Kuepit, now standing in the centre of the crater, concentrated her buff aura on herself to its limits. The aura of her buff was concentrated from its radius which would span several miles and focused on only herself, providing an exponential boost to each and every muscle in her body. Her heart pumped with greater strength and fervour, and her neurons pulsed electrical currents with the synergy of a hundred—no, a thousand men. Her senses could now hear even the whistle of the wind around the wings of a gryphon in flight in the stratosphere. Yet she spotted no sign of Evan.
With bulging veins on her forehead and a severely reddened face, Kuepit threw her head back and let loose a guttural scream. The prey had escaped the predator.
High up in the low thermosphere, where the air was far too thin to breathe for a person without the gift of mana to breathe, was Evan, with Elara slung in his arms in a princess carry. With feeble occasional use of Third Circle - Fly, he was slowly gliding away. With his current trajectory and velocity, he would likely land several hundred miles away, which was what he intended.
If he wanted to seek shelter from Kuepit, who would undoubtedly be out for his and Elara's blood now, he wouldn't be able to find anyone strong enough to act as a strength deterrent for one of the Heroes themselves. No, what he sought was a political deterrent, and he had a feeling he knew a friend that could grant him that.
He let his tense muscles loosen as the adrenaline of the chase slowly wore off and how tired he was truly began to hit him. The tears he had shed had long since left his face by now, and his tear ducts were dried up. He looked down at Elara, checking her pulse as he did so. It was slightly elevated but otherwise normal, without unusual symptoms. He released a long exhale in relief. His makeshift plan had worked.
What he had just pulled was fairly straightforward, yet it was something even the most skilled of mages would struggle to emulate, and the inspiration for it had come from Kuepit herself.
When he had been running away from her, he recalled how she talked about her skills revolving around the concept of buffs. That is, a temporary upgrade to one's physical state in exchange for mana. When she had first said it, a small part of his brain immediately wondered how a buff ability could allow for the instant movement that he had seen. Sure, buffing, or rather, debuffing, would explain her ability to knock out a warrior with a Lord ranked body with casual throws around a fragile room—by reducing the person's upgraded physical stats back down to one that matched that of a regular person. This made sense, but movement that looked almost like teleportation?
But witnessing her do it again had rammed an idea into his head. If her buffs didn't necessarily work on a timer and cooldown like he had assumed but rather were purely based on mana expenditure, she would be able to basically manually adjust her own velocity.
Even if the strongest person in the world were to dash at maximum speed, they would require a short period of acceleration and deceleration to change the velocity of their dash. A gradual increase and decrease in velocity were necessary. But in the case of Kuepit, she might have been able to forfeit this process in its entirety by directly buffing velocity rather than her muscles.
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‘A direct buff to physical values rather than an indirect one by enhancing her own body. No, she probably has a separate skill that could enhance her own body as well. What a monster!'
Evan looked at his charred palm that had held onto the rock and now held Elara. It was evidence of how he had escaped.
‘The acceleration spell—taught to be a double-edged sword to whoever tries to learn it.’
The acceleration spell would do exactly as advertised: provide acceleration. However, this acceleration was fixed in just one direction, and spending too much mana on it could end up accelerating the caster to G-forces their body simply could not handle, killing them.
Kuepit had imposed a mana debuff on him. Evan had understood this upon realising that his mana levels were not going up, which meant he couldn't have spent too much mana in the first place. But her imposition of a mana debuff was what led him to understand that she didn't really do much research about her assassination target. Evan's core technique was drawing magic circles that drew mana from the atmosphere rather than himself. The mana debuff did not hinder this.
And this was why his running path was circular. Once he understood that Kuepit could catch him anytime and that the whole act of running away was a farce, he had begun drawing the magic circle for the Third Circle - Accelerate.
By casting Accelerate with a truly enormous quantity of mana that only the atmosphere could provide, his movement would almost instantly accelerate to several dozen times Mach speed. Of course, what would have followed such a manoeuvre was the vaporisation of several internal organs for Elara, and even he would suffer internal injuries close enough to put him to death from the g-force of the acceleration. This was where the rock came in.
When Kuepit had broken into a psychotic episode in front of him, he had taken the opportunity to subtly carve in the decelerate spell twice into the rock. With decelerate being a third circle spell, the minimum mana requirement was a fraction of a fraction of Evan’s total mana reserves as an otherworlder, which was why he had the mana to activate the spell even with the mana reduction debuff. At the moment he did so, the rock exploded from spell strain, and the accelerate spells activated radially at the centre of Evan’s and Elara’s bodies, negating the g-force of the upward acceleration by imitating a gravitational field within their bodies that protected their organs. Of course, this acceleration from the rock was nowhere close to the acceleration from Evan’s magic circle he had drawn in the air. The reason it was enough to protect them was due to the compound effect of these two protective acceleration spells from being so close to each other, the fact that their bodies were stronger than that of the average human, etc.
‘That was far too close for comfort. If I hadn't been able to draw inspiration from her technique of instant movement at the last moment... Anyway, I can feel the debuff wearing off. I suppose this means I’m far enough from her now.’
Casting yet another First Circle - Heal on Elara as first aid, he then pumped the mana he regained from the wearing off of the debuff into Third Circle - Fly, such that he no longer was gliding. Now in proper flight, all that was left was to continue westward.