It was obvious that Adrian's mother's neck was being gripped extremely tightly. She kept trying to speak, but she couldn't form a complete sentence. Vaksham hadn't even been putting much effort into it from start to finish, yet his strength—used on an ordinary human—was still terrifyingly apparent.
And how could Adrian possibly endure that kind of provocation? He immediately began urging all of us, again and again, to do exactly what Vaksham said.
Throwing away my Water Abyss Sword didn't affect me much, but Cyrae and Brennan were a different story. Because they'd just made Vaksham's underlings suffer badly a moment ago, they were immediately met with a ruthless retaliation—swarmed and beaten without mercy.
"Didn't you say you wouldn't hurt us?!"
In the face of our accusation, Vaksham didn't stop his men right away. Instead, he let them vent for quite a while before finally barking them back.
It was obvious: he was giving us a warning.
For Cyrae, that kind of beating couldn't really harm her. The unluckiest one was Brennan—at only fourth tier, there was no way he wasn't going to take a beating.
"Do you really think he'll keep his word?" I leaned close to Adrian and whispered a warning.
Their attitude made me deeply suspicious. Vaksham's temperament felt volatile and unpredictable. I didn't know him well at all, and there was still the blood debt between him and Adrian—his sister had been killed, after all. Even if Vaksham said he was giving up, even if we did everything he demanded, who could guarantee he wouldn't still pull something at the end?
Besides, in my eyes, his threat didn't truly mean much.
Even if Adrian's mother really died here, as long as her body remained—and not too much time passed before her soul was noticed and taken away by the Cycle of Rebirth—with my current abilities, I could bring her back easily.
But Adrian didn't see it that way.
"No matter what, she's my mother," he said through clenched teeth. "Right now, the only way to guarantee her safety—even temporarily—is to obey him. There's no other option."
With Adrian's stance so firm, I couldn't push any further.
At this point, it was best to avoid hostage casualties as much as possible. The key issue was that even though we held an absolute advantage in strength, we still weren't fast enough to act before Vaksham could react. If we forced it and Adrian had to watch his mother get killed right in front of him… that would be unimaginably cruel.
And there was another problem: my ability to revive people wasn't truly limitless. If we fought again, with so many hostages packed in so tightly, it would be almost impossible for no one to get caught in the chaos. If too many died, there was a real risk that some might not be recoverable.
In the end, the best solution would be a single technique that could end everything before any of those problems happened.
Nicola's time reversal would have been the perfect answer—but she wasn't here.
My Paradise Lost Annihilation Wave might be able to erase Vaksham—the root cause—in one strike, but it would be difficult to avoid harming Adrian's mother, who was right beside him. Worse still, his human underlings had gathered around their boss and formed a tight ring around the hostages. If Vaksham died, those men might lose all restraint and rush in to slaughter the hostages anyway.
"You all know the way out, right?" Vaksham warned. "Don't try anything clever on the way."
Seeing that we finally seemed willing to comply, Vaksham stopped making things difficult. He forced the four of us to walk at the very front and began leading everyone out of the cave, planning to retreat outside first and only then decide the next step.
The first stretch of the route was extremely narrow. In the winding tunnels, everyone ended up in a long single-file line. The hostages were wedged among the bandits in the middle, while our group was at the front—under normal circumstances, we couldn't even reach them.
"Wait… maybe there is a way!"
A sudden spark lit in my mind. As I walked, I remembered a variation of a technique I'd once abandoned.
In a situation like this, if I could eliminate all enemies at once in an instant, wouldn't every problem solve itself?
Paradise Lost Annihilation Wave was a technique I had only created recently. Aside from looking somewhat similar, it had almost nothing to do with the older spell Paradise Lost Shockwave anymore. And precisely because of that, I could adjust its attack pattern as needed.
For example: shrink the area of the descending light pillars so they wouldn't hit Adrian's mother—and redistribute the excess power elsewhere…
"What way?" Adrian asked quietly, hearing me mutter to myself. He clearly didn't want to be at anyone's mercy if there was another option.
"We need a chance to stop so I can confirm a few things," I said. "Help me come up with a good reason."
This method required a little preparation. I decided not to explain it outright yet and asked him for that small favor.
