Chapter 23 "How do you know I don't have it?"
"Joyce's" skin was blown away by the wind, his black hair disappeared, and the person underneath had white hair. The contrast made Edith's eyes sore.
She subconsciously turned her head to adjust, but happened to see Lin Qi with a blank expression, standing there in a daze.
Do they know each other?
Noticing the other party's momentary daze, "Joyce" exerted force and instantly pulled his hand out of Edith's palm. Hedda, who was below, immediately raised her wand and cast an attack spell to block the white-haired girl's path: "Be careful!"
Edith recovered and turned around to bring the person back to her side.
"You are..." She looked at the other person's golden pupils that were exactly the same as Lynch's, and suddenly a name came to mind from the depths of her mind, "...Bell Charles?"
The white-haired girl and Lynch below were both stunned for a moment.
"...My last name is not Charles." The girl was silent for a while, but finally did not deny the name.
Edith raised her eyebrows slightly, and was about to ask more in-depth questions when a dazzling red light suddenly shone into her eyes. A sense of crisis rising from behind made Edith's nerves suddenly tense. She didn't want to fight, and quickly let go of Bell's hand and stepped back, squatting, flipping sideways and falling into the bushes in one go.
At the same moment when dust splashed in the grass, a laser with the edge of a mid-level attack spell fell on the place where she had originally stood, burning a black mark on the stone.
"Walk!"
Bell shouted at the attacker in the sky. The man quickly fell from midair, waved his wand to control all the cages, and jumped into the teleportation array holding Bell's hand.
The two disappeared from the spot, and the teleportation array dimmed and turned into an ordinary pattern on the stone.
The entire "Central Waterfall" suddenly fell into silence.
"No... Where is Joyce? Where are our test results?" After a long time, someone finally spoke tremblingly, "Shouldn't we... be sent away?"
"I was deceived." Edith looked down at the map, trying to analyze where the problem started. "From the central waterfall to Joyce himself, they were all illusions. The handover just now was not the end at all."
She raised her head and grumbled to the blinding sunlight, "An illusion array of this level requires at least twelve people to provide magic power. It's impossible for a group to do it alone... I was wondering why no one was trying to grab it. It turns out they've formed an alliance and are waiting here."
"I, I don't understand." Standing next to the "teleportation array", Heda's friend, who was squeezed in the crowd, stood up, his voice trembling, "What do you mean by being cheated?"
"You mean, the Joyce just now was pretended by another candidate, and this central waterfall was also made up by another candidate, and the purpose, the purpose is to snatch our cages and give our test results to the real Joyce?"
Edith shrugged and said nothing more, leaving time for everyone to digest the situation on their own.
"We are running out of time. We need to break this magic circle before sunset, or find an exit to leave. The former has a higher score, while the latter is safer. Which one should we choose?" She turned her head and looked in the direction of Heda. "Miss?"
"I choose the former," Hedda answered immediately, with a sad face, "I can't bear to see so many poor victims forever blinded by the endless darkness."
Edith nodded as if nothing had happened: "Then crack it."
She laid the map flat on the ground and asked everyone to gather around and observe the surrounding structures. "With your abilities, you are not yet able to use illusions to change the terrain. Since a waterfall can be created here, there must be something like a mountain." Edith pointed to the hill in front of the central waterfall and said affirmatively, "We are here now."
"It just so happens that there is a long straight section of the route before this, and it is indeed difficult to find if it is shortened." She continued, "We know the approximate range, and now we need to confirm the solution: should we deal with the magic circle or the person who created it?"
"I remember that this kind of magic array requires a constant supply of magic power." Barney tried hard to search for knowledge in his mind. "It is difficult to hide the aura of those people. Since we haven't found them yet, they must have hidden behind the mountain. It is not convenient to deal with them. It is better to break the magic array alone."
"I think so too." Edith nodded. "There are two ways to deal with the magic circle: simple and difficult. From the more difficult point of view, first dig out the monsters and materials that guide the magic power, then find out all the spells in the magic circle, use spells with opposite functions to weave a new magic circle, and embed it in it for blasting."
"It's simple?" A strange voice suddenly interrupted from the side, scaring everyone in Edith's group to take a step back at the same time.
"Who are you?"
"To the team that just didn't hand in the cage like you, let me introduce myself. My name is Tuttle Kirk." He smiled and extended his hand to Edith. "We are all smart people, why don't we work together?"
"You are not a traditional noble with a name in the capital." Heda confirmed that he did not know the other person at a glance, and whispered quietly in Edith's ear.
Edith nodded silently.
