The troll didn’t even seem to be taking the battle seriously.
From about half a kilometer away, he looked at Matt and grinned, his massive, grotesque mouth stretching wide in a bloodthirsty smile.
The demon race worshiped strength.
Even more than strength, they glorified battle and bloodshed.
Killing someone powerful was, to them, more exhilarating than even sex—ten times more, in fact.
The human standing before him wasn’t exactly a top-tier opponent, but he was still strong enough to make the fight more enjoyable than killing cannon fodder.
If he had to compare, maybe this would feel two to three times better than sex?
The troll’s hand holding the sacrificial offering was, of course, unusable in combat.
Not that he cared to use it anyway—he didn’t see the need to threaten the human with a hostage.
He simply let it hang down naturally and lunged at Matt with just one arm.
Matt clenched his jaw, his expression grim.
He was a genius of the Empire, hailed as the youngest ace mage in history.
Naturally, he had his pride.
And he was not someone who would ever admit defeat easily.
Even though he knew this was a mid-ranked demon with considerable power, and even though he had little confidence in beating it, being attacked with just one hand—wasn’t that just plain disrespectful?!
Fueled by rage, he didn’t hesitate anymore.
Watching the massive troll charge toward him at high speed, he began chanting under his breath.
At the same time, a large amount of ice-elemental energy started gathering around his staff.
“Ice Spear.”
In just one second, a gleaming spear formed entirely from ice appeared in his hand—clear and crystalline, shimmering in the sunlight.
“That’s… a high-level spell! Ice Spear! As expected of Lord Matt—he can even cast high-level spells instantly!”
A shout of admiration came from a knowledgeable mage within the army ranks.
Standing nearby, Li Xian looked puzzled.
“Instantly? Didn’t he stand there holding it in for a while before casting?”
In battle, every second mattered.
For strong fighters, even a single second could change everything.
Take Li Xian, for example.
If he were up against Matt, the time Matt needed to complete that spell would be enough for Li Xian to kill him a dozen times over.
Still, this method of forming a weapon using ice-elemental energy was quite interesting.
Li Xian watched Matt’s ice spear with great interest, carefully observing the structure and arrangement of the elemental energy.
***
Meanwhile, Matt ignored the flattery from the other mages.
His gaze was focused, his expression grave as he stared down the troll.
He couldn’t accurately gauge the troll’s strength, but since this was a mid-ranked demon, he dared not hold back.
He had chosen to go all-out from the start.
The ice spear launched instantly, flying straight toward the troll.
The troll let out a disdainful snort.
Seeing the spear flying at him, he reached out and casually grabbed it midair.
With a flick of his wrist, he hurled the spear aside.
It pierced through several Imperial soldiers like paper.
Aside from a few ice shards clinging to his hand, he was completely unharmed.
But in that brief moment, a massive wall had already formed in front of Matt—a spell beyond high-level magic: Ice Barrier.
“Pathetic trick!” the troll sneered, completely unfazed.
Without any fancy moves, he simply threw a punch straight at the ice barrier.
“Boom—!”
With a single punch, an earth-shattering noise echoed through the air as the Ice Barrier was shattered by the troll’s simple, brute-force strike.
He hadn’t even used his battle aura.
The shattered Ice Barrier exploded into a flurry of sparkling shards.
But behind that rain of broken ice, Matt stood with a confident smile on his face.
The staff in his hand was glowing with an intense concentration of ice magic.
He clearly hadn’t wasted precious seconds constructing that Ice Barrier himself—it wouldn’t have made any sense.
That barrier had been cast using a spell scroll.
Its only purpose was to buy him time… time to unleash his real finishing move!
Before the troll could even react, a surge of terrifying ice magic erupted in an instant.
“Ice Tempest!”
This was Matt’s signature move—an ultimate-tier spell known as Ice Tempest.
But it wasn’t just any ordinary ultimate-tier magic.
Matt’s version wasn’t only powered by overwhelming ice energy—it was also fused with wind elements.
That’s right.
Despite his young age, Matt had already stepped into the ranks of ultimate-tier mages.
Even more impressively, he was a rare dual-element mage capable of cultivating two types of magic.
While his command over wind was far inferior to his mastery of ice, it was more than enough to serve as support.
This fusion of wind and ice had never been released before.
He had kept it hidden as his trump card.
But now, to defeat the troll as quickly as possible and save the princess, he had no hesitation in using it.
The raging Ice Tempest swept out in an instant, a massive vortex filled with countless razor-sharp shards of ice.
If an ordinary person were caught in it, they would be torn to bloody ribbons in a heartbeat, reduced to nothing but bones.
Even the troll seemed surprised at first.
Then he grinned.
“Interesting… but…”
A dark aura of battle energy suddenly surged around his body, enveloping his massive, furnace-like fist.
Without the slightest hesitation, he struck at the towering twenty-meter-high storm—nearly twice his own height.
“Hmph. Courting death!”
Matt, panting heavily, glared at the troll.
That spell had drained more than half of his magical power.
But after seeing the troll’s reckless move, he suddenly felt it was worth every drop.
To try and block a magical attack with mere flesh and blood?
“Utterly idiotic!” Matt even began to think he had been too cautious.
If this was the intelligence level of the demon race, perhaps he never needed to go that far in the first place.
But in the very next moment, what unfolded before his eyes froze the smug expression on his face.
He gasped, his breath catching in his throat, unable to speak another word as a look of stunned disbelief overtook him.