Not long after, we returned to the original limestone-cavern hall. Adrian immediately used the excuse of ensuring the other hostages' safety—preventing anyone from being separated and hidden—to request a brief stop and wait until the rest of the group caught up.
Vaksham, who also wanted to avoid anything going wrong at the rear of the line, agreed without much resistance.
"You're planning to make a move now?" Adrian's expression tightened. "This is too dangerous!"
As an endless stream of rank-and-file bandits poured in along with the hostages, the hall actually became chaotic. Adrian assumed I was about to gamble on an ambush in the open space and objected at once.
"Relax," I told him.
The purpose of stopping wasn't to charge blindly—it was to confirm the precise positions of every enemy in the shortest time possible.
Once the targets had mostly assembled and were unlikely to shift around much in the next few moments, I soothed Adrian with one hand and suddenly raised my arm high.
"What are you trying to do? Do you want her to die?!" Vaksham, surrounded by his men at the center, immediately went on guard. He yanked Adrian's mother up as a shield and shouted at me.
I didn't answer him.
"Paradise Lost Scatter Wave!"
I snapped my fingers.
Even deep inside the mountain, it couldn't stop what happened next—countless thin, needle-like blue beams poured down from above. In an instant, they pierced every single enemy present—nearly a hundred of them, including Vaksham—striking without exception at fatal points and killing them on the spot.
The residual force didn't fade, either. Beneath each fallen enemy, a narrow, bottomless-looking hole was left drilled into the ground.
This technique still used the same core principle as Paradise Lost Annihilation Wave. But in the past, my control over the elements—especially after drawing on fragments of the Water Angel's authority—had been too crude. For a long time, I could only concentrate that power on a single target at a time.
However, ever since that inexplicable incident with No. 18 Cyra—after he controlled me and I lost an entire day—my elemental control had mysteriously improved. The way I'd converted an entire pond's worth of water earlier, and the fact that I'd been able to summon as many as six Water Abyss Swords at once, were both undeniable proof.
If that logic held, then techniques that had once been impossible were finally within reach.
Paradise Lost Scatter Wave was nowhere near as overwhelming as Paradise Lost Annihilation Wave, which focused all power on a single individual. Instead, it relied on dispersing attacks across vital points to eliminate multiple targets at once. But judging by the results, it worked.
In the blink of an eye, the human bandits dropped one after another. Vaksham was no exception. His human guise—maintained through dragon-speech magic—collapsed, and his body reverted to the dragon's original form, sprawling across the ground.
And yet, the hostages were all still alive—unharmed, untouched.
That meant every impact point had been calculated within controlled limits. If this had been the old me, it would have been utterly impossible.
"What… just happened?"
Even someone as experienced as Cyrae was shaken. The ordinary people were even worse. It took a long time for anyone to react at all.
"Adrian… thank goodness…"
Nearly a full minute passed before Adrian's mother finally realized they had truly been saved. Adrian rushed to her, and the two of them embraced tightly. The scene—mother and son reunited after surviving disaster—was genuinely heartwarming.
"Mom, this is Feliciana," Adrian said after the reunion. "And that's Cyrae. They're not human—they're angels from Edenmere. They're also the ones who saved you this time."
Brennan, who knew the hostages personally, was busy checking everyone's condition. Meanwhile Adrian made sure to introduce Cyrae and me to his mother properly.
Truthfully, it didn't need much explanation—our wings already said everything. Angels weren't some secret on the Eldoria Continent. Especially after the True Church unified faith across the continent, the image of angels had been stamped into human understanding everywhere.
Even remote mountain villages like Dasan were no exception—Boyak Town itself had a church of considerable size.
Of course, the angelic image spread by that faith was, in ordinary people's eyes, never quite "real." Angels didn't usually appear in places like this, and locals had never seen one with their own eyes. In that sense, they had only ever known angels through the Church's teachings.
"She's… an angel too?"
Hearing Adrian say it, his mother—who was a devout believer—shifted from intense emotion into confusion. The main reason was that the vivid blue color of my wings didn't match the angelic imagery she'd heard about, and she couldn't immediately be sure.
Cyrae's wings, on the other hand, were unmistakably white—exactly like the Church's depictions. And she had as many as six.