Contrary to expectations, he was unable to deform the stone in the building. The whole facility was protected by magic that was completely alien to him. The magic patterns on the walls blocked any attempt by him to enter them with mana. This deprived him of any possibility of protecting her back with magic. They had also lost other people in the fighting.

The system kept announcing an increase in rewards whenever someone died. Something that only revealed that it was getting harder and harder. The building also made it harder for him to passively regain his mana. A problem that he has not yet experienced. This place continued to limit its possibilities.

He had to come up with more ideas for a potential fight. If they reacted to mana and cold, it probably also reacted to cold wind, mana grenades, and nitrogen oxide. For the latter, he only vaguely remembered that nitrogen was present in oxygen and that he had to remove the other constituents from the air. Maybe he could do it in a mana bubble like he made his little napalm bombs.

In the end, when his life was at stake, he would just go all in too. No secret was dying for it. Something he never understood about films or books. However, he understood that some things are best kept hidden until the end. Human greed knew no boundaries in his old life, why should it have been any different in this one? Besides, he was already sure that some of his secrets were valuable.

While the mercenaries were working their way through their resistance, he was working on some of the magic he wanted to try. They had already seen him stopping the Naga-like creatures with the laying on of his hand and, strangely enough, he trusted the mercenary more than the noble one.

These people's interests were much easier to pinpoint, understand, and earn their gratitude. At least an honest gratitude that was probably not exchanged for an opportunity. Well, at least as far as this muscular brain Samira was concerned, he could earn trust in her eyes.

He advised her to leave the next group to him, which got him some laughs. You saw him killing individuals, but a whole group? How could he blame them?

The beings came in waves when they didn't have to fight their way through a corridor blocked by their bodies. The only other benefit to the magical shielding of this facility was that it effectively prevented their hive minds from communicating through the walls. Sometimes they also had to secure themselves to the rear.

So it came in handy that he and a few others brought up the rear for the time being. Not long after he volunteered for the task, he got his willing test subjects. Worked in advance on this spell, which summarized mana in a small mana grenade. The vessel itself consisted of pure mana, into which he compressed more and more mana. He continued to increase this compression by strengthening and shrinking the barrier around it. Mana had the natural property of not being brought into a form to expand, to spread, but in this case it was trapped in a confined space. Also, when he formed this grenade, he thought with his will, his knowledge that the mana was expanding spontaneously. No, he literally burned this urge to expand into the mana.

As soon as the first group came into view, he tossed the baseball-sized mana lump at these creatures' heads. Not quite as expected, but still unprecedentedly the mana detonated or expanded rapidly after the vessel was broken, almost forming an explosion cone.

The mercenaries could hardly stop staring after the creatures fell to the ground like dolls whose strings were severed. In one fell swoop he had eliminated a whole group of them. He would have loved to turn around at such a moment to grin triumphantly at the others, but firstly he wore his hood as well as his mask and secondly it was not the right time for it, because the next group was already snaking over the corpses of their fallen .

Unfortunately, creating this spell used up more mana than originally thought, causing it to end up on the blacklist. His list included all spells that were effective but not cost effective. That damn ball cost him a whole tenth of his supply.

Other than getting some news of her death, he still got no real information on whether he was gaining any experience. This was one of the things that really bothered him. That lack of clarity as to whether he was getting any real gain from the fight.

Another try would be nitrogen, but using nitrogen in tight spaces posed another bloody problem. Although the liquid nitrogen would turn everything it touched into ice on contact, unfortunately there was also too little oxygen in closed rooms with nitrogen, maybe it could do it like with the Mana Ball.

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Maybe ice spears? Could he make it from mana in a jar? Could he enrich the air with H2O there or extract it from the air and then lower the temperature inside the vessel? In another example, he could solidify the blood of the creatures in the dungeon, but if he didn't want to create it, which was using up his resources, then he had to extract it from somewhere.

After a few attempts, as well as failures, he finally succeeded in his first sensible ice spear, which, as expected, had a strong effect on the creatures, but unfortunately did not kill them. Unexpected, but not entirely surprising. Contact alone seemed to harm them or the parasite. But he could achieve this effect more easily by lowering the temperature in the corridors.

Perhaps he could create a field in whose room there was a certain temperature range? It would at least immobilize them and the mercenaries could then finish them off.

Magna: I want to try something. Be prepared, it might get a little cold.

