Floating up, Ben Higgs slowly woke up from his long night of sleep as he finally got away from his obsessed working trance.
Floating up, Ben Higgs also slowly fell asleep again as he sealed away his most cherished memories.
His mind was spinning. His overflowing short memory crumbled while a set of instincts sunk deeper.
A sense of certainness rose within his heart: I AM READY.
He had work to do, so his body must move forward.
As those feeling overcame his mind, a dirty head popped from the ground nearby where Ben had sunk years ago.
His appearance was different. Leo Moon was no more. But in addition, his features were full of anger.
"I AM SUCH A SUCKER! Why, why, why?"
The way up was slow, so the seal stabilized when he was finally above ground.
The feelings involved in this waking/sleeping routine always made Ben mad. His decision didn't make sense to him anymore. But while he wanted to rebel, he knew he shouldn't. And more importantly, he couldn't.
After completely freeing himself from the ground, Ben lay on the floor. He questioned himself on why he chose to be proactive now.
'Is this the time to make such high-risk bets? It's so not like me.'
Ben felt this impulse to be proactive. Instead of only staying on the sidelines, do something.
'I should curse Ginn later.'
A lot passed through Ben's mind since he had spent a lot of time and resources fortifying his state. He was trying to make it make sense.
However, something else interrupted his running mind. The defying silence of his surrounding drew a depressive tide on Ben's mood.
So, he quickly went up on his feet and looked around.
'Lifeless.'
Ben unbuttoned his crumbling shirt and removed the
But those were also not decaying as they only stayed there like in pause, waiting for something.
'Did those strings influence where I chose to hide? Or is this a consequence of my overly lucky state? Will I keep paying back later?'
Fortunately, the work he did on the progress of his sense paid off since Ben could quickly identify he was inside a sealed area.
'This is a giant spell. And quite terrifying. Is someone trying to refine a region? Are THEY setting up stuff again? Maybe someone else, but it's very similar.'
After he noticed the danger, Ben's body functionalities turned off, so the whole system couldn't sense him.
'Something came inside and then died. Please don't notice it!' Ben thought in a joking tone.
Then, he walked around like a dead man, only using his vision to identify the surroundings.
Ben had one similar encounter before. And he suffered a lot because of it, ending up poisoned and almost dead. The after-effects from that time were the main reason he even helped the young man on the floor around the Ruins of the Sunset Empire.
Although back then he did survive, Ben hadn't removed the poison inside him. So he was experimenting on the boy so that he might feel confident in dealing with his issues. And that indeed paid off as he learned how to deal with another one of his ticking bombs.
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But even now, he only strengthened the seal he had made. Since Ben thought it would be helpful if he didn't destroy it.
'This should be easier. I'll break this and think more later. If a battle happens, so be it. I'm so tired of those people.'
Those who lived commonly couldn't notice the ongoing battle behind the curtains. But for someone like Ben, who lived a long time, signs of that appeared eventually.
A slow and ever-going battle. The world against those that wouldn't mind sacrificing everything else for their own benefit.
And here, it wasn't different. Ben quickly noticed the center of the formation and found the sight he expected.
In the middle, pits with dead creatures built lakes of death. The payment needed to keep on running such a spell.
'They're sucking everything they can. It's more similar than I hoped for.'
The terrifying sight couldn't move Ben's heart. And he only focused on finding the Core. But he still glanced around, identifying the bodies of animals, monsters, and humans.
Yet, Ben was the one who looked dead and not them. With his crumbling clothes, dirty body, and aged appearance, He looked as if he had run away from his grave while the creatures in the pit looked asleep.
But the bodies didn't breathe. And the silence built this illusion that death only hadn't caught up to their state. As if life and death were playing a weird game.
Ben saw no life around, but he searched for the Core carefully. While he couldn't save everything, he could at least stop the formation from fully achieving its ultimate goal.
As Ben moved around, small birthmarks on his face solidified back into deep black marks tattoos. Moreover, a flower had sprouted again and was in the open due to his unbuttoned shirt.
He was ready to fight.
'How long did I spend down there? It shouldn't be a decade. So not only did they build this quite fast, but they must have been overclocking it to achieve such a shocking result.'
Unfortunately, the Core wasn't in the center like last time. So Ben could only continue to look around.
He eventually came closer to a big tree. It stood tall but looked small compared to the pit close to it.
Ben moved the dagger in his right hand toward the tree. Yet, it didn't hit something hard. Instead, it flowed in and created waves on the trunk's surface. The same reaction one sees when you throw a stone into a tranquil body of water.
'This is it!'
After arriving before the Core, he released some of his senses to detect the improvised ritual and the corresponding Arrays connections. Although dim, the extra sensitivity he gained last time allowed him to feel it.
After he poked inside, the veil surrounding him trembled.
Ben made broad movements with both daggers after fully sensing the illusion and doing his preliminary analyses. He cut into the false trunk before walking into the protected area, ready to fight.
'Jackpot!'
Around Ben, the area was chaotic. The system was poorly glued, like a computer put together while using broken pieces, tape, uncovered wires, hot glue, etc.
The sight made one thing clear: whoever built it didn't have spare time.
'I'll give it to them. It's not every day I find someone who makes things as bad as I do. Like a terrible improvised DIY.'
Ben's body began to get stiff. So to avoid further after-effects, he immediately started the robbery.
He acted like a kid who found a charming mountain of Lego pieces. He broke a few pieces, threw some away, and forcefully put some together, ignoring any reasonable game rules.
First, he broke the security-related setups. Then, he tweaked the Core functionalities and moved around objects. Since the system seemed hurried, Ben acted with a bit more ease.
Even if he wasn't the best array master, he was a master used to working in the middle of a mess, so how could this surprise him. Most of his carefulness came from him trying to notice if something waited beneath, something like a trap that may put him in danger.
However, Ben embraced the chaos once he explored enough to feel confident in the lack of traps.
Once he crashed everything which would cause him some danger, he fully deployed his senses again. With the ability to use energy, he scanned everything once more. After quickly ranking everything within sight, he began picking the valuable assets.
'As within my expectations, they put no tracking since those may work against them. Since they dare to do something like this, they should be willing to eat their losses if the worst cases arise. Indeed, there is only one connection to them: the Core artifact sending them the harvested energy. One single point of failure! And they should disable it as soon as they notice something wrong. Alright, I can't hold back. Let's make them angry.' Ben laughed.
A pen appeared in Ben's hands. And since his energy had already taken control of most of the system, he began ordering them around.
Before the wireless energy-sending device, he wrote on the floor a simple design. Next, many things around him broke, and an enormous amount of energy concentrated on the single Array. Lastly, Ben sent the Array toward the artifact when it started to crumble.
The whole setup rumbled.
Ben put together the whole protective system and used the rest of the burnt energy to isolate the area around the artifact. His DIY from the pieces around held back the results of the explosion, but as a consequence, the whole system turned ineffective, and even the illusion finally disappeared.
The simple design was Ben's Bomb Array, which tried to replicate one of Earth humanity's most disastrous inventions.
Ben never arrived at a complete copy. But while applying a few general physics concepts, he built an unstable array that caused non-spirit-based damage.
'Destruction is so much easier than building something.' He sighed.