We got greeted by a horde of green sewer rats and we dispatched them swiftly. I looked at the flow of energy both magical and leyline and it seemed more intense than the day I did my investigation. This time also learning from Gregory’s investigation I checked the balance of magic. The percentage of useless magic seemed to be increasing.

Is it me or does it feel suffocating here? Yeah, let's not stay here too long when Greg isn't around. There are ways to deal with high energy density but it is not anything we are familiar with or skilled enough to deal with at this moment. I just added: “find out how to not get screwed over by high energy concentration” to my long list of stuff I needed to work on. For now, we just rushed home to shower. Raishin didn't have a manhole close to his hut so he just stopped by my house. I told Philip and Hera I would go out hunting with Raishin and that I will bring some meat back with me but that that probably will be after dinnertime so they didn't have to cook or wait for me. We went back to Raishin’s hut and met up with Ted and Gregory.

Ok, guys! I have a fun idea to make this pheasant boar hunting interesting! Because if we just go about, it normally our dinner ehh I mean the poor thing would keel over in seconds, so I thought of something to spice things up! This idea of you doesn't include any more tasteless puns, does it?

No, it won't! I just thought of this plan since we’re all well-seasoned fighters in our element of expertise so I want us to bake in some new fighting techniques. So, what is your idea then?

I'm glad that you asked! My idea is that we use one of our high-affinity magic we don't frequently use. Agnis has an affinity for lightning but I hardly see him use it, as well as Greg with his water affinity. Ugh, water…

And for you, Raishin its wind. What about you? You just punch stuff, what are you going to do differently?

Nothing really, I've already reached my full potential. Ted says proudly.

I mean, he has a point about us not using magic we have a good affinity with but I seriously doubt you reached your full potential, Ted. Yeah, didn't you lose that tournament? Hey! I got second ok!

Anyway sounds good to me, how about you Greg? Ugh fine, as much as I hate the idea, I should get more proficient with water sooner rather than later. So Agnis on lightning magic, Raishin on wind magic, and me on water magic. This is going to get messy. At least the pheasant boar won't get vaporized seconds after we engage it. Raishin looked at me.

What? I wasn't planning on vaporizing our dinner! Raishin how far away from the town did you see the PB? PB?

Pheasant boar, it's too long to keep saying out full. Are you cutting corners again? Hmm, I saw it about 4 km that way! Raishin pointed northeast.

Northeast, we go! I got out my tails and used my tail dynamo. I grabbed Ted, Gregory, and Raishin with the three tails I didn't use for the tail dynamo.

I have a bad feeling about this. Is this what I think it is? Oh haha, nice! You managed to copy our flash steps! The lightning generated shifted towards purple and I imbued myself with the generated energy and dashed off. That might've been an understatement because the speed I went at made it look more like I teleported away. With my Elgards eyes, it's a piece of cake to evade obstacles at this speed. It did seem that I created a sonic boom though.

Holy shit! This is way faster than I've ever gone with this. Aaand we're here! This is about 4 km. Did you just cover 4 km in 15 seconds?

Hmm pretty much. You've been hiding some cool stuff there. Ted said as he was standing at a tree emptying his stomach.

How did you even get vertigo? I'm not a vehicle! I don't have problems with vertigo normally but... Bleegh. This was a bit too wild for me. Hmm even though it was a bit rough on execution it was a pretty pleasant ride.

I've been able to do this for a while I just never really got the chance to improve on it. It's a little bit tiring stamina-wise wise but I've at least ironed out the kinks in the last 5 years just by running simulations. I should be fine using it continuously unless the fight drags out for 30 minutes or longer. Hmm, I've been running simulations on water magic but I never thought any was worth casting since I hate water. We looked at Raishin.

I ehh did simulations on, eh. It sounds like you didn't run any. That’s fine, he can practice wind magic now.

So where is this PB? Gimme a second I will track it down. Raishin was about to use lightning magic to sense out the area when Gregory stopped him.

Only wind magic, remember? Ugh, how am I supposed to find it then? You've fought multiple times against Charlize, right? It seems she uses wind magic to find us, can't you use something like that? I could probably use something similar to your technique but maybe it is better if you do this.

