[Gained New Blessings.
The Blessing of Fire Avoidance: Cuts 80% of the damage received from Fire Magic.
The Blessing of Sunburn: Makes him unable to receive any burns whatsoever.
The Blessing of the Fire Fan: Allows him to reflect 80% of Fire Magic back toward its source.
The Blessing of Weak Fire: Decreases the overall effect of Fire Magic on him by 80%.
The Blessing of Fire Absorption: Lets him absorb 80% of Fire Magic.
The Blessing of Fire Nullification: Causes him to nullify 80% of Fire Magic entirely.
The Blessing of Fire Disentanglement: Permits him to split and redirect the transfer of 80% of Fire Magic to another target of his choosing.
The Blessing of First Sight: He will instinctively know how to counter or dodge attacks that he is experiencing for the first time, akin to a form of precognition. This includes surprise attacks, and he will be awakened from sleep should an attack come while he is unconscious. However, if he is physically unable to avoid or counter the attack despite knowing it is coming, the Divine Protection will not activate.]
'I let my guard down. I didn't expect a sniper from over five miles away to attack me. I also thought the Blessing of Arrow Evasion would kick in and redirect the fireball, but it didn't—because I wasn't the actual target. The spell had been aimed at the ground near me, not at me directly. The blessing only deflected attacks intended to hit him, and a fireball aimed at the earth beside his feet technically wasn't targeting him at all.' Reinhard thought, letting out a quiet sigh at how careless he had been.
It was a mistake born of complacency, of assuming his blessings would cover every possible angle without him needing to stay alert. But he adapted his mindset quickly, making a conscious decision to avoid falling into the trap of relying too heavily on his blessings going forward. They were tools—powerful ones, undeniably—but they weren't substitutes for his own awareness and judgment.
He had acted quickly when it mattered, cutting through the fireball before it had the chance to detonate. And that distinction was critical, because that hadn't been a normal fireball by any stretch of the imagination.
It was called the Atomic Fireball, a spell of catastrophic magnitude whose explosion, if allowed to go off, would have been absolutely massive—capable of flattening everything within a wide radius and leaving nothing but scorched earth in its wake.
But Reinhard had split it apart before the detonation could trigger, defusing the bomb by cutting through its very structure with a stick.
And by the way, the Blessing of Anti-Nuke only worked on things that were not spells—physical explosives, munitions, bombs, and devices of that nature. It had no jurisdiction over magical detonations. So while Reinhard was functionally immune to conventional explosives, a magically created blast like the Atomic Fireball fell outside its protection entirely.
Yes, he was immune to magic under normal circumstances—his body absorbed ambient mana and dismantled incoming spells before they could reach him. But this particular spell had been cast at the eighth tier, a level of magical output so enormous that his body simply couldn't absorb it all instantly.
The sheer volume of mana compressed into that single fireball exceeded what his passive absorption could handle in the fraction of a second he had to react. That was even more true when he wasn't actively focusing his absorption to enhance its effect—when he was simply walking and not expecting an attack from five miles away, his defenses were operating at their baseline, and the baseline wasn't enough for an eighth-tier spell, after all, he wasn't at the 8th rank.
"You're not at Rank Eight." A blonde-haired dwarf appeared in the sky above Reinhard, hovering in the air with the effortless confidence of someone for whom gravity was merely a suggestion.
It was a dwarf, visibly aged, a step or two away from being called old. He was clearly up there in years, his features weathered but sharp, his eyes carrying the weight of well over a century of accumulated experience and power. Reinhard guessed him to be around a hundred and sixty years old based on what he could see.
Dwarves could live up to two hundred and fifty years, so his estimate placed this one in the later stages of his life but not yet near the end of it. As it turned out, Reinhard's guess was remarkably close.
This dwarf floating above him was an eighth-circle mage, currently one hundred and sixty years old, and was widely considered a generational genius with the potential to one day reach the ninth circle—a feat that only a handful of individuals across the entirety of history had ever accomplished.
