Tony trailed off mid-sentence, his eyes going wide.
That pearly green beam didn't look very powerful, but the moment it touched the rusty iron door, the metal began to break apart from the point of contact, rapidly disintegrating until the entire door had turned into dust too fine to see with the naked eye.
Tony Stark noticed that even the bomb he had strapped to the door had been broken down before it had any chance of exploding.
"Uh…"
Tony forcibly swallowed the rest of what he'd been about to say, turning instead to the question of what on earth this power was. Was this… magic?
Maybe this young man really could get them out.
Harry heard footsteps coming from outside the cave. Clearly, the Ten Rings had noticed something was wrong inside.
He glanced around and quickly spotted a surveillance camera mounted on the rock wall. He flicked his wrist and sent a Severing Charm at it, blowing the camera apart.
"Let's go. But before that, you'd better put on your armor. Otherwise, even I can't guarantee I'll be able to stop every stray bullet," Harry reminded him.
Tony Stark was a little confused. "Don't you people have defensive magic? Like, I don't know, magic shields?"
"Of course we do, and I can use them," Harry explained, "but there might be a slight problem."
"What problem?"
Harry pointed his wand at a nearby rock and cast Protego on it, doing his best to keep the magic in his body as calm as possible.
For the first two seconds, everything seemed fine. But then his magic suddenly grew erratic. The transparent barrier wrapping the rock thickened rapidly. As Protego became stronger and denser, it also expanded, and in an instant it crushed the stone inside to powder.
Harry spread his hands. "Like that. If you want, I can cast Protego on you. Its defensive power is excellent—your average artillery shell isn't getting through."
It sounded like a pretty good offer, but Tony Stark took one look at the pulverized rock and immediately shook his head. "No thanks. I think I'm very happy with my armor."
By the time Tony Stark had finished putting on his armor, the Ten Rings had already arrived.
They spotted Harry and shouted at him in mangled English:
"Damn you! Who are you—hands up and get down on the ground!"
Harry didn't bother trading words. The pearly green beam swept out in an instant, carving through more than a dozen Ten Rings fighters, rending body and soul alike, and leaving deep grooves in the rock wall behind them.
By the time Tony Stark was fully suited up, Harry had already taken care of several dozen terrorists.
After losing that many men, the Ten Rings didn't dare push deeper into the cave. They changed tactics, pulled back to the outside, and set up a dragnet to wait for Harry to come out.
Encased in his armor, Tony Stark immediately felt much safer. He glanced at Harry and joked:
"Pajama Baby, just hide behind Uncle Tony. Uncle Tony will get you out of here."
Harry gave the armor a quick once-over and then asked curiously,
"Mr Stark, aren't you worried that a piece of shrapnel might just happen to slip through the eye-slit of your armor and blow your head off?
If you're not worried, I can certainly stand behind you."
Tony Stark choked on his comeback. He was proud, sure—but not proud enough to gamble with his life.
So he honestly backed down. "Uh… okay, kid, maybe I should be the one standing behind you."
The three of them started toward the cave mouth. Harry took the lead, Tony Stark in his armor followed close behind, and Yinsen brought up the rear, holding up a sheet of metal in front of him like a makeshift Captain America shield.
As they neared the entrance, Tony Stark spoke up again:
"You sure you can handle this? I really don't want to watch a kid get torn to pieces right in front of me."
Tony Stark's phrasing wasn't exactly gentle, but Harry knew he was worried about him. Underneath the playboy exterior, this man was a good person.
Harry flashed him a brilliant grin, then stepped out of the cave mouth, fully exposed to the hundreds of heavily armed terrorists outside, radiating confidence and swagger.
"Watch me, Mr Stark. I'm the guy who's going to be the Sorcerer Supreme!"
"Open fire!"
At the Ten Rings leader's order, hundreds of terrorists opened fire on Harry.
They were armed with AKM assault rifles. The 7.62×39mm rounds they fired at high speed could easily punch through steel plating, let alone human flesh and bone.
Even though Harry clearly had some kind of extraordinary ability, the Ten Rings still had complete faith in their weapons. They didn't take him seriously at all. To them, he was definitely going to be turned into a sieve.
Their real attention was on Tony Stark. That suit of armor of his looked seriously thick, and nobody knew what it was made of. It was entirely possible that not even a sniper rifle could punch through it.
That was the real threat.
But very soon, they no longer thought that way, because that barely-legal young man simply raised his hand and held his palm out in front of him, as if he really meant to stop all those bullets with just that gesture.
The sight was absurd, almost comical—but before the Ten Rings fighters could burst out laughing, their smiles froze on their faces.
Because right in front of them, that outstretched hand became like some inviolable law, as if it were saying: passage prohibited.
And then, within a meter of the young man, all those bullets quite visibly stopped, hanging motionless in the air, like insects trapped in amber.
Once the countless bullets in front of Harry had gathered into a solid "wall," he suddenly shoved his hand forward.
The bullets flew back at an even higher speed than before, scything through the terrorists and cutting them down in droves.
Neither the AKM assault rifles nor the SVD sniper rifles could punch through Harry's telekinesis. Paired with the crimson Rings of Raggadorr that flickered into existence from time to time, the three of them advanced in an orderly, unstoppable march.
There were a lot of Ten Rings fighters—hundreds of them. Even after Harry had killed close to a hundred, he still couldn't tear open a breach in their defensive line.
Seeing this, Tony Stark made a suggestion:
"There's a flamethrower on this armor. I can use it to set off those ammo crates."
Harry shook his head. "No. If we blow the ammo crates, it could trigger a chain reaction. The two of us might be okay, but Yinsen's dead for sure. Don't rush—we'll do it my way."
Several rockets shrieked through the air toward Harry. Seizing a brief moment when his magic felt relatively stable, Harry instantly formed a spell circle. Kamar-Taj's powerful defensive spell, the Shield of the Seraphim, sprang up before them like a solid rampart, stopping the rockets cold.
Before long, the three of them reached the center of the Ten Rings camp. Harry warned them:
"Mr Stark, Mr Yinsen—stay as close to me as you can!"
Tony Stark didn't know why Harry was insisting on this, but he still moved closer without hesitation.
Once both men were within three meters of him, an endless, terrifying tide of magic suddenly surged out of Harry's body.
He rose into the air, and his body was wrapped in visible scarlet chaos magic.
He lifted his hand slightly. There was no sign of a spell circle, but the gravity manipulation spell was already taking effect.
Within several hundred meters around them, gravity itself fell under Harry's control, a faint blue aura wrapping around every single thing in range.
When that pale blue radiance reached a certain intensity, Harry clenched his fist.
Boom.
Everything within a hundred-meter radius, with the sole exception of the three-meter sphere around Harry that remained completely untouched, was instantly crushed beneath several dozen times normal gravity.
It didn't matter if it was hard rock, thick trees, once-sturdy buildings, or the flesh-and-blood bodies of the terrorists.
In the face of that overwhelming force, they all became as fragile as paper, flattened without mercy and ground into a twisted, shattered expanse of rubble.
When the drifting dust finally settled, Tony Stark realized the ground around them had been forced several meters lower, and the stone-hard surface was studded with patches of blinding scarlet.
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