Ah right, the I-can-sense-you-displace-air and enhanced smell magic. Wait, you knew how she tracked us down?

Of course! It's quite obvious. I thought you did too. Ugh, whatever, go for it. Raishin concentrated and started sniffing.

I think I found it! You think?

Well, I don't really know what boar and Pheasant smell like unless it's fried. How is that possible? Aren’t those the 2 main animals next to deer that you hunt? How come you don't know how they smell after 5 years?

Well, I don't sniff animals after I hunt them duh! But... you know what never mind, lead the way. You okay Ted? Yeah, I feel better now, just saying this in front, I'll just walk back home, no need to carry me with that supersonic dash of yours Agnis. Uh sure. We stood in front of a cave that was going into a different part of the Umbra mountain range.

Lots of caves lately. I think that will continue for a while. Since Greg is banned from using earth magic this fight, we might want to lure it out. I'm on it! Greg made a huge amount of water and sent it into the cave after which he started emptying his stomach.

I'm starting to see a trend here. Ugh, how come you didn't get nauseous from your supersonic dash?

It was too short and I'm using nature magic to keep it suppressed. Hey, isn't that cheating? Can you teach me that? I could take the Agnis Express back if I could suppress my nausea.

Agnis express, interesting naming sense you got there Ted. A lot of bats escaped out of the cave after Gregory blasted it with water and a huge silhouette could be seen dashing towards us.

Say Raishin. Sup

Didn't you forget an important detail when describing this uhm animal? Hmm? Not really why? As the silhouette started to become bigger and the sound of footsteps started to become louder Ted and Gregory slowly started to realize what I was getting at.

How about mentioning that this thing is like 5 meters tall?! Good job Raishin, how could you miss such an obvious detail? We can't possibly eat all of this! Out of the cave, a monster so hideous appeared. For a lack of better words, it did look like a combination of a pheasant and a boar. It looked like a big pheasant but it had a boar face and instead of pheasant legs, it had two thick boar legs.

What the actual fuck is this thing! It's huge and ugly! Ugh, I can't imagine this huge ugly thing tasting good. The PB charged at Gregory. Gregory copied me and froze the floor and made the PB slip. He followed up by making an ice wall and made the PB crash into it. Raishin shot a wind blade at the PB but its hide was too tough to take any damage from it.

What the! What is this thing made out of? I assume it's made out of PB meat.

Thanks for the useful input, Captain Obvious! Ted and Raishin rushed to the PB. Ted used a fire-infused punch and Raishin formed wind claws on his hands and swiped at the PB’s butt. The PB squealed as it finally took damage. It tried to turn around but Gregory formed a mass of water around the PB’s head, slowly drowning it. I took the chance and fired a blue lightning bolt at the water Gregory created. So, in our first round of attacks, the PB was bleeding out of its butt and had an electrified body of water around its head which was slowly drowning and electrocuting it.

Hmm not bad for some random attacks. The PB started rampaging. Gregory formed water blades and shot them at the PB, Raishin did the same with wind blades, and Ted punched at the PB I tried to also use waves but well lightning doesn't have waves. So, I tried to come up with something cool and new. At this rate, it was just a matter of time before the PB would be defeated. I took a sword that I deemed a failure out of my dimensional pocket. I fired up my tail dynamo again but this time imbued the blade with the lightning I created, inspected it and saw that the blade couldn't take this technique for too long. Since imbuing myself with lightning makes me faster and stronger, I wondered what would happen if I applied this to my sword fighting. I supersonic dashed at the PB and slashed at it. I heard the sound of metal shattering. I was too focused on making sure the blade wouldn't shatter while I was dashing so I wasn't paying much attention to the PB. I managed to miss the boar but a huge cut was seen into the floor and the rock wall behind the pheasant boar.

Oh, I missed it. Maybe that's a good thing! Are you trying to find out how to vaporize stuff without fire?! Ok if you’re going ham, I will go ham too! A strong wind started to blow and wind started to gather around Raishin. He held his hands in front of him with his fingers spread as if he were holding an invisible ball and made all the wind compress in that area.

