The exhibition continued for a time, but no match was as exciting or bloody as the one the geomancer and hemomancer had displayed. After a few hours of continuous matches, no matter how thrilling they were, they started to get boring.
I took advantage of this free time to analyze the soul of all military men and women present. None detected my spiritual scrying, not even the eleven-star mage present. That’s the thing about soul and mind magic, if you didn’t have defenses against it, you were totally vulnerable.
The same didn’t apply to fields like neuromancy as mages developed basic mental defenses as a side effect of their studies on magic. The soul remained untouched, in any case. Sure, elder people and mages with high soul pools were more difficult to infiltrate, but a higher difficulty didn’t correlate with a higher detection chance.
I didn’t know when, but we had started walking across the military outpost, and now we were at the entrance of the precinct looking at some watchtowers. I guess some soldier was giving an explanation about them, but I was too focused on collecting data to pay attention to such small details.
The insane amounts of information I was getting from Mystic’s Dominion overloaded my mind a bit. There were too many souls present, too many to inspect. Besides the considerable amount students present, and the soldiers, a new group had entered my area of effect.
My head snapped towards the gate of the base, not because of the tumult gathered in front of it (which it did influence as the pressure on my mind intensified), but by the apparition of a familiar soul imprint. The Offensive Coalition spokesperson.
“…do that! We have the right to be right here!” The man told to the Sergeant Major as the multitude behind him cheered.
“You are correct about your rights, but we have visitors currently at the station, and I fear you are disrupting their tour with your rambling,” Kalyd spoke with exhaustion. She wasn’t the only tired out by the group’s antics. “So please, either disperse yourselves or move your herd elsewhere.”
“And why should we do that?” The spokesperson replied with cockiness.
“Because the ‘Arcane Veil’ dictates it.” Kalyd made use of her reputation. The group backpedaled at her words and the spokesperson’s face soured.
Adrian had filled me out on the overall Wyrm’s situation during the countless exhibition matches, and she, the Arcane Veil, and her partner, the Ceaseless Storm, had become sort of celebrities. Especially around people like the Coalition as they were an anti-dragon group, and they celebrated the pair of mages as heroes.
I was surprised that I didn’t know anything about the situation. I was literally living a historic moment and I was wholeheartedly ignoring it. To be fair, I had been rather focused on my development as a mage to compute what was happening in my country.
“Still,” the man continued, “we are not trespassing any territory and we are free to manifest our will in such fateful and relevant location as this one.”
So much for Kalyd’s hero status. What did the Offensive Coalition intend to do with this protest? Take down the dome? Sure, but they weren’t the only ones trying so. Hate was their motivation, and that hate was directed toward the dragons, so I didn’t have a clue why they were so aggressive with their compatriots. Even their own damned heroes of war.
I emitted a pulse with Mystic’s Dominion in order to see how many people the Offensive Coalition had gathered, and I had taken three precious pieces of information from it. One, the people were commoners in a strict sense. No mages present, except a minority. That told me that they were probably people affected by the attack twenty years ago.
Second, the mages gathered were nobles. How did I know? Soul correlates with the individual, and nobles have a particular damp stench to them. More instinctual than a proven fact. They may be the ones recruited at the opera house. Though I can objectively declare that high ellari souls tended to be bigger than commoner mages, even if they were of the same tier, affinity, and power. I was the exception, of course.
But all of that was occluded by the third piece. The hemomancer’s soul was getting away from the group. He was a soldier on a military base, which shouldn’t raise any alarms, the problem was that his soul was becoming more unstable by the second.
My mind began thinking over the worst-case scenario. A bunch of defenseless people and a spiritually unstable blood mage didn’t inspire a lot of trust. I had seen him fight; I had carefully inspected his soul. That man was a time bomb and there was a pile of volatile substances in front of me.
Such degeneration of the soul couldn’t be of natural origin, yet no matter how many times I scanned Ikail Natas’ soul, I couldn’t find any evidence of soul tampering. This man was absolutely unstable, and I feared the rates of mana flowing inside his soul. A calm and peaceful mind wouldn’t resemble even a bit of the maelstrom happening on the inwards of the hemomancer’s very being.
I casted Concealment inside my soul and stealthily separated from the academy’s group. Thankfully, everyone was too concerned with the Coalition’s shenanigans to actually pay any attention to me.
Once there were no soldiers in sight, I started running toward Ikail. He was walking normally, but there was a sizable chunk of distance between us.
“So, what are you doing?” Someone whispered behind me.
