyone, especially Safilos. If he were to see the four death wizards, he would have definitely been able to tell.
As such, the Winged Skull needed to wait until the death wizards had completely changed their appearances and body shapes. The death wizards were not in a state of hibernation within the spirit space, and they were able to learn skills. That was something important to the Winged Skull.
Learning skills within spirit space was a very slow process, and the reason was simple—the Winged Skull was learning as well, but they were unable to put a lot mental powers into doing so.
Mages who came to possess spirit spaces were powerful mostly because of that. Summoning spirits anytime, anywhere was nothing much in comparison. Such mages would not need to put in much effort to gain massive amounts of skills. That, coupled with their long lives, would make advancement easy.
With the exception of not being able to use others to develop comprehension of the rules, the mystical part about death mages actually far surpassed that of their elemental cousins.
In some planes, death mages were unusually revered, and they were not called death mages. They were addressed as life mages in those places instead.
The Winged Skull held the Reaper Scythe and shot up to the cave. Green light strafed from their eyes, purifying all low-level abominations before them. Rafel was still holding her spear, yet she never encountered any enemies along the way.
The passage was only several hundred meters in length, after all.
There was a huge plaza after emerging from the hole, which was at the side of the plaza. The Winged Skull took one look at the center of the plaza and found a vortex coalesced by black mist, spewing abominations outwards.
The abominations who were spewed were in shambles as well. The vortex’s power and speed were too high, and only abominations above level nine would have been able to land steadily.
The high-level abominations rushed the low-level ones to get in line as soon as they emerged. There were already powerful abominations looking their way when the Winged Skull emerged from the hole.
However, none of those abominations moved against. They simply stayed where they were and organized their underlings.
The Winged Skull quickly found something was off with the abominations’ behavior, which meant that it was only a matter of time before more powerful ones emerged. Those abominations who did not bother with the Winged Skull were already at level ten.
If abominations of higher levels were to emerge and the magic door was broken too early, it would have been anyone’s guess if Saleen’s plans would have been ruined.

Rafel, we’ll take on those abominations.
The Winged Skull changed their mind and charged at the center of the plaza.
This skeleton sure is a lot of trouble, Rafel mumbled. She was rather reluctant to fight those abominations. Despite being a level 13 archangel, having to use divine arts after her god had perished meant that she had to rely on divine power reserves in her own equipment.
She would not have been able to receive aid from gods, and that was why she was willing to follow Saleen.
If she were to be the only one left to protect the metal angels, her divine powers would run out sooner or later, and she would have been reduced to little more than a warrior.
However, Rafel loathed the idea of having to believe in some other gods again.
But then again, the Winged Skull was very important, and Rafel could not have simply watched that pile of bones truly be reduced to a mere pile of bones. She hesitated for a bit before taking out and changing into the equipment that Saleen had prepared for her.
She changed into the Devil Possession Armor, holding a blade shield on her left hand and switched to another spear in her right. That spear was crafted using the spike of a level 14 silverline golden spearfish, which was inferior in quality compared to Grey Memory in Nailisi’s possession.
However, a weapon crafted from level 14 silverline golden spearfish was already powerful enough. It would not have taken more than one stab to deal with a level ten abomination. If the ones to be attacked were to stand in a straight line, it would have even been possible to skewer three to four of them in one go.
It was not easy for Saleen to craft that spear as well. While he had a good number of materials derived from silverline golden spearfish, only that spear had six completely intact eyes.
Rafel’s strong body was what made using the equipment possible. She did not need to spend much of her divine powers, and Saleen generously embedded dragon crystals on the spear.
Ever since he came to ally with Grand Duke Iron Blood, the powerful ones at Saleen’s side had the magic nuclei of their equipment switched to dragon crystals.
Dragon crystals were rare and precious, and yet Saleen had no qualms of using them in such ways. Items were dead things, and any losses could have been replenished. However, living people were gone for good once they were dead. Saleen was very good with calculations, but he hardly ever talked about price with those close to him.
So long as he was able to enhance their combat capacity, he had always been willing to use the best things on his people.
By the time Rafel changed into her new equipment, the Winged Skull had already charged into the midst of the abominations. Their Reaper Scythe was extended beyond seven meters, and with one horizontal sweep, blade blades danced. Almost a hundred abominations were reduced to pieces.
That move of his made those few level ten abominations tense up right away. Six of them ganged up on the Winged Skull.