Is he doing what I think he's doing? Hmm doing something like that costs either a lot of concentration or a lot of energy of one he has none but of the other one he has an infinite amount. This might turn out to become a quite powerful technique. Hmm Indeed, focusing and pressurizing the air and releasing it could attack with a lot of destructive power.

Stop calmly analysing the situation while Raishin is making a bomb! Hmm it's not a big problem though, is it?

Whud? Well, Agnis can easily dodge this, I could tank this and you can just regenerate the damage.

It is gonna hurt a lot though?! I think that is YOUR problem. Okay, let's see what you got Raishin! I gave Raishin a thumbs up.

Nooo! Aaaand! Boom!

I sonic dashed away to dodge the shockwave. I saw Gregory create a water barrier and Ted started digging for his life. The dust settled. A huge crater could be seen from the tree top I escaped to. I could see a water barrier with an unscathed Gregory inside and about the hole Ted dug. It seemed he barely got deep enough to escape the blast. But what about the PB? I looked around. I saw that the PB got blasted into a rock wall. It was still alive but it was severely wounded. I don't blame it, it practically got hit by a small nuke.

Good! It didn't get vaporized! I was afraid it might get turned into atoms so I held back! Wait that was you holding back? Ted said while brushing dirt off his clothes.

Hmm, if you could make this attack more focused on a smaller area and up its power a bit you might get a more efficient attack. The PB got blown away before your attack hit it. You missed it. But that's good! I don't want to vaporize it! You guys are crazy! Don't tell me you also have some environment-destroying technique, Greg!

Hmm, not really my attack attributes aren't as high as those two. But didn't your mother one-shot a tanky guy once? I also heard that she also one-shot a God and that's why she's called the Goddess of Death.

Well in the first case, she did an attribute swap making that person's attack and defense swap. He had very high magical and physical defense but a really low attack and magic attack so after swapping them she could easily one-shot him. I don't have a good grasp on how she did that but I should be able to do something like that too. I will just have to run a lot of simulations to even get close to knowing how to use it. In the second instance, she used abyss magic which is a form of lost magic. It is very close to dark magic it is really powerful and costs an insane amount of energy. If six-tailed tigers could use it they would probably be the most overpowered-tailed beasts in existence but they can't. A three-tail would need to have stored an insane amount of energy to use that. But if they do whatever gets hit by it takes a lot of damage. You know reviving, rebirth and reincarnation are a thing, right? Well, abyss magic blocks that. Get killed by Abyss magic and it's game over. According to mom Gods either revive or reincarnate as long as there are sentient beings that believe or worship them. Abyss magic doesn't care if you manage to kill a god with it, he never comes back. And it is because of abyss magic that she is called the Goddess of Death. If she wants to kill you, you're not coming back. So technically we could do a lot of damage but in normal circumstances not really. Hmm, I did not know that. So as long as you don't want to delete something out of existence you do shitty damage?

Gregory reacted to 'shitty damage' but nodded as he realized that it was quite accurate. Pretty much, we can store energy in shadows so our damage output depends on how much energy we have stored. In general, I will do more damage than a skilled human mage but on the scale of mythical beings and stuff, we do shitty damage. Ok, so I just have to watch out for those two glass cannons then. So Agnis is overpowered because he has the speed of a phoenix and combined firepower of a phoenix and nine tail with the technical skills nine tails have, you are overpowered because you are quite tanky and can flip attributes and one-shot things whenever you banked enough energy and make them stay dead and Raishin because of ehh infinite energy? Sounds like he got the short end of the stick. Hmm, infinite energy is overpowered though their specialty might look like it's lightning magic but it's electromagnetic interactions in general. They could easily put forth fusion and fission reactions mainly because they can create a near-infinite amount of energy, Raishin could make a small sun and vaporize a city probably way easier than I could.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Ugh, I feel outclassed here. But you can regenerate almost anything in a matter of seconds! We can't do that! If my arm gets chopped off I gotta wait like 3 hours before it grows back you only have to wait like 3 seconds!

It is not that fast but yeah, I guess. So, what are we gonna do with the PB It got launched up quite high and it seems it's lodged into the rock wall. I can get it. I sonic dashed and jumped at the PB and tried to pull it out of the rock wall.

Ugh, it's stuck! I'm not sure what I was expecting, there is no way I could pull a 5m tall PB out of a rock wall.