In total, only seven ninth-rank beings currently existed across the entire world, and each one was considered the ultimate powerhouse of their respective race. The humans, the elves, the dwarves, the fairy race, the demihumans, the giants, and the fishmen—each race had exactly one individual who had reached the ninth rank, be it as a ninth-rank warrior or a ninth-circle mage.
They were the pillars upon which the balance of power between the races rested, the ultimate deterrents that kept any single race from attempting to dominate the others. But of course, outside of those seven also existed the Dragon Emperor, a dragon who had reached the ninth rank through sheer might and age.
So it was entirely possible that other beings at the ninth rank existed as well, hidden in corners of the world that no one had yet explored or acknowledged.
"I'm just returning home, I wish you or your people no ill will," Reinhard said, letting out a soft sigh as he looked up at the dwarf hovering above him. He had no desire to fight, no interest in conflict. He just wanted to get back to the human domain and begin his mission properly.
"You are different from other humans, but it's truly the actions of a fool to trust the words of a human," The dwarf said with a heavy sigh of his own.
But his reluctance to simply let Reinhard walk away wasn't born solely from racial distrust—there was a far more practical reason behind it. He was an eighth-circle mage, one of the most powerful beings on the continent.
Any attack he unleashed at full power could instantly kill ninety-nine percent of everyone below the eighth rank. It wasn't a matter of skill or technique at that point—it was simply the overwhelming gap in raw destructive capability.
No one below the seventh rank should ever hope to even exist for a single heartbeat in the face of his magic. They would be erased before their minds could even register what was happening… With the sole exception of Reinhard Pendragon, of course.
When Reinhard had cut through that fireball, the act itself had reduced the overall power contained within the spell. By splitting it apart before detonation, he had disrupted its structure and dispersed a significant portion of its concentrated energy, dropping its effective power to a level that his body could absorb and tank the remaining aftermath.
To pull off what he did—caught completely off guard, with nothing but a stick in his hands, and facing such a high-ranking magical attack for the very first time in his existence, given that just a few minutes prior he had never even experienced magic of such level directed at him—should have been flatly impossible.
No being at his rank, under those circumstances, with those tools, should have been able to survive that encounter, let alone walk away unscathed. But of course, once you realized that this was Reinhard Pendragon, the impossible was no longer impossible, and everything he did became perfectly reasonable... so how could he allow the humans to have such a genius?
The dwarf, named Thorin, was well known across the dwarven domain for his mastery of fire magic. Among all the mages of his race, his flames burned the hottest—he was capable of unleashing fire so intense that it could rival the heat of the sun itself, temperatures so extreme that they could melt through virtually anything in existence.
He unleashed his aura to its absolute fullest, holding nothing back, and instantly, the world for miles in every direction began to dry up and wither. An overwhelming heat wave fell upon the land like a blanket of suffocating flame, the air itself shimmering and distorting as moisture evaporated from the soil, the grass, and even the trees in the distance. Everything began to crackle and brown under the sheer oppressive temperature.
But Thorin was shocked—genuinely, deeply shocked—to see Reinhard simply wave his palm through the air in front of him. That single, casual motion cut through the space ahead, and the heat wave split apart as cleanly as a blade parting water. It was divided perfectly down the middle, the two halves of the superheated air flowing harmlessly around Reinhard as though redirected by an invisible wall.
It was a sight Thorin had never even imagined could happen. Someone using nothing but their bare hands, without mana, without a weapon, without any visible technique—cutting through a heat wave the way one might cut open a sea.
The split traveled forward from Reinhard's position, racing through the air toward Thorin with terrifying speed, the sheer force of the slash carrying far beyond where a normal attack should have ended.
Thorin was forced to quickly dodge to the side, narrowly avoiding the invisible blade of pressure that carved through the space he had just occupied. As he moved, his hands were already in motion, tracing intricate patterns as he formed a magic circle directed toward the sky above him. He was preparing something far larger than a fireball.
