abcnovels
Chapter 723
Chapter 723
Chapter 723: Book Page (2 in 1)
As Christmas Eve approached, the usual festive spirit of joy was diluted by a serious, solemn atmosphere, and everyone’s hearts sank as if they too were hanging in an invisible holly and mistletoe-draped ribbon just like those on the great hall’s Christmas tree. News and pictures of New York Harbor continued to multiply, ranging from traffic jams caused by the blizzard, to the presence of air, land, and navy battalions, as well as Marines and Coast Guard troops gathered in the harbour, and appeals send for calmer and more restrained responses on both sides from the United Nations headquarters … all increasingly stirred the common people’s tense nerves.
At first, the White House did try to glamorize the dispute as a peace ‘drill’, to undermine and erode wizards’ morale to fight, by issuing statements like – “to help make the wizards recognize the situation and understand their place in the world.” But it soon became clear that this kind of practice would not be going to succeed.
With the sheer persistence and unity behind the extraordinary silence shown by the entire magical community, and the news that ‘hundreds of young wizards have been illegally imprisoned and abused for up to two decades’ gaining momentum around the world, they had no choice but to quickly turn their guns and start violently attacking the legitimacy of the Constitution of the International Confederation of Wizards and Pan-Magical Alliance.
The White House started to claim to the public that wizards are all minorities and should follow United States law. But when the reporters pressed him for his opinion on the two-hundred-page lists of perpetrators along with evidence provided by the International Confederation of Wizards and the International Pan-Magical Alliance, the spokesman kept his mouth shut for good. And the federal courts, which represent justice and public order, collectively lost their voices at a critical moment.
A certain public relations expert from across the ocean, who carried himself in the same manner as Luna, told the unpleasant truth in one sentence.
“The secret of this conflict is written on the last page of the Constitution of the International Confederation of Wizards and Pan-Magical Alliance.”
When people took up the magnifying glass to scrutinize the dense signatures on the document with great probing eyes, they were shocked to discover how simple the truth turned out to be.
Next to the signature of ‘Felix Hap’ – a name which is by now well-known to everyone, with over three hundred organizations sprang up in North America alone that somehow insist on being affiliated with him – a small line of dark green letters clearly states.
‘The above laws and regulations are recognized and signed into effect by all representatives of the magical community, and the Archmage (Felix Hap) is authorized to guarantee their implementation.’
It dawned on some people that a few days ago the spokesman of the International Confederation of Wizards solemnly announced to the public that Felix Hap had been authorized to transport the American wizards who are currently in grave danger; but a few days prior to that, he would participate as the only representative of the wizard community in – the spokesman said in a sneering tone – the so-called peace drill.
“This is Monsieur Hap’s personal choice, and I do not wish to analyse his intentions in doing so in detail; all I can do is hope the best for him, just as we all waited for the outcome of that legendary duel half a century ago.”
In the following days, various tabloids unanimously used eye-catching terms such as “cruel” and “bloody”, and some even directly put up the headline “Black Christmas”.
The morning before Christmas, the sun came up, and the world went silent.
The early morning sky shone with a cold, dark blue hue, the weather was cold and dry, and dozens of battleships wandered like ghosts a few kilometers away from the harbour, the water splashes they made as they moved forward made the frozen harbour more and more tense and unsettling. At least hundreds of Earth observation satellites in the sky pointed their lenses at this area, which are powerful enough to observe centimeter-level frames.
The atmosphere in an underground control chamber deep within the harbour was unusually heavy. Ten minutes ago, a satellite call came in and told them, “It’s on.” Thus, an operation with the keyword ‘hunting’ started in full swing. All of a sudden, there was an abnormal disturbance in a satellite feed.
A group of people gathered in front of the satellite feed, which appeared abnormal.
“What’s going on?”
“It is not clear at the moment!”
“What about the ground radar?”
“No moving targets were detected except for the tagged helicopters, fighter jets, tanks, and military fleets.”
At that moment, a private officer raised his hand, “Report, a report, right now it’s similar to one of the situations in the manual that was issued to us.”
“Speak!”
“Magic disturbance.”
The commander looked very confused, “Are you implying that there’s some wizard near the satellite?” One of the surveillance officers who had his back to the commander muttered in a low voice, “That man has once even been to the moon.” What he subtly implied was that the distance of a satellite is nothing compared to the moon. The commander interrupted gruffly: “There is no evidence that he has been to the moon! Except for that little bit of dust–”
As soon as these words left his mouth, a young face appeared on the monitor, and the corners of his mouth moved as if he was talking to himself, but unfortunately, his voice could not be transmitted. Then that frame fell into darkness.
The commander gulped and asked, “Did anyone able to catch what he said?”