I stopped dead in my tracks as shivers run rampant across my body. “Damn it, Marissa! Don’t scare me like that.”
I only elevated my voice; crying would reveal our position to the guards. Of course, she was able to see me through my Concealment. She was probably one of the people with the most soul tolerance and detection capabilities in the whole city. Or even the world.
“So, where are we going?” She instantly incorporated my chase.
“You are going back with the group, that’s what you are going to do.” I told her. I didn’t stop walking toward the unstable soul, though. Time was of the essence.
“No, I think not,” Marissa replied. I gave her a mean look, but she continued. “You have that look on your face when you are about to do something stupid.” Huh, she knew me too well. “So, I want to join that stupidity.” And I also knew her too well. Instead of stopping me, she decided to join me.
I sighed. “Do you remember the hemomancer from the exhibition matches?”
“The oddly calm mage? How could I forget it?” She responded following behind me.
“His soul is absurdly unstable, and I fear it’s going to crack at moment’s notice, so I’m tailing behind him.” I filled her out. “Can you spellcast Silence so no one hears us come?”
After a gust of wind, she talked. “Done.”
I also manipulated my own soul, stretching it around us with Mystic’s Dominion, to spread my Concealment’s effect over Marissa. She was, somehow, able to sense my subtle movements and spellcasted her own Concealment spell. The Air version, obviously.
Whatever was going to happen when we arrived, at least we would have the element of surprise.
Marissa and I had followed the unstable hemomancer through an underground entrance that was hidden in a stone building, which we also had to infiltrate in. The metal door leading downwards was fully opened, the lock was destroyed, and some hinges had popped off. Ikail had been here, and he had forced his entry.
This was enough confirmation to tell that he wasn’t in this place with good intentions.
We shared a nod and delved into the deep, descending onto a spiral staircase. Mage Lights dimly lightened the place. They were an automatic system, the lights weren’t set on by the recent intruder, or at least the basic runic inscriptions told me so. The place was surprisingly humid but lacked any water flow. When the stairs reached an end, we were led to a circular tunnel made of the typical ellari white stone.
“What is this place?” Marissa talked with a normal voice, no need to whisper as she kept our sound quiet to outsiders with her wind magic. She then touched the walls and pressed on with her hand. “The stone is wet and cold.”
“It doesn’t look like a sewage system,” I told while I kept following the red mess that was the blood mage’s soul. “Maybe a drainage or flood prevention system. We are on the shore, after all.”
“Hmm.” Marissa pondered on it. “I was thinking about a dungeon. We are in a military base, after all.” She reiterated my wording with unnecessary sassiness. Totally inappropriate for our current status.
“Not likely,” I told her. “This place is too old, and the Lan’el district has only become a garrison for less than two decades now. The timeline doesn’t match. Even then, this was a commercial port before.”
“Maybe they kept contrabandists and criminals here.” Marissa continued with her hypothesis.
“You can believe whatever you like.” I wasn’t paying attention to her; my focus was on the moving soul.
“There may even be skele- Ouch!” Marissa cried as she impacted against my back. “Why did you stop?”
“He has stopped moving,” I replied.
“Has he noticed us?” She abandoned her carefree demeanor and readied for battle.
“No.” I taciturnly said as I inspected further on. “He’s too far away to do so. He looks like… like…” I examined the movements of his soul, the wiggling of the protuberances that represented his arms… Then another entity popped into my detection range. “Like he’s talking to someone? Hurry!” I alerted Marissa.
Without exchanging words, Marissa spellcasted several movement enhancement spells on her, and then applied them to me. I hastily spellcasted a double Slow Fall synergy to prevent me to tumble down from my paranormal speed. Our pace greatly accelerated, the crimson and the new blue silhouette becoming bigger and bigger by the instant.
In a moment of clarity, I shrouded Marissa completely inside my soul, Concealment wouldn’t suffice. With Mystic’s Dominion, it was easy to influence her with my soul magic. This way, we couldn’t be heard or detected, only seen. And seeing how dim the environment was, I thought we were set.
Although we were still far from the hemomancer, I finally had enough range to discern who was talking to. I couldn’t discern the gender from it, but the soul was a tall and thin figure, something taken out of a children’s horror storybook. It was colored with a greyish blue, so while not pure, it was not corrupted like their talking partner was.
I wasn’t really sure of the description; the crimson soul was too unstable, and its noise was interfering with my Soul Sight.
A question popped up in my mind. “Have you mapped where we are? I had been too focused on tailing the souls.”