The Winged Skull took to the air, and the blade of the scythe was brought down on them in a frenzy, targeting level nine abominations specifically. Those below level nine quickly ended up dead simply by touching the blade.
Furthermore, abominations had souls as well, and the killed abominations had their souls sucked into the Reaper Scythe.
The blade of the Reaper Scythe grew increasingly huge, and the attacks unleashed grew in range as well.
Rafel arrived and lashed out with her spear. The flash of her spear pierced into the black vortex, making it explode. Hundreds of abomination dead bodies were ejected from within. Blood splattered downwards as if it was raining.
The black vortex coalesced again in less than half a second after being destroyed by the flash of the spear. Rafel frowned. While that attack was not as powerful as when she was using Bloody Rose, that spear that Saleen made for her had very good anti-abomination properties.
That attack practically did nothing as killing some abominations was rather pointless. That black vortex grew even thicker when it was restored, spewing a greater number of abominations from within.
Rafel was exasperated. If her god had still lived, she would have only needed to use Prayer to borrow powerful divine powers, eradicating the evil vortex once and for all on the spot.
However, she was unable to do so at the moment, as using one such skill would cost her life.
Rafel began to act like the Winged Skull—killing abominations surrounding the vortex—after she failed to destroy the black vortex. When she was incapable of using divine spells, her skills with her spear enabled her to be like a tiger in a flock of sheep.
However, the abominations emerging from the vortex seemed to be of no end. Regardless of how many she killed, the number did not seem to decrease at all.
The god that Rafel once served did not like taking territories of others. However, that metal god had extremely special powers and had constantly been the target of other gods. As such, their divine kingdom had been in a constant state of war. Rafel had once been little more than a captain among the angels.
She had already fought hundreds of divine armies back when she was at level 12.
Her close-quarter combat abilities alone surpassed the abominations by several orders of magnitude.
The six eyes on her spear were also capable of absorbing the power of the abominations. After the abominations ended up dead, they would not have been able to power the black vortex further, which made Rafel have quite an easy time with combat.
The Winged Skull, on the other hand, was having quite a hard time instead. While the Reaper Scythe had anti-abomination properties as well, the problem however, was that they were not as high as Rafel. The strength of their constitution might not have been all that different, they lacked Rafel’s vast close-combat experience.
Rafel had probably personally killed hundreds of thousands of angels, and there had been many gods who died by her hands. The fighting between gods was one fought between divine kingdoms. She was created as a combat angel and a perfect weapon of the Metal God.
Her level might not have been high, but she was capable of advancing further. Her combat skills and divine spells were also top of the line.
If the Metal God had not perished, Rafel might have actually evolved from an angel to a god herself, making her a servant god instead.
That was not the case with the Winged Skull, as their combat skills came from a death wizard that they had devoured. For some unknown reasons, that death wizard had kept too much of the memories of their previous life, which caused the Winged Skull to mutate and developed incredibly high intelligence.
The experience also enabled the Winged Skull to be proficient in the battles between mages.
However, the Winged Skull’s skills at close-quarter combat were average at best. The skeleton was lacking in instincts and level, preventing them from being able to make short work of the abominations. They were relying on the power of equipment alone to make it that far.
The reason why they remained unscathed so far was due to their golden heart and the green purifying beam that shot out from their eyes.
Spirits who were capable of purification skills would have driven any human who saw it insane. However, within the eyes of the Winged Skull were two Blood Soul Towers, which in turn housed the souls of the oracle of the Goddess of Nature.
The Winged Skull was getting increasingly agitated and began to cast death magic. Their soul flame allowed them to connect to the spirit plane. Their powerful soul flame had taken solid form and made the Winged Skull’s eyes resemble that of humans, forming black eyeballs within the flames.
Death Healing, Death Roar, Invasion of Darkness, Death Ray…
The Winged Skull fired all manner of skills of spirits without care. An empty area formed around the Winged Skull. All of the dead bodies of the abominations within said area were purified along the way.
The Winged Skull noticed that the level ten abominations were surrounding them from afar and commanding their troops, while they refrained from getting into the range of the Reaper Scythe’s attack. The Winged Skull then made a crass gesture at the abominations.
None of the abominations knew what the Winged Skull meant exactly, yet they nonetheless knew that the gesture was an insulting one. Two of those abominations were unable to sit around any longer and barged through their low-level goons, making their way to the Winged Skull