There was silence in the control room. After a few seconds, a voice quietly whispered in the corner, “From the English pronunciation, I think he said …” The voice paused and seemed to find it uncanny as well, “U… …S…A…”
In the next ten minutes, hundreds of frames segmented on the big screen went out one by one, those frames were like the flames that mankind first managed to harness when they first started their civilization, which now are being extinguished one by one, by invisible hands in the darkness. The temperature conditioning in the room seems to be completely broken, the temperature inside is as suffocating cold as the icy weather outside.
After another three minutes, no more frames disappeared. Everyone breathed a long sigh of relief, at this moment there are less than half of the satellite feeds are still intact. In the time it took to catch their breath, the satellite phones in the control room rang in quick succession.
“Shut those drunken sons of bitches up!” The commander yelled, “The target may have given up, immediately mobilize the remaining satellites, turn on the radar power to the maximum, instruct the helicopters, reconnaissance planes, and fighter jets to search with all their might-”
Hundreds of fighter jets buzzed through the sky, trailing long white trails as the sky was divided into fine fractions by the ‘white smoke’, like a crisscrossing chessboard, circling the morning star that had not yet been completely hidden.
The early warning aircraft finally sent back a message when it climbed almost to 30,000 meters, “Target spotted! Should we initiate an attack?” Then the military radar, satellite positioning, and graphics gradually became clear, although only a rear view of the head was shown.
“Attack.” The commander coldly gave the order.
Felix was restraining the urge to use magic, letting himself float down slowly like a feather. Although he could fly on his own. At the moment Felix is still in the mood to calculate in the midst of free fall, according to the current speed, he will probably land in about three hours … which is really a long time.
The orange-red fire streaks of light dotted into lines, which then intertwined to form a net-like format that approached him quickly from all directions like a swift storm. But with the thinking room that expands to dozens of kilometers into the distance, Felix knew even before the pilot in the fighter jet whether these machine gun bullets fired at high speed would hit their target – which turned out to be him. Because this is definitely a technical task, as he is individually too small compared to the size of the aircraft.
After Felix symbolically dodged a few rounds of high calibre bullets, various types of aerial guns, air-to-air missiles, and laser-guided bombs started to fire at his appropriate location, and then the sky turned into a field of fireworks displays that began to flash wildly with the sound of deafening thunder. As another fireball with an explosion radius of more than two hundred meters exploded around him and tried to obliterate him, Felix somewhat stared into the empty air.
When everything regained its silence, Felix carefully observed the nearby black smoke and the much brighter sky, where various fighter jets were trying to turn around in the distance, as if they wanted to do it several more times.
“At this altitude, you should be able to see pretty well, right?” Felix whispered to himself. Of course, he wasn’t talking to the pilots or even the commander on the underground, but to the more than two hundred nations and regimes on the planet who must be watching this – he wants to make it clear that conventional weapons are ineffective against him.
Felix held out his hand and said flatly, “Then let’s get it over with as soon as possible.” Even If there was no time for preparations, he has far too many means at his disposal to handle most circumstances, not to mention now, when he has more than enough time to prepare.
In a dazzling light green glow, a guttural cry that felt like a baby’s cry rang out, which gradually sounded clearer and louder, then it came to an abrupt end. Felix stood in the air, his face looked expressionless, as he lowered his arms. Within the enveloping range of the thinking room, many streamlined fighter jets suddenly went out of control and plummeted downwards at a skewed angle.
The cry of the mature mandrake would kill people – a magic he had originally intended to hide permanently.
It wouldn’t be long before the information about it would be on the desks of the leaders of various countries, and the magical effect and casualties it could create are comparable to that of a nuclear bomb – under the help of Archmages’ massive magical power, it could envelop a city almost without any side effects and create a dead zone in a blink of an eye, from which not even mosquitoes and cockroaches could survive. Felix suddenly felt like a merchant peddling death – the voice of death is now demonstrating the capabilities of the product to potential buyers, and in fear of customers will not know the products, it must be accompanied by an instruction manual.
Felix knows that no one can hear him now, but he still wants to say something.
“It is kind of inevitable for it to develop to this point. If it is not the United States, it will be other countries. As much as I thought and planned, even to the point of taking care of places as chaotic as Africa to avoid war as much as possible … the more I ended up on the opposite side of the whole world.”
“Wizards, as a group that holds a lot of individual strength, should have been made accessible to all countries at the first moment of exposure, but I delayed this process for a long time, and as a result it made many people suspect that wizards are only strong on the outside. It is true that without my … top battle power, wizards would either have fought back, compromised, or hidden deeper, and some places would have fallen into flames of war … chaos that would inevitably last for years and decades, a process that would inevitably also allow everyone to make an assessment about wizards power that is close to the truth. A new order will be established through blood and fire, at the cost of countless lives.”
