Whistling a cheery tune as they flew across the ocean on a bed of sand, Ben couldn’t help but feel satisfied.

The meeting had stretched out late but that was more a side-effect of how smoothly it had gone overall, with the world’s two newest third tiers getting acquainted with the rest of them as they discussed ways they might be able to help each other and the world as a whole through their power, with Killi leading the group and hitting every point she’d wanted to a day early, leaving her looking tremendously pleased by the end.

He wasn’t going to act like Rook was the only unruly element among the third tiers but he was a big enough one that just the lack of his presence alone had made things easier, letting them wrap up and get back to their work and their lives.

As for whether either Ben or Thera had gotten anything out of it, only Ben felt like that was the case. As interesting as some of the talks had been and getting to learn the names and dispositions of some of the most powerful people on the planet, what he’d gotten was experience, placing his strength against their own to see where he’d stack against a few of them and despite how low it was, he’d at least seen he could plan around it to an extent, giving him just a little hope for the future.

“Alright, is this out far enough for you?” Thera asked him while Ben looked around.

It had been over ten minutes since they’d seen land in any direction, exactly what he was looking for as he nodded.

“Yep, just one sec.”

Taking out Rook's prison and holding it in his hand, Ben first spent his mana, wrapping the thing in a thick layer of steel before dropping it into the sea below, sighing contently as he did.

“Ah, now that felt good,” He said as he got up, wrapping his arms around Thera as he did. “You ready to go home?”

“As I’m going to be. This was not supposed to be such a stressful outing.”

“I mean, technically we didn’t know how stressful it was going to be beforehand since Falk never told us.”

“Not important, I just want to get a nice couple of days where nothing goes wrong for once.”

“Saying that’s a jynx, we’re going to go home and find Stonewall overrun by demons now.”

“Well luckily for Stonewall, it’s home to the beloved daughter of the great earth spirit. Plenty of the other spirits are going to be protecting it while I’m not around.”

“Is calling yourself the beloved daughter of the great earth spirit really less embarrassing than calling yourself the spirit princess?”

“Yep, now don’t question that anymore if you don’t want to fall into the ocean too.”

“Okay, I’ll be a good cute little boyfriend and just quietly take in the view.”

Huh? Restraint?

Oh, the letter! You saw that, huh?

Stolen story; please report.

Yeah, but you didn’t speak up. Okay, so here’s the thing, I lied.

<...About?>

Mainly the length of time he could expect to be trapped in there, I do still plan on talking to Ogilt though.

<...Okay, I never doubted the second part so by how much did you lie?>

…

Ah, well here’s the thing, I actually built the enchantments to decay and calculated their decay rate to figure out how long he’d be trapped, but I’m just so good at enchanting, you know? Literally the second best on the planet, all of my enchantments want to be strong and stable, especially since they all incorporate the ring system and that’s kind of that system’s defining feature.

Fine, fine, it’s going to be roughly six months of real time, just to really get the message across, you know?

<...Why are you like this?>

He literally tried to kill me!

He literally tried to kill me?

Ah, I mean, six months is a pretty short prison time considering the charge is attempted murder, isn’t it?

Agree to disagree. Anyway, he’s immortal, that will all probably be fine and since that would be fine I just did my best to extend things as much as I could to really get the point across. Now, obviously, he needs to act as a meat shield by the time the third wave rolls around so I couldn’t justify actually keeping him in there past the third wave but through the clever addition of time enchantments I can sure make it feel like it's longer.

Ah, not that much. So the interesting thing about what I did was that I warped space itself to make his prison, meaning that teleporting out of it would be close to the same as teleporting out of reality. Obviously not exactly the same, I wouldn’t be able to trap Ogilt like that, but even someone in the middle of an awakened space magic would probably feel trapped. Now, he has about three meters of space in all directions but since space is also warping back in on itself it could also be described as infinite, complicating things a bit more-

Fine, three times faster. Six months in there translates to about a year and a half.

I can be both curious and annoying.

Hey, nobody should be mad about this, I’m basically doing him a service by helping the guy remember something it seems like he’s long forgotten.

Fear. A guy with all the time in the world and no motivation to use it beyond being creepy to women and an asshole to the people around him, that sort of thing would be far better suited to self-improvement. Even if it's too little, too late, considering we’re reaching the end of the invasion, maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll use this chance to get motivated enough in his training to actually awaken his space magic. You gotta admit, being nearly a thousand and not having dozens of awakened skills is a little embarrassing.

…Yep, absolutely left him with a light because I have a sweet merciful heart. So there we go, all’s well that ends well.

I would, now stop sweating the small stuff man, it’s time to go home.