The old grudges from Anchor Bay City had not been settled, and now the other party had locked onto his location the moment he was promoted to Legendary and launched such a fierce attack.

What alarmed the puppeteers even more was that the purifying power contained in Alfonso's sword strike had an astonishingly restraining effect on the undead puppets he controlled.

Holy Light is really useful!

Since he began researching and creating puppets, it seems that most of the puppets he created were suppressed by holy light magic.

Fortunately, in order to deal with the Church of Holy Light, he had devoted himself to research for many years and had long prepared a secret weapon for the Church of Holy Light.

"To desecrate life and to toy with the soul is an even greater sin."

Alfonso, his silver armor gleaming, took a step and vanished from the sky. The next instant, he appeared not far in front of the puppeteer as if by teleportation, his longsword aimed straight for his vitals!

That speed was several times faster than when he was at the peak of the high-level!

A sharp glint flashed in the puppeteer's eyes, and he did not hesitate at all.

He suddenly raised his hand, his five fingers spread wide, and a complex arcane rune instantly lit up in his palm. He pressed it down into the swampy mud churning with dense death energy at his feet.

"Sea Mirage! Stop him!"

Boom!

The swamp mud exploded as if boiling, and a vast oceanic aura, far more ancient and powerful than the deathly aura of the battlefield, soared into the sky!

With a deafening roar, a colossal creature broke through the spatial barrier and descended onto the battlefield!

It resembles a giant, dark jellyfish, with countless eerie blue tentacles bearing giant suckers dancing in the air. Its massive body is covered with mysterious runes, radiating a genuine legendary aura.

It was the legendary Void Sea Mirage that he had subdued in Anchor Bay City!

However, it seems that it now has an additional ice attribute.

The enormous tentacles, like pillars supporting the sky, carrying the chill of frozen space and the illusion of distorted light, lashed fiercely at the charging Alfonso!

The air crackled under the strain.

However, the puppeteer did not summon the mirage to truly engage in a life-or-death battle with this rising legend at this moment.

His target was never Alfonso, nor the current battlefield situation.

Just as the massive body of the mirage blocked Alfonso's view, the puppeteer's true form, like a drop of water merging into the shadows, instantly faded and disappeared.

He left behind only a substitute puppet whose aura and form were identical to his own, and commanded the mirage to launch an attack.

The puppeteer's true form had already used the chaotic necromantic aura and spatial fluctuations of the battlefield to perform a more sophisticated spatial teleportation technique.

His figure appeared silently at the edge of a relatively quiet forest of withered bones, several miles away from the main battlefield.

There, a gray figure, close to the ground, with an extremely restrained aura, was intently writing battlefield data rapidly on a record board.

It was Elliott, who had successfully broken through to this point, who was now completely unprepared.

The puppeteer appeared behind Elliot like a ghost, his pale hand moving with lightning speed, silently reaching for a pouch at Elliot's waist that emitted a faint spatial fluctuation.

Elliott's alertness was triggered at the last moment, but it was too late!

He only had time to feel a violent shockwave from the spatial equipment on his waist, as if it had been forcibly torn apart. Then, the spatial equipment, which was specially encrypted by the church and should have been extremely stable, was forcibly broken open by the strange runes wrapped around the puppeteer's palm!

"you!"

Elliott whirled around, dropping the recorder. For the first time, his perpetually cold expression showed a violent fluctuation—the shock and rage of having his quest item stolen!

However, no matter how angry or shocked he was, it was useless against a legendary expert.

The puppeteer had already withdrawn his hand, and in his palm was a strange object about the size of a fist and shaped like a heart.

Its entire body is dark red, and its surface is covered with natural emerald green magical patterns that resemble blood vessels. At this moment, it is slowly pulsating with some strange rhythm, exuding a rich and irresistible life essence, as well as a trace of... a heart-palpitating, ferocious divinity originating from the ancient wilderness!

It is the sacred relic of the orc legends, and the highest priority item that Elliot is determined to protect on this trip: the Heart of the Bloodvine!

On the puppeteer's pale, stiff mask, an extremely subtle yet greedy and satisfied arc was drawn out.

He didn't even glance at the shocked and furious Elliott; his gaze was completely drawn to the Bloodvine Heart in his palm.

"The Time Witch may not care about this..." The puppeteer's cold voice carried a hint of fanaticism, "but how can we easily miss this treasure that contains boundless life force and can awaken the divinity of life?"

In his mind, the whispered divine pronouncements of the supreme being echoed.

Only by gathering the five divine hearts—Star Remains (Far North Ice Plains), Blood Vine (Lor Swamp), Holy Light (Holy City), Nature (Elven Royal Court), and Holy Dragon (Dragon Clan's Secret Treasury)—can the true path for the God Lord to descend upon this world be paved!

His original goal was to find a way to control the Heart of the Stars through an opportunity hidden in the Monster Mountain Range, but he never expected that the Oracle, who was lurking in the Dark Church, would take advantage of the situation.

Now that he has already missed out on the Heart of the Stars, how could he, as a puppeteer and a wise man of the Enlightenment Society, fall behind others?

With the Bloodvine Heart acquired, the core objective of this trip has been achieved!

His figure blurred again, as if merging into the shadows, and with that throbbing dark red heart, he completely disappeared into the necromantic mist that permeated the depths of the Bone Forest, leaving behind only the furious but unable-to-catch Elliott, and the main battlefield behind him still shrouded in the hissing of the mirages and the cold sword light of Alfonso.

The puppeteer's figure, along with the pulsating heart of the blood vine, completely dissolved into the thick, dead fog deep within the withered bone forest.

Almost at the same instant he disappeared, the legendary Void Mirage that had been summoned to block Alfonso seemed to receive an invisible command.

Its massive body, covered in mysterious runes, suddenly contracted. Countless dark blue, icy tentacles ceased their frenzied attacks and instead, like giant suction cups, violently swept towards the gray-clad puppets and the mutated gray-white orcs scattered across the battlefield, which had lost their command and appeared somewhat bewildered!

Buzz—!

Space violently distorted and fluctuated, and a deep vortex, seemingly connected to an unknown void, formed before the giant mouth of the sea mirage.

With a powerful suction burst forth, those stiff, gray figures were like withered leaves caught in a storm, involuntarily pulled off the ground and silently swallowed by the enormous vortex.

In just a few breaths, the gray tide that had spread like a plague in the core area of ​​the battlefield was completely swept away!

The sea mirage completed this bizarre cleaning task, and its enormous form disappeared into the whirlpool, leaving behind only a mess and frozen mud.

The once bustling battlefield of the Blackwater Shallows suddenly fell into an eerie silence.

Smoke mingled with the heavy stench of blood and burnt flesh, and the ground was littered with broken bones, charred craters, and weapons that had lost their owners.

The knights of the Ninth Holy Knights stood there blankly, looking at the sky where their leader Harrington had fallen, and then at the eleventh knights who were eyeing them menacingly, and the thirteenth knights who had just arrived with an imposing aura. Their morale completely collapsed, and their faces were a mixture of grief, indignation, confusion and deep fear.