'This is my first time using my hands like this. It's not too bad.' Reinhard thought with a calm that bordered on absurdity, given the magnitude of the battle unfolding around him.
He watched with sharp, analytical eyes as Thorin cast his spell overhead, studying the way the magic circle formed, the way the mana flowed and concentrated, taking mental notes on how magic worked in this world from the perspective of someone who would never be able to cast it himself.
"Morning Sun!" Thorin called out, his voice booming across the scorched landscape, and a sun—an actual, blazing sun—formed above his magic circle, its blinding light flooding the world below with a golden radiance so intense that it turned the sky white.
He was taking this battle with absolute seriousness now, no longer testing or probing. With one hand, he maintained the spell Morning Sun, feeding it mana to keep the miniature star stable and growing in intensity. But with his other hand, he was simultaneously casting a barrage of debuffs upon Reinhard, layering curse after curse onto him from a distance.
Reinhard suddenly felt his body becoming heavier, as though invisible chains had been wrapped around every limb. He felt weaker, his muscles losing their explosive responsiveness. He felt slower, his reaction time dulling as if his nerves had been submerged in mud.
Even his senses dropped, the world around him becoming muffled and hazy as the debuffs stacked on top of one another, each one compounding the last. Reinhard didn't even bother to use his adaptation to counteract these effects.
Yes, he was suddenly ninety-seven percent weaker than he had been moments ago—his strength, speed, reflexes, and perception all reduced to a mere fraction of what they were. But so what? Even at three percent of his capability, he was still Reinhard Pendragon.
At a speed that approached the speed of light, Thorin hurled the sun downward upon Reinhard. The miniature star descended from the heavens like the fist of an angry god, trailing a wake of superheated plasma that scorched the atmosphere as it fell.
This was an attack that could seriously damage the very land itself, scarring the earth in ways that might never heal. This was a strike that rivaled all of Earth's nuclear arsenals combined in terms of raw destructive output. This was an island-erasing attack—one that, upon impact, would leave nothing behind but a smoldering crater where solid ground had once existed.
There was no dodging this attack. Even if someone ran for hundreds of kilometers in any direction, they would still fall within the range of the blast radius and the subsequent heat wave that followed. There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to flee, no distance that provided safety.
And to make matters even worse, this attack rivaled the surface temperature of an actual star, and when it finally exploded upon impact, for a few devastating seconds, the center of the detonation would burn with the true, unbridled heat of the sun—a temperature so extreme that matter itself would cease to exist within its core.
But call it his bad luck—Thorin was fighting Reinhard. A single slash, born from nothing but pure physical technique and willpower, cut through the world itself. The strike split the descending sun into two perfect halves, the miniature star cleaving apart soundlessly as the energy that held it together was severed cleanly down the middle.
The two halves drifted apart, their contained fury disappearing harmlessly into the world as they tumbled away from each other harmlessly. Reinhard, using his palm alone, had cut his attack and nullified it… no he pretty much killed the sun he created
Thorin's eyes widened in utter disbelief as he watched the impossible unfold beneath him—and then widened further as he saw the slash continuing upward, flying toward him with a speed he barely had time to register.
He reacted on instinct, conjuring a massive fire shield in front of himself, pouring mana into the barrier at a desperate rate to reinforce it. The shield absorbed most of the attack's force, the flames straining and buckling under the pressure of the slash that struck it.
But it wasn't enough. The slash cut clean through the fire shield a moment later, shattering the barrier like glass, and the remaining force of the strike connected with Thorin directly.
The blow sent him plummeting toward the ground, his body spinning through the air as he cried out in agony. A deep slash ran from his shoulder all the way across his body, carving a line of searing pain through his flesh that left him barely able to stay conscious as the earth rushed up to meet him.
[A/N: Thorin doesn't have a wand, but has a glove in its place.
MC is currently weaker without the stick.
After dealing with Thorin's first attack, MC had improved his skills to better deal with magic and be able to cut them in such a way that he nullifies them completely.