My Dragon King System-Chapter 370: Day One: Esparda De Langza

Dunn turned toward Talen’s position to engage with a follow-up attack, but he noticed the Grand Magus was no longer there. Nor anywhere at all.

What he didn’t realize was that his view had already been distorted to see things a few seconds later than when they actually happened.

"View Warp," Talen whispered.

And with that in play, Talen had already closed the distance by warping his position to achieve the effect of teleportation.

He reappeared at Dunn’s blind spot with the aim to drive the tip of his katana right through Dunn’s back.

But the blade met an invisible barrier around Dunn’s body.

The katana snapped on impact and Talen’s eyes widened in shock.

At the same moment, Dunn’s view of things corrected back into order and he reacted on instinct, vanishing from his spot and reappearing several meters away, still on air.

A grin spread across Dunn’s face as he stretched both hands out to his sides.

"Esparda de Langza is always passively around me," he said in a satisfied tone.

Talen, still floating in position, took a look at his broken sword before letting it fall to the ground. The blade tumbled through the air and landed in the dirt below.

"Hm..." he muttered.

There was a brief pause as the two mages assessed each other from across the distance. The forest around them had gone silent, as though the world itself was holding its breath.

Right then, Dunn thrust both hands forward, and multiple spheres of Esparda de Langza materialized around him. Each one had a dark glow of energy.

He launched them forward in rapid succession, which made Talen raise his hand to create a barrier of distortion.

The spheres struck it, and the two forces clashed in midair. The distortion bent and warped the trajectory of the spheres, redirecting them off course. Several veered to the left, others to the right, and a few shot upward into the sky.

But one sphere had somehow slipped through.

"Tch." Talen hovered to the side, narrowly avoiding it as it passed inches from his shoulder. He felt the air shift as it flew past him.

The sphere continued on its path and struck a tree behind him. The moment it made contact, the tree vanished. It had been erased.

That was a space shaving attack from the Lesedor mage.

Talen’s eyes glanced at the empty space where the tree had been, then back to Dunn. His expression remained calm, but his thoughts were already calculating the next move.

He exhaled, then lifted his right hand forward, causing a magic circle to appear before his palm.

"Distortion Field."

The space around Dunn began to twist. The ground beneath his feet seemed to stretch and compress at random intervals, making it impossible to judge distance or footing.

The air itself warped, bending light and sound in unpredictable ways. Trees in the background appeared to lean in directions they shouldn’t, and the sky above seemed to ripple like water.

Dunn’s expression gained a frustrated look, but he didn’t panic.

His personal spatial layer remained around him at all times, an intrinsic property of Esparda de Langza that created a stable zone where natural space resisted external attacks. This layer kept his body anchored within its own unaltered space, preventing the distortion field from directly affecting him.

However, that wouldn’t have been enough on its own. Even if he wasn’t affected by the distortion field himself, there was no way he could send out an attack. The field would warp and redirect anything he launched, making any offensive spell useless.

Dunn stood there for a moment, with his eyes narrowing as he considered his options.

Then, the grin returned to his face.

Right then, he let his personal layer of Esparda de Langza expand outward into what looked like a bigger sphere around himself. The sphere grew larger and larger, pushing against the distortion field with raw force.

Dunn stretched his hand forward, and the sphere expanded outward in a pulse, pushing back against Talen’s distortion in an attempt to fix the space around him back to normal.

The two forces collided, and the air crackled with energy.

—

Back at the Valaross fortress, in Dragonhold’s hall, the mages gathered around the screens with tense expressions.

There weren’t many people who could fight their Grand Magus almost equally. Talen was one of the strongest mages in the kingdom, and watching him struggle against an opponent was rare.

At a certain point, two other champions had wandered close to the area where Talen and Dunn fought. They wore robes of different colors, each representing a different continent.

When they saw what was happening; a tree simply vanishing, multiple chunks of earth erased from existence, and the very air warping in unnatural ways—both champions stopped in their tracks.