It seems it's my turn. Agnis, can you get me up there but slowly? I jumped back down and transported Ted to the wall next to the PB.

Is there anyone observing us? If there was, I wouldn't be dashing around with my tails out, don't worry if anyone gets within a 2 km radius, I will warn you guys. We all had our tails out so anyone walking in on us might be really confused and would notice that we’re not human. We could go around as if were regular beast kin but those generally don't have multiple tails so that wouldn't work either.

Ok, time to show off! Ted transformed into his big bear mode in which he grew to about 4m tall. He grabbed the PB and easily pulled it out and threw it at the ground. So cool! For how long can you use that?

The duration is 3 minutes, it will greatly boost my strength, vitality, and regeneration and for now, I can only use it 2 times per day. My brother could use it for 10 minutes and 5 times a day 5 years ago so there's a lot of room for improvement. Ted said as he returned to normal.

I guess that concludes our PB hunt. We were supposed to practice but it still ended up in the PB getting completely destroyed. Hmm.

What's up Agnis?

I looked at the PB who was wounded and seemed to be knocked out. Do you guys consider this as a boss-type monster? Hmm? It was pretty big so I guess?

Ok guys back off! I said as I took another failed sword out of my dimensional pocket.

Huh, why?

Bosses always have a phase 2! Whud? What? Oh, that’s right! At that moment the PB moved and started to glow dark purple.

I knew it! The PB got up and doubled in size before releasing an ear-deafening shriek.

My ears! We all were suffering because our ears were really good. The PB started to grow big wings and started to flap them.

It is trying to escape! I'm on it! I imbued my blade with lightning again and cut off both wings of the PB. The wind created by the wing flapping made it challenging but nothing my eyes couldn't handle. The PB which got its wings clipped started to get angry.

Oh no, he’s enraging! Oh shit! Wait what does that mean?

It is when you take too long to defeat a boss! It will start throwing around really powerful skills or instantly kill you. Uhm, I feel a lot of energy gathering towards its core, does the boss exploding also fall under enraging? Yup... Oh crap.

This can't be happening. Take cover! Gregory ignored the ban on using non-water magic and erected an earth and shadow wall and covered us in his shadow cloak and layered the walls around us. I created frost walls on the inside of Gregory’s barrier while Raishin fed Gregory energy. An ear-deafening explosion. The blast hit our barriers for 47 seconds before it started to subside. During the explosion, I was checking what kinds of energy got released. It was mainly magical but there was also a big portion of ley line energy.

It is a good thing you used a shadow cloak on us and I used my frost barrier. I said as we lowered the walls. Because I mentioned the shadow cloak Gregory didn't cancel that.

Check the magic composition of the magic around us now. Gregory used his technique to separate the magic into its elemental components.

What? 57% unusable magic?

Yeah, the explosion even reached 76%. If it wasn't for our shadow wall and frost magic, we would've been in deep shit even though we protected ourselves from the blast. Yeah, we might've gotten corrupted or gotten a severe case of magic poisoning. Such a high concentration might've killed us a couple of times over almost instantly. How about we make it baseline that big suspicious blasts or explosions always have your frost wall and shadow cloak next to the appropriate mitigation to prevent something like this from killing us one day?

That sounds like a good idea. Our dinner… Oh shit, what are we going to do about dinner now?

We debated the possible things we could do while standing inside a crater about a 500m radius.

Someone is approaching! We disguised ourselves as humans and found a hiding spot to observe the people who would probably come and check out what happened over here. Two men appeared 10 minutes later and were inspecting the area. I can't say that I remember who these men were.

Hey Greg, do you know who those two guys are? Hmm, I don't know them by name but I do know that they like to keep order in the town. If they like to keep order how come they never seem to be able to keep order when you and Agnis make a mess out of the town whenever you get chased by Charlize and Cecilia?

That is a very good question to which I don't know the answer to. Cecilia and Charlize don't always take every opportunity to harass us, maybe it's related to these two guys. The two guys seemed to take their time investigating the place, looking around, collecting samples and stuff. After 40 minutes they finally left.

I'm hungry… We need to get some food, sadly this PB was quite disappointing.