“No?” Marissa responded. Even though we were traveling at high speeds, I could still hear her fine thanks to her control of the air. “We entered from the east to the underground, and the spiral stairs did a full loop, so we must be going ba- Oh shit.”
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Marissa had confirmed my fears, we were close to where the students, the military, and the Offensive Coalition had gathered. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people stood right on top of us.
“I have a bad premonition,” I told her.
“Do we accelerate?” The aeromancer asked with nervousness.
“No, we are pretty close, and I would like to maintain ourselves camouflaged for the time being.”
A spiritually deranged blood mage standing below a congregation didn’t look good. A deranged hemomancer standing below people and meeting with someone was even way worse. This was something planned.
As a violet light began to overcome the Mage Lights on the tunnel, I raised my hand to tell Marissa to stop. We were right on top of them.
The circular and narrow tunnel had opened to a massive cylindrical chamber. Tens of meters high, the two people conversating at the bottom looked like ants. I should be paying attention, but my eyes were directed at the thing next to them.
“A leyline…” Marissa whispered to my side. Not for the sake of being stealthy, but out of sheer awe.
The two of them were talking next to a filled leyline, insane amounts of mana flowing across the tube that contained it. Calling it a tube might be the wrong word. Massive golden runes were laid on the ground, I was talking of meters in scale. And runes normally worked in centimeters.
This leyline was way smaller and less saturated with mana than the one we had seen at the Arcane Sanctum. But it still was one of the blood vessels of the world, and it was ripe with power.
One didn’t need to have a great knowledge of runic inscribing to know that those runes were containing the leyline in their path. An invisible barrier of Force mana kept the concentrated mana from obliterating the two individuals beside it.
The other person was a tall woman, and while her lips moved, I couldn’t hear her.
“Can you enhance the sound, Marissa?” I requested her.
“On it.” The next instant, Marissa had materialized the spell.
“…done every-thing you asked for!” Ikail was the one shouting. “This will b-break the dome, right?”
“Of course, of course.” The woman sweetly told him to appease him. “Once the capacitor is charged, the leyline will be unable to continue supplying power and the dome will shut itself down.”
“Perr-fect.” By now, Ikail’s soul was so unstable that it was impeding his speech. “Wee’ll be f-freee.”
I noticed Marissa trying to lounge on them and I stopped her. I was also affected by the woman’s ruthless words, but this wasn’t the time. “Why?” She asked devouring the madman with her eyes.
“Ikail is already strong on its own, maybe a high ten-star mage,” I told her. “But the woman is stronger. Her soul contains a lot of mana and is perfectly stable. I can affirm she isn’t a soul practitioner. She is just that good of a mage. A low eleven-star or maybe just a very knowledgeable ten-star.” I stopped to look at the artifact she handed to Ikail. “The point is this will be a very tough fight head-on. We need to wait for the right moment.”
“Now, if you excuse,” the tall woman said to Ikail, “I have other matters to attend to. Oh, and a reminder,” she looked back from the tunnel she had entered, “be fast to leave or you’ll be trapped on the radius of impact.”
It was horrifying how she could say such words in a calm manner.
“D-don’t worry. The endd isss n-near.” His soul had been irreparably damaged by now, even if he got assistance, he would suffer stuttering for life. How could someone have caused this much damage to themselves? What did he do?
With the blood mage’s words, the mysterious woman disappeared in an unlit passage, unlike the dozens of illuminated passages that connected towards the leyline. An illusion of some sort removed the archway she had crossed, now only looking like a common wall like every other.
“Yesss, we’ll be finally freee.” By this time the woman was already gone, he was talking to himself in a creepy way. “Fa-a-ather. M-mo-ther.”
As he inserted the artifact into the leyline, his arms started to burn from the overwhelming amount of mana flowing across. Ikail didn’t mind the pain, just taking away his burned arms from the leyline without making a single sound. That was probably the reason why the woman gave him the task, instead of doing it herself.
The hemomancer’s burns began to heal slowly, magenta blood pouring out onto the ground. Ikail didn’t give it much thought, just walking away from the leyline whilst muttering to himself.
“Now’s the time.” I whispered to Marissa.
Marissa and I dropped down from our high ground with a spellcast of Slow Fall of our own elements. Our falling speed was greatly reduced even after falling for half a minute and a ten-story high.
Marissa fell faster than I, not because her spell was weaker than mine, but because she forced it.
“Be careful,” I advised her as I touched the ground. “What if you hurt yourself?”
“This is not the time to worry about such little things, the blood mage is getting away!”