One of them glanced at the other, then back at the source of the destruction. They didn’t need to say anything. Instead, they just turned and walked in the opposite direction, choosing to steer clear of whatever battle was happening over there.

——

Talen took the opportunity and cast his signature spell. "Wrong Balance."

This warped Dunn’s sense of equilibrium, making him experience sudden and severe vertigo.

Due to the fact that the Lesedor mage had just expanded his personal layer of Esparda de Langza in a bid to counter Talen’s field, he had been left defenseless against the effects of the vertigo spell.

Right then, Dunn fell off course and started falling from the skies toward the ground as he lost orientation. The world spun around him, up and down losing all meaning. His vision blurred, and his body refused to respond properly.

He crashed onto the ground with a heavy impact, kicking up dirt and debris around him.

But he recovered almost right away. His personal spatial field reasserted itself, recalibrating his senses and restoring his sense of balance back to normal.

Dunn pushed himself up to his feet and lifted both hands upward. A massive portal opened directly in front of Talen and another behind him at the same time.

Dunn then fired a concentrated purplish black beam of his magic into the first portal.

It emerged from the second portal, aimed straight at Talen’s back.

Talen sensed it and distorted his position at the last second, vanishing from midair and reappearing on the ground, now facing Dunn.

They both stared at each other for a moment without speaking. There was this evident tension between them

Then, suddenly their magic energies began to surge and overflow, as though they hadn’t been serious all this while. The ground beneath their feet began to crack

Dunn brought both hands before him, forming condensed black energy between his palms. The energy pulsed, growing denser with each passing second.

Talen could sense the sheer magic power radiating from that spell and stretched his hand forward. A large magic circle then formed in front of him, glowing with silver light.

The condensed black energy expanded into a massive sphere of dark energy, which Dunn launched toward Talen with tremendous force.

But the Grand Magus was in anticipation.

The glowing magic circle in front of him distorted the space ahead, creating a barrier of warped reality. The sphere struck it and began to slow, its forward momentum grinding against the distortion.

Talen attempted to shift its trajectory again, but Dunn stretched both hands toward the black sphere as if empowering it to fight against the distortion barrier.

And so it continued forward, carving through the distortion inch by inch as though it would shave the barrier away. The two forces struggled against each other, neither giving ground.

Talen gritted his teeth in frustration, then brought his other hand toward his barrier. Right then it became a contest of who had more will to push against the other.

Both mages went into roars as they put everything into it.

Then an explosion occurred.

The black mass had collapsed inward on itself. Dunn’s Esparda de Langza, designed to erase anything it touched, had been forced to compress under the pressure of Talen’s distortion barrier.

Unable to advance or retreat, the sphere’s erasure property turned inward, consuming itself in a violent implosion that released all the stored energy at once.

The explosion shook the ground and sent shockwaves rippling outward in all directions. Dirt and debris were thrown into the air, and the trees nearby bent under the force of the blast.

When the smoke and debris cleared, both mages were breathing hard, and the effects of exhaustion were visible on their faces. Sweat dripped down their brows, and their shoulders rose and fell with each labored breath.

—-

Back at the Valaross fortress, the hall had gone silent from the tension. Every eye was glued to the screen showing Talen and Dunn.

Then Oberon spoke. "They’re evenly matched."

His voice was calm, but there was a note of approval in it.

On the battlefield, Talen and Dunn remained where they were. 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

Dunn finally spoke first. "You’re strong."

Talen replied, "So are you."

There was a long pause. Neither mage moved. The forest around them was still, the only sound the faint rustling of leaves in the wind.

Then, without another word, both mages turned and began to walk away from each other.

They had both come to the same silent conclusion. This fight could go on for hours, and by the end of it, both of them would be too drained to continue.

The smart move was to retreat, conserve mana for other fights, and come back to this another day.

Talen glanced back once, then continued walking. Dunn did the same.

And just like that, the battle ended.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​