“I loathed chaos enough to single-handedly promote the formation of the Constitution of the International Confederation of Wizards and Pan-Magical Alliance, just as four of the most distinguished male and female wizards joined forces to establish Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry a thousand years ago. Come to think of it, I had foreseen this scenario as if I could glimpse into the future – well, somehow it was not wrong – and since I had seen this possible future ahead, it became my duty to ensure that such a future wouldn’t become a reality that is bound to happen.”
From this day on, everyone will know what it really means to be on the opposite side of an Archmage, especially an Archmage of the Ancient Rune Domain.
Felix’s figure suddenly disappeared, and when he reappeared, he had already stood at the edge of the harbour, where he could smell the scent of the sea. He stretched out his left hand, with his palm up, where a book heavily covered in runes appeared out of thin air. He opened the Book of Runes with his right hand, brushing his fingertips over the pages, then one of which instantly fell off, floating in the air like a feather, without any kind of power at all.
However, in the eyes of highly skilled wizards, this page carries an unimaginable amount of magical power that they could not even imagine.
Felix’s body stood straight, and he raised his head unhurriedly, sweeping his eyes in every direction – in fact, it was something redundant, as the thinking room had long shown him that the nearest helicopter is still two kilometers away from here, about the cruising fleet outside the harbour even without him turning around, about the snow that is piling up in the distant city, and that the reflections of the glass and binoculars on the tall buildings are intertwined. In fact, he could even faintly hear the roar of motorcycles and the shouts of excitement.
He could completely grasp all the surrounding details. The entire city in front of him has a total area of more than a thousand square kilometers, with close to eight million people living there. Of course, most of them had now temporarily evacuated the city, which had caused a major traffic jam before, but there were still small groups of people who unbelievably chose to stay and watch the spectacle. And the city’s empty depressed long streets also give these people the opportunity to vent their raw desire for violence in broad daylight, with steel, leather, motorcycles, muscle, and sweat seen everywhere…
Felix estimates that this place could become a source of inspiration for a number of artists in the coming week.
In the next second, the page fell to the ground.
Ancient rune symbols fluttered like ice grains, and ice-blue magic suddenly curled up and merged with the biting cold wind around, blowing his clothes in the process. This magic is like a dye dropped into a pool, leaving a kind of colourful ripples – Felix has already used this magic before, even more than once, but the magic power consumed then was far less than a thousandth of what it is using at the moment – and the result of that is, with him as the center, all colours began to fade away, whether it was buildings, machines or people, all that remained behind were clear lines, and if you look closely you will see a light glow reflecting on their surfaces.
This magic coverage was so wide that it was enough to cover all the troops, the command room, and part of the military fleet … that were scattered along the coastline. Of course, all these people are still alive, but they will fall into silence along with the city for the next week, like moving from the middle of reality to a subplot in a comic book.
After all this was done, Felix took a step forward and appeared outside the harbour. There was no sound around him, reminding him of his first experience in the space, and suddenly a bold idea popped into his head – to roll up New York City and hang it on the doorstep of the White House in Washington, D.C., as he had done with Grawp’s house in the Burrow, an idea which he even found to be too crazy. It is estimated that at this moment Akingbade and Ms. Bones’ side of every contact method that can be used would almost be blown up.
The commotion transmitted through his thinking room also reminded him of the business that needed to be focused on, and as Felix stood high in the sky looking down, the sea seemed to have an extra clear line of separation, with half of the sea being realistic and half being in the shape of waves that could only be found in comic books. He looked at the city again, not everyone had been ‘linealized’, he deliberately avoided the wizarding families hiding in the shadows, they remained intact and at this moment they stood out in a cluster of chaotic black and white lines.
The most conspicuous of all these had to be the Woolworth Building, which doubled as the Headquarters of the Magical Congress of the United States of America and was nearly filled with several hundred wizards.
As he watched Horace Grimsditch fly toward him on a broomstick, Felix suddenly realized that the people of the Magical Congress of the United States of America might be about to have their sixth relocation.
—–
[Author:]
I can see that some readers in the community do not understand what Felix is up to and why he is doing this, so I will briefly explain the plot to you.
Felix, the International Confederation of Wizards, and the Ministry of Magic people have always wanted the peaceful integration of wizards into the outside world, and they have done a good job, through a series of means to sign cooperation treaties with various countries one after another.
But the biggest problem in the middle of this is: because of overly well-rounded planning, no large-scale conflict has broken out so far, which has led the world to doubt the war potential of wizards, as the wizard’s deterrence level only stayed on paper, various countries now unanimously, in fact, wish to see a conflict (as long as it does not happen in their own country), and it can be said that this is the last hurdle before moving towards peace.
And Felix took this responsibility on his own.
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