Mage Adam

Then the next group of five bullets came.

A noise like breaking glass was heard when their armor\'s magic defense broke, leaving their bodies exposed to the emptiness of space. A scary pressure came down on them without mercy.

They couldn\'t make a noise, but blood came out of their pores, and their eyes looked like they were about to burst. They felt like they were dying, but a light from the ether saved them. In the world of the mages, everything comes from the ether, and nothing is more powerful.

Only then did they cry out in pain, with no time to heal or even show how scared they were. They could only think about escaping.

Their bloody bodies let their souls gather energy from within. This was their last fight. If they got away, healing would take forever. But no one cared about that now, not even Adam.

If he hadn\'t attacked, he could have let them go, but since he had, only one side could live. Being unsure would only cause trouble; total destruction was the real point of the fight.

"Third time, fourth time, railgun, fire!"

The ether crystals in the energy nodes broke, and the magical array fell apart after the fourth launch.

The explosion here was silent.

But the far-off explosion was very loud.

The last thing Adam saw through the infected\'s vision was the ten bullets hitting their targets, all infected being destroyed.

For a moment, he felt like he couldn\'t see.

After letting go of the devil, Adam looked at his Point bracelet. Two hundred and fifty Points were gone, showing the five people he had killed. Then a strong wind came, and the magic array was totally broken.

Adam started walking underground and said, "Speed up the self-destruction of the infected and send the good ones to the Saint\'s Fall. Don\'t make trouble. Help the apprentices if you need to."

The fight was done, and Adam didn\'t want to think about it. When he was doing research, he cared about every step and the final result, because he might get new ideas from it. But in a battle, he only cared about winning. He lived, and they died---that was all that mattered.

"Master," the devil said later, sounding scared.

The devil was still joined with others. After Adam cut him loose, he sent the remaining infected to where the explosion happened. The place was destroyed, with a huge crater and rocks turned into crystals. Giant tornadoes were there, but they didn\'t move any dust. Everything was dead, with only wild forces moving around.

The railgun had ruined this place for any normal life for a long time.

The devil was scared by what it saw and understood how fierce Adam was.

"What is it?" Adam asked, looking back.

The devil and Garfield, joined in a big body, shook in a funny way, "No, no, nothing."

Adam knew what the devil was thinking and kept walking underground. He wondered why the devil was so shy. "Aren\'t devils supposed to like destruction? Is it because I\'ve been treating him wrong?"

Adam stayed underground for a whole week, not doing any other work but organizing what he knew about viruses and genes.

He thought of viruses as a backup plan, knowing that trained mages might have scary poisons that could ruin whole ecosystems. Even though he wasn\'t good with potions and didn\'t really care about them, he got a new idea.

Adam started thinking that the Mage Council had kept a lot of knowledge away from apprentices. He thought that genes and biology had been studied a lot by mages. He hadn\'t cared about what high-level mage avatars were before. Now, he thought they were likely clones from their own bodies.

These clones could have magic power, maybe because of better genes and cells made after a mage changed. From this idea and his own experience, Adam had a great thought.

Maybe he didn\'t need helpers in his lab. He could do big projects on his own. If he had enough clones, all as smart as he was, they would be way more helpful than any assistants.

On the eighth day, a message came from the Point bracelet. Following the instructions, Adam took it off, and it floated and broke apart, making a shiny portal. He called the devil, joined Garfield and looked a bit confused, and walked into the portal, vanishing from that spot.

Behind him, the underground lab fell apart completely."