Sofia and the students stared at the infinite waterfall of blood in front of them, perpetually flowing onto itself.
“Well, it looks like this is another failure. I don’t think this is helping drain the barrier’s mana at all. If anything, it feels like the amount of ambient mana has been going up. I could make more blood but that looks pointless.”
“Why are we trapped in here in the first place, what’s the point?” En complained as she walked back and forth on the bone platform.
“That’s hard to tell at this point, I feel like someone trying to kill me or you guys could do it without too much trouble if they can set up a barrier like this without me or Pareth noticing anything. So it’s most likely not that.”
Not that killing me would be that easy as long as I have Leverle’s charm. The students though…
Shaily played with one of her sprites, pensively she mumbled to herself, “Maybe someone just wants to ruin our chances at getting tokens… All of us here are serious competitors, even Lola has started dueling a lot and almost caught up with En and me, I don’t know about Topaz but I’ve had a match against Opal and it was pretty close too…”
“I am the outlier I guess,” Topaz said from the corner she was sitting on, her legs dangling in the void, “I’m not too interested in the competition, I’d rather spend my time here learning all I can, I can’t compare with Opal anyway so it’s dumb to even try.”
Opal snuck up on her and hugged her sister from behind.
Sofia shrugged, “It would be nice if it was just about tokens. I could see someone going that far to sabotage the thing considering how tremendous the reward is, but I worry it might be a bit more nefarious than that. What if this is the ProudWall family trying to get revenge for their guy I slapped around in the arena?”
Lola had been very silent the entire time the group had been trapped, but she spoke up for Erian, “Impossible. The ProudWall family isn’t normally so petty… They worship Talent and they got their Ducal rank for their exceptional service to the Empire. The duel was strange in the first place.” Lola took a deep breath. “That one of them would insult a BrightHall teacher was a great embarrassment for the family even before you fought the match, Erian wouldn’t even come near us out of shame… I don’t want to believe they would stoop so low as to cheat in a competition like this, let alone try to pursue revenge for a fair loss!” she finished, almost shouting.
“Hey hey, calm down Lola, I believe you, alright? Is that really why Erian stopped coming to my classes? I will need to have a talk with him, he can’t be compromising his future out of shame for something he didn’t do. That said, we need to get out of here. The ambient mana is still rising and that’s becoming a bit worrying.”
“Why is it worrying?” En instantly asked.
“Well, this feels oddly familiar to something I have already experienced multiple times. The academic name of which I’ve recently learned is Siege magic. This is something you do when you need to be sure to absolutely annihilate your opponent, level a fortress with everyone inside, obliterate an army, such things. You trap your opponents inside of a barrier so they cannot escape, you gather a lot of mana over a long period of time… And you unleash a devastating strike all at once. We still have some time though, although I don’t know how long, but I can tell that the mana is still too calm for the spell to be about to resolve.”
While everyone looked noticeably more worried about their situation now, Topaz still looked calmer, even though her feet had stopped moving, she turned to look at Sofia, “You experienced that multiple times… As the caster?”
“As the target. Things happened,” Sofia answered with a shrug.
After a moment of silence, Topaz leaned back against Opal, looking at the infinite reflections of their bone platform in the barrier above, “I’m not even a summoner but if you get us out of here I’ll sign up to your class…”
“Sure, you’re welcome to join, Opal too. Also, I am pretty confident in getting us out right now.”
“What?!”
Everyone looked at Sofia like she was crazy, they had been stuck here for hours and now she was somehow confident in getting out?
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“Yes. Sorry students, I really let you down this time. I had a way to get out all this time and I just completely forgot about it. I have so much stuff now, so many skills, so many options, I’m really stupid for not thinking of this before, you can insult me later if you want, but yeah, now that I see it, it’s obvious.”
Opal quickly scribbled something on her notepad, she presented it to Sofia with a kind smile. ‘Better late than never!’
Sofia laughed nervously, and started to reshape the bone platform into a small pyramid.
“Please get inside, although the way to get out should be safe, I’m worried about what we’ll find outside, so I’ll be spreading rot everywhere as soon as we’re out and potentially teleport us to the place I spoke of before if things look too dangerous.”
With little opposition from the students, she got them and the box of compressed shades inside of the pyramid before preparing herself.
I would put on an undeath rune but I’m not sure we have that much time before the siege spell resolves…
Preparing her spells, Sofia formed a big handle above the pyramid and tapped on Pareth’s bone plates. I’ll activate the third tier overlord so you can fly, if there’s anyone waiting for us outside, grab the girls and go. Don’t worry about me, I still have Leverle’s charm as a security.
“Alright, everything ready.”
This HAS to work, right?
[Ringed arms of Zar] : (Manaless state): When this ring is devoid of mana, the wearer may activate [Collapse] at any time to make the ring instantly absorb all out-of-body mana in a large area.
Wait, would it even work through the Dragon-scale armor? I will be like the storage ring and have the mana travel through my arm I guess. It’s an artifact of the deep, so now way would it not work…
Sofia controlled the bone pyramid to be near a corner of the barrier, perhaps the barrier would reform after her little stunt so it was best to get out fast.
“Here we go.”
Sofia activated the third tier of [Runeforged Overlord] and raised her hand high.
[Collapse]
The barrier shattered like a broken mirror and all the mana in a huge sphere around Sofia collapsed toward her. As she predicted, it entered the scale arm through the shoulder going through her all the way to her fist which felt like getting struck by lightning. To Sofia this was nothing. With a huge chunk of the barrier gone, she and Pareth quickly flew up, and Sofia observed her surroundings while showering the entire vicinity in Holy light and Erredian Rot.
It was still night and they were still in the same place, but the immediate surroundings were not as they once were. The mansion was gone, and the surrounding forest had been burned down, in their place was a truly enormous ritual circle carved out in the charred soil, glowing brightly with blood-red magic.
Sofia only got a glimpse of it before it was covered in rot. In the distance, on an extremity of the ritual circle stood a single tall masked figure in a gray cloak. Sofia tried to [Identify] them, but they disappeared as soon as the rot started spreading on them. The only distinctive sign she had managed to really see about the person before they were gone were two pointy ears.
An Elf?!
Sofia worriedly looked in Pareth’s direction, hoping the cloaked figure hadn't teleported to him and the students, but her mana vision quickly confirmed that no teleportation trail led to their direction. The person had teleported somewhere else, completely abandoning the siege ritual which was getting ravenously devoured by the rot.
They fled?
She hesitated for a second, did she need Pareth to teleport to her and flee to Zangdar, or was the immediate danger gone?
A second passed, then another, the ambient mana dispersed as the rot ravaged the remains of the ritual, and there was no sign of the cloaked figure coming back. In the charred forest, there were only the sounds of the spreading rot and the cold windy night.
Fuck me, what the hell was that?
Sofia recalled the creepy design of the elf’s white mask, that of a deformed face with a single round eye, it gave her shivers.
She told Pareth to stop and flew to him, her mana would soon be drained by [Runeforged Overlord], so she also quickly brought out bookie and summoned random skeletons to have some mana to absorb back after she hit zero. Landing at the border of the charred zone, watching the rot quickly devouring itself a few tens of meters away, Sofia opened the bone pyramid, a hint of worry in her heart.
“Is everyone fine?!”
The girls inside were shaken but unscathed. Finally Sofia could sigh of relief. For now, they were out of danger. Still, she monitored the mana around her like a hawk looking for the tiniest sign of spatial magic as she helped the girls out of her bone construct.
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