“That’s not our objective, Marissa,” I told her. “We must disarm the capacitor he put inside the leyline. It’s not going to shut down the leyline as the woman said. It will overload and explode, destroying the runes containing the leyline and provoking a chain reaction. There will be more explosions, and everyone will die!”
“We can’t let him get away!” Marissa spellcasted several air spells on her, not even bothering to hear what I just had said.
“Marissa!” I cried to her as she disappeared into the same tunnel as him. “Damn it!”
As I stood down on the leyline-containing facility, I knew I couldn’t waste time worrying about Marissa. Restoring the leyline was the top objective, and failing would trigger an event like the Wyrm’s Landing once more.
I looked at the object Ikail had thrown into the stream of mana. It was a ball of a weird dark metal with several runes inscribed into it. The blinding glow of the leyline didn’t allow me to identify them, but I knew what I had in front of me.
“It’s a damn mana battery. Its capacity’s enough to handle the influx of a leyline.” I didn’t have the tools nor the time to measure the absurdity of that artifact. A single second of the stream of the leyline was more than my yearly mana output. “How do I do this?”
There was too much mana to spellcast a Force spell and yank the object out of the stream, the interferences were too great to even cast. Even my Mystic’s Dominion began passively dispelling, only maintaining any coherence by the virtue of being a ten-star spell.
Should I mana-weave my way through the energy stream? Not the best idea, but I didn’t have a lot of time. The artifact had begun illuminating on its own, meaning it had filled a bit.
“Here goes nothing.” I used my mana-weaver abilities to open a hole in the concentrated flow of mana. “Aghh!” Pain instantly assaulted me as I did so, I dropped to the ground, stunned.
The quantities were far bigger than anything I had worked with. This wasn’t like dispelling a charged cast as the pyromancer had done so many years prior, or even the overloaded Tornado Adrian had used against me. Those quantities of mana were negligible in comparison.
“What the…” I touched my nose to feel the warm magenta liquid trimming down. “One millisecond and my mind is already overloaded.” I grabbed my head in pain, a puff of air resembling a laugh coming out my mouth “Mana-weaving isn’t the way.” I joked to not cry in pain, swiftly showering myself with healing spells.
I tried every alternative in my repertoire.
Firstly, I used mana tendrils. It was a fool’s errand as they instantly evaporated by the mana density, being overwhelmed by a far superior intensity. No matter if they were soul mana tendrils, such a singularity of mana was able to bend reality over, affecting even the spiritual plane.
Then I went with Astral Self, the nine-star version of Astral Projection. In the beginning, it resisted well in place. It was mostly immune to the arcane mana thanks to its metaphysical properties, but when I phase-shifted my clone into the physical realm, it evaporated before it was able to touch the orb.
Mana-weaving the battery itself? There were too many interferences to manipulate a specific volume of mana in the first place. It was difficult even to distinguish the capacitor floating inside the leyline.
Then I tried the last thing I could even think of. I spellcasted Mana Nullness. The upgraded version of Mana Void was able to absorb unbelievable amounts of mana, far more than both my mana pools. Yet as the deep purple construct materialized, it suddenly shone brightly, far fiercer than the sun or the leyline itself.
“Shi-“ My spell exploded, throwing me to the ground. My passive defensive barriers shattered off without showing resistance before an explosion of these magnitudes. It was a miracle I was unscathed after receiving headfirst the impact.
I could recall something like this happening back when I was a child. Back then I tried to overload Mana Vacuum, but that spell’s total capacity wasn’t even a tenth of the needed to cast Mystic’s Dominion. This overloaded Mana Nullness was comparable to eleven-star sorcery in terms of mana consumption.
As I lay down on the ground, five minutes had happened since the capacitor was introduced into the leyline. Five minutes where I would try something, and it would inevitably fail. I was exhausted, my thoughts became sluggish, my mind rambling as it was unable to concentrate, and the battery was around half-filled. Time was running out.
“Oh, do I really have to?” I looked upon the shine of magic incarnate.
There still remained one alternative, one I knew since the beginning, but I didn’t dare to try until now, one last method. It would cripple me at best and kill me at worst.
“This wouldn’t even cross my mind if I wasn’t a Superb, but, it’s the last resource and I’m out of options.” I talked to myself, trying to convince myself. For the first time in my life, I held my sigh, probably in my last opportunity to do so to fix my bad habit. “Here goes nothing.”
I stuck up my left arm inside the leyline. Nothing.
Then. Pain.
Too much energy, my mind and body faltered, and the only thing that kept me going was my unwavering soul. Before I could even blink, my tunic’s sleeve had already evaporated from the magical primal energies. Too potent for the minimally enchanted fabric to survive.