She knows, she recognizes,
Tattle's parents were both from impoverished noble families. They had lost their voices long before the king's capital, but they still relied on their reputation to enter the Magic Association. After so many years of hard work, both of them now hold high positions and are considered a new generation of academic aristocrats.
It's normal that Heda doesn't know him.
Children raised in such a family would not be bad, no wonder they could find something wrong with Joyce just now. But on the other hand, they had not received aristocratic etiquette education, nor had they experienced the pain of climbing up like common people, so they were generally more unruly or more self-centered. She didn't like to work with such people.
"Why should we cooperate with you?" Edith casually lifted her eyelids and glanced at him. "We can get higher scores if we do it ourselves."
"There's not enough time. You can't make it."
Tuttle said frankly, "I heard you can write magic arrays? That's perfect. Our group will be responsible for processing the materials, and you will be responsible for making up the opposite magic array to explode in the center. If you act quickly, it can be solved within three hours."
“No one knows if you can find all the materials.” Edith said calmly, “If you don’t dig it out completely, and we embed the opposite magic circle underground, you sneak out of the exit, and the damage you cause will be enough to seriously injure everyone present.”
"Please go back. There is no reason for us to put our lives in your hands. This method is not enough. There is another one that can be used."
After hearing this, Tuttle smiled even more deeply, and he almost wrote the words "stupid human" on his forehead.
"You just mentioned another simple solution. It should be to let everyone cast an attack spell together and use force to break it, right?" He said frivolously, "This method is indeed simple and does not require any brains, but how do you want to gather them?"
He spoke slowly around Edith in a confident tone that said, "You can't refuse me." "These mice who failed to observe the current situation have completely lost the qualification to complete the assessment. Guess, at this time, will they help you break the illusion and let you hand in the paper successfully, or will they sit there and waste your time until the end of the exam?"
The students behind him cried and shouted, and the sound of them yelling accompanied Tuttle's coaxing all the time, adding evidence to his statement: "Unless you can offer enough benefits to impress them - do you have any?"
Edith raised her eyebrows slightly: "How do you know I don't have it?"
Tuttle's hand, running through his hair, paused for a moment.
"...To break the magic circle, the power required is not something that a few teams can do." His arrogant voice finally subsided a little. "Besides, even if you give them enough benefits, they may not work hard. You think I will regret it, why don't you believe that they will betray after getting what they need?"
"Create a competitive environment and make leaving here a common goal for everyone." Seeing that Tuttle was smiling so long, Edith also put on a social smile out of politeness, but it made Tuttle shudder.
She took a step back and rejected the cooperation in front of him, which he could not help but be tempted by.
Tuttle could hardly keep his smile.
Edith actually planned to unite with the group of candidates? How could she - she was just a companion, where was the temptation of benefits?
The Turner family has been on a downward spiral, and this promise cannot be fulfilled by Hedda, so what is it?
"Everyone calm down."
Edith walked back to where "Joyce" had just stood, and put her hands down to calm the people who were out of control.
No one is quiet.
Everyone was still immersed in self-doubt of "how could all this be fake", and no one wanted to listen to her speech as a "winner".
Edith had anticipated this scene. She was calm and said, "I still have fifteen healthy demon-eating birds in my hands."
In an instant, everything was quiet.
All the weeping and sighing people stopped at the same time, their heads turned stiffly in all directions, like trees that had been chopped down to leave only a little bark, and then fell forward on their stump-like necks.
Edith whistled and clapped her hands, asking Lynch to come over and take the cage out of the sword case.
Newborn birds are already very noisy, and then suddenly they come out of darkness into the sunlight and start chirping like crazy, which makes people feel irritated.
But this voice sounded like heavenly music to the ears of those who were already in despair.
"I still have some medicine that can cure the original demon-eating bird's disease." Edith took a bottle of medicine from her waist and shook it in the air. The liquid medicine rotated in the transparent tube without any impurities, which showed the high level of the refiner. "For those teams that handed in the captured demon-eating birds and kept their sick birds untreated, we can provide enough medicine to ensure that you can complete the task."
"So, there are about 25 teams that can pass the exam, but we seem to have at least 35 teams here." She stopped talking at the right time, slowly paced on the stone, and felt everyone's eyes following her movements without blinking, and then continued, "It just so happens that we are now trapped in the illusion, and we can't get out even if we get the bird."
"Why don't we all work together and use our greatest strength to cast attack spells to remove the illusions? At the same time, I can also distribute rewards according to the degree of contribution."
Edith glanced at Tuttle's dull expression, then at the focused faces of the others, retracted her smile, and said calmly, "Don't think about stealing the bird while the chaos is going on."
"Anyway, no one can get out now. I will kill all the lives in the cage as soon as someone comes. Then, you will be the sinner of everyone present."
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