Sam over the noise: What are you going to do?

Magna didn't answer, but spread a thin cube with his mana, letting the temperature drop to an uncomfortable zero degrees. This was not really easy and had to be sustained. Some of the men even began to complain, but their voices fell silent the moment the creatures entered the cold sphere and their movements were delayed enough to look like robots. The advantage of this approach was that it was extremely mana efficient.

It also reduced the mercenaries' casualties enough that they began to look at him differently. In them he found something as simple as gratitude, Sam, too, kept giving him a few grateful looks. With this cube, they could successfully move through multiple levels, leaving a single battlefield behind.

Finally, the formation had to move closer and he had to adjust the cube a little to his reduced regeneration. The cube reminded him immensely of the effects of aura magic in some of the games he once played. Which at the moment he played the role of a supporter.

Had it not been for this whole damn situation, the place might have been a treasure trove, a real treasure trove of knowledge as well as rare resources. In some of the laboratories, some plants were still in their pots. Some wither, others with a water supply still alive enough to be plucked. Unfortunately, nobody had the time or the patience to pause to make this possible.

Magna really had to wonder how the young nobleman and his group were doing, were they still alive? What did they come across? Sometimes he would have liked to see people's heads because he couldn't always act on guesswork, could he?

At least they were getting on better and better, and he was beginning to wonder, because the corpses of the serpent beings were already beginning to pile up. The corridors were literally clogged with corpses. It wasn't a stone wall, but it was at least as effective as one, if utterly disgusting. How did everyone here get infected with these parasites?

Wait a minute, if the parasites came from a strange world, when it became necessary to close the portal, then? Did the damn parasites live in other world water? Or maybe they were just vulnerable to so many things because the bodies of these beings were not their preferred hosts?

Did he have one of these parasites himself? In a bit of a panic, he almost used up all of his mana scanning his brain. But that wasn't practical at the moment, maybe a poison killer could do something? A mana potion to shock his system? Could mana potions solve the problem? But had he even drunk from the water? Did the others have? This blue-blooded man had definitely drunk from it.

Perhaps the mana density outside the plateau became high enough to kill any of the parasites in the water. In fact, he didn't want to find out, on the other hand, he just had to know. For his safety, he let two of the mana potions appear in his backpack, of which he took one out and drank it unobtrusively. Immediately he could feel his mana being regenerated. Well, the potions worked to fill his pool a little.

Unfortunately he couldn't really change his position in the formation, but somehow he had to ask Sam to have a drink or send a wave of mana through their heads without grilling their brains. But how should he do that?

If they also destroyed the stone ring, then not only should the filter system collapse, but the radius of the mana-poor area should be massively expanded. Suddenly he felt an urgent feeling to bring this damn portal to collapse as quickly as possible.

The way into the depths of the complex still demanded an enormous toll in blood from the group of mercenaries, but the increase in rewards also went hand in hand with it. It only took a little more until the group found themselves on a balcony with a view of what is probably the largest mana crystal they had ever seen. The thing was definitely worth entire cities. Included in the view were countless small crystals that seemed to form on the walls. This giant crystal was certainly created that way. The mana density in the room, well, he didn't have to use his perception. It was worse than the dungeon.

The mana was a viscous soup, slime, like a wall of smoke, you could hardly see a few meters away. In the middle, the crystal was surrounded by enchantments that were as capitalized as some of the houses reached into the sky. Damn it, it would have eaten a broom if that underground facility didn't take up most of the lower plateau. Presumably the city was built after the plant or was the rock created around the plant?

The mana was focused through the crystal and shot straight up through a tube, presumably onto the portal itself. His own house would certainly have broken into the complex had he dug the tunnels deeper into the rock. Basically, he lived next to a ticking time bomb. The memory of it made him swallow hard. At least he had everything of value in his attic, even if he felt sorry for some of the books.

The only question left to him was how he could sabotage the process without the system blowing up, because so much mana that suddenly there was no direct way out.

Sam looked at the hall right in front of her eyes. The stranger next to her swallowed hard and she could understand it. Well, she couldn't understand why the mana formed into crystals or how the enchantments worked, but she could understand the sight. There was enough wealth down there to lead entire kingdoms into endless war. Your people all had the same look. Who could she blame? None of them would have to work with such a crystal. You would have taken care of it, you would never have to get your hands dirty again.