Let's go hunt some boars and pheasants! Sounds good to me. Go for it! Greg, can I borrow you for a bit? What's up?

The cave the PB came out of… Hmm, yeah might be a good idea to check it out. Whud I wanna check it out too! You don't know anything about magic and energy flow! Let's just catch dinner while they check that out. Gregory and I entered the cave but I didn't know what I expected because most of it was flooded.

Right, I forgot about that.

I moved the water aside effectively creating an air bubble that allowed us to go through the water without getting wet.

Your bubble looks a bit unstable. Yeah, I think a combination of wind and water magic would make this more effective. Wind magic would also refresh the air in here. Let's hope we don't have to be underwater for too long. After walking underwater a bit, the cave started to go upward and we were getting close to surfacing. Gregory made stairs on the rock floor so we wouldn't slip and slide back down. Moments before we surfaced, Gregory applied a shadow cloak on us.

Do I need to keep frost magic on standby? Yes please, the energy density and magic imbalance here are highly unsettling. I could see that the percentage of unusable magic was reaching almost 50%.

This isn't natural, what could cause this? I don't know but it can't be good. We continued and the cave ended up in a large room, which seemed to be the trend with these cave systems here. I stopped Gregory.

What do you see? A big purple root seems to come out of a wall and exits into the room in there. There seem to be various magic traps and there is something that looks like an altar next to the root. There seem to be various seals on it. Besides that, there are a lot of flying corrupted creatures in there. I assume they were once bats that got their magic warped and corrupted. Judging by their magic saturation each of the bats could give us a run for our money if we’re not careful.

Do you think it's a root of the big pink broccoli? Possibly, but the energy density, magic imbalance, traps, seals, and the over 200 bats in there make me think that going in there will be suicide. We might want to go back.

You are well versed in figuring seals out with your eyes by now, right? Well, I've only really messed with our slave crest of ours but I'm quite familiar with how they work in general yah.

Can you check them out? I feel a particular energy but I'm unfamiliar with it so I can't suggest what filter to use. Is it coming from the seals?

I don't know, can you link my vision up with yours? Sure. I linked Gregory’s vision with mine so he could see what I could see.

Ok, it feels that the energy comes from either that altar or the seals on it. Can you retrieve some of it with your shadow and look into it later in your lab? I also want to see what happens when your shadows go inside if it triggers something. I will start preparing a teleport in case shit hits the fan.

That is fine, it reminds me that we should practice making shadow clones. Teleports are more a technique that originates from chaos magic which is lost magic, any version of teleports used nowadays are cheap copies or imitations of it. My long-range teleports use spatial magic. So far, I managed to be able to teleport only myself. I haven't succeeded in teleporting more than myself. It is taxing on my eyes because this is more like a racial skill than actually using magic meaning I don't necessarily need mana to do this, it surely makes it hurt less and easier on the execution if I did though. It seems I can feed it any type of energy; it showed signs of going off when I fed it nature energy, but since I'm not great at nature energy, it wasn't enough to make the teleport go off. That is not the teleport type I'm going to use I'm going to use a lightning-type teleport. Lightning has 2 or 3 types of teleports but I'm going for transmission feedback teleport or lightning short-range teleport as most people would call it.

How this works is, I send some lightning magic pulses riding on photons. It will check the area I specified and the magic will shoot back at me at half lightspeed and make me teleport to the location it stopped at and shot back at me. The reason why it is a short-range teleport is that the lightning magic riding the photon decreases in strength proportional to the distance it travels. Too far and it will fizzle out either making the teleport fail or teleporting you to a random spot between the location where it fizzled out and where you are. It could also teleport stuff to you If the magic fizzles out in a wall it could teleport a piece of the wall into you. So, the distance is limited by how much energy you can put into the signal and if there is a way for light to get there, which is basically almost anywhere. It also works if the user has been there before, which can be useful when trying to teleport to or from dark places. To transport Gregory with me I just have to give him a light zap to attune him to the same lightning signal I sent out. Don't worry it is so weak that he won't feel it. Gregory extended shadows inside the room. The corrupted bats didn't seem to notice. Something else did though. I and by extension, Gregory, also saw one of the seals react, give off a strong energy, and activate. Gregory who was still linked to my eyes tried to decrease the density of his shadows to trick the seal into disrupting its activation.

I don't think lowering the concentration will help! Just get the samples! I think we need to get out of here! On it! The seal activated and an enormous magic circle covering the whole room appeared and started to glow.

Ow shit! Uh oh, this looks like a summoning circle.

What is it summoning though? Do we want to stick around and find out?

Not really, I got the samples is the teleport ready? Gregory said while he looked at the summoning circle through my vision. He could probably see as well that the summoning was almost complete and that whatever would get summoned wouldn't be funny to deal with.

Ok, let’s go! Just a disclaimer this is the first time I've done a lightning-based short teleport so it might be a bit sloppy. Hoo boi. I located Ted and Raishin with my eyes and sent for a teleport request to port next to them which obviously went through since I could see them. What? my eyes are special so that's not a good argument? Well, the short-range teleport disagrees! The teleport went off as something appeared out of the summoning circle and we appeared next to Ted and Raishin who just finished catching a boar.

Whoa! Sup. I perked my fox ears toward the cave we teleported out of and faintly heard a roar. We were quite some distance from the cave so hearing it from here might've indicated that was one load roar.

Did you hear that? Hear what? A roar, that was probably whatever got summoned to the cave.

I didn't hear anything. That's fine, let's hunt it! Yeah, let's not do that. There seems to be a room in that cave with a lot of bad news. Waltzing in there is a suicide, it is still blocked by the water Gregory shot into the cave so there shouldn't be any issues. Can you go back and freeze that water with frost magic? If that thing escapes, we and the town will be in deep shit.

Aight, I’ll be carrying you guys with me though because I think we should head back home. Wait! I grabbed Ted, Gregory, and Raishin with a tail and fired up my tail dynamo with my other 4 tails.

Say if I feed you energy can you go faster? Please let's not go faster! Well theoretically yes but you gotta feed it into my frost magic because nothing you produce is usable by us unless Greg manipulates it or you dump it in my frost magic, besides that I'm holding back on speed because I don't want to overdo it.

You're holding back!? We arrived and I froze the water in the cave. Unless that summoned thing could use lost magic, it wasn't getting out. I tried to check it out but my vision of it was unclear. It seemed the large mass of my frost magic was interfering with my Elgards eyes. Interesting, I never experienced anything like this before, probably because I never created a large volume of frost magic and then tried looking through it. I will have to remember this since it is an important interaction that could screw me over if I'm not careful.

What is that creature doing? I can't tell, it seems my frost magic interferes with my Elgards eyes.

Oh, so it does have a weakness, well not like anyone could probably exploit that. At least that thing won't be bothering us. Are you done barfing Ted? It's time to go back. Wait, please! I'll walk. We will all walk; I can't dash you guys back to the town we might be seen and the nausea is starting to catch up to me. Aww.

We got our dinner so let's go back to Raishin’s hut and eat. So, what did you guys encounter there? Ted asked while we walked back.

There was a big room with a root of the pink tree, it was protected by an altar with various seals and magic traps, there were also a lot of corrupted bats in there, on top of the energy density and magic composition which would set a foot there a living nightmare. When I tried to take some samples of the energy there a seal activated. I'm not sure what activated it but it created a room-wide summoning circle that summoned a thing. We didn't get a look at it because we got out as soon as I got enough samples. I will analyze them later. Ugh, just a question Gregory, can you make anything to counter nausea? Gregory stopped.

What's up? Why didn't I think of this, ugh I would like to think that I'm smart but I feel so dumb sometimes.

Hehe, welcome to the club! We all look at Raishin.

Whud? Never mind. Forget it. It’s nothing. So, what can you make for me?

I'm sorry I can't make anything that makes you smarter. Wow. Ok, guys stop fighting let's focus on getting dinner and then rest till tomorrow so that we can set our plan into motion. Say Raishin, did you lock your hut?

Hmm? Why would I do that? Nobody ever comes here besides you guys. Well about that… The two men who were inspecting our battle aftermath are in your hut now.

What?! My fried pheasant stash is in danger! Raishin imbued himself with lightning and dashed off.

I don't think they're there for his fried pheasant but we should hurry up too.