“Fuck, fuck, fuckfuckfuck.” Unlike my clothes, my arm held better but not by much as my Arcane affinity made me resistant to the element. The skin on my arm was being incinerated by the seconds, the pain unbearable. “Augh…” I wanted to accelerate my pace, but no matter what I did I couldn’t go faster.
It was like I was swimming on molten lead, no, it was trying to swim against the current on the River of the Damned. A sludge of vibrating and chaotic unadulterated power instead of the very essence of death.
I was certainly advancing, but every centimeter was a hard-fought one. The veins on my arm showed under the little skin I had. My vision was becoming more and more blurry. The intense energies of the leyline assaulted me, but thankfully they stayed in its container without pouring out of the barrier laid out by the golden inscriptions on the ground.
It was soon after that even my blood vessels began to tear up, blood pouring out from thin stretches and pores, only to be evaporated heartbeats after they left my body.
I wanted to puke. I wanted to sit down. I wanted to go to sleep. Forever.
Thankfully enough, the Force barrier holding the leyline somehow prevent the arcane damage I was constantly receiving at my left arm from being passed onto my body. That single fact was what kept me alive.
But I knew I had to do this. I couldn’t stop now. The consequences had already reached my whole body, if I retreated now, it would have been for nothing.
If escaping was even an option at this point.
Even when my arm corroded into nothingness, my soul held strong, guiding it toward the foreign object. The River of Damned wasn’t enough to make me falter, to destroy my soul as it did with the others. A minor leyline wouldn’t finish the job.
It would not.
By the time my fingertips reached the battery, more bone than flesh, I couldn’t almost see. I couldn’t discern if it was because of the pain, the lack of blood, or the fact that I was actually dying, but I could sense the capacitator was nearly filled to the top. With the last push, my hand latched onto the metal sphere, it was incredibly hot to the touch. I could sense that my hand was burning, but at some point, I could no longer feel the pain.
Then as I felt the phantom heat, a headache assaulted me.
Pain. Familiar. Agonizing.
This wasn’t the doing of the leyline. No. The loss of my flesh, the burning feeling of having a limb devoured by the very lifeblood of the planet wasn’t the type of pain I was experiencing. That could only be classified as physical pain, or even mental, as the fatigue started to kick in.
No. I was assaulted by such pain no amount of adrenaline could stop it.
Spiritual pain.
The headache got worse as I stood on the leyline, more and more fragments of my arm disappearing by the moment.
“Why… now?” I muttered to myself as I could feel the beckoning of death. The calling of the river. Yet as strength left my body, I noticed I wasn’t the target of the reaper’s scythe.
My mind became numb. Free of thought. Even when my body was free of the leyline’s influence, the multiple sources of pain became too overwhelming to deal with.
Yet I didn’t falter.
As I lost complete sense of my left arm, as my body resembled a corpse, and my mind probably died at some point, I stood there. My arm stretched out, grabbing an artifact of death.
And I pushed.
My body no longer responded; my mind no longer sent signals. Yet my soul still struggled.
My whole being enveloped my arm, pushing it outside of the world’s influence. My spirit healed the damage on my body, regenerating flesh and blood alike, only to be damaged again by the impossible energies I was fighting.
This wasn’t a daunting task I was trying to overcome. But the strength of the planet itself.
“Please…” My voice was coarse and dry, dead. Not the voice of a living being, but the silent screams of a ghost permeating the physical realm. “There… Out.” I only needed to yank the battery out of the leyline. I used every single shed of my power left to remove my arm from the stream of primordial mana, and my body collapsed on the ground by the knockback. “Ough…” I responded with a fallacy, as there was no longer a pain to be felt.
There it was, the colossal mana battery was in my hands, ninety-six-point-six percent full. Something back in my mind told me that number meant something. If I had taken more time, everything would have been obliterated.
My violet arm now had a shade of dark blue as it burned off. I was surprised I even had one, it had to be regenerated at some point, lest I could no longer feel it. My arm’s blood vessels glowed in a deep purple hue; I didn’t even care why. I couldn’t think straight. Everything was tumbling down.
My body was raised from the ground. Not like a person pushing against the gravitational attraction of the planet would do, but a puppet being jostled around by an inexperienced puppeteer.
A spark of thought hit me. Mind or soul, the inception of it didn’t matter. Only its contents.
“Marissa…” I mumbled as I still lay on the ground, unable to completely get up. My burnt arm against what I supposed was the cool stone. “I need, I need to… help her.” With great pain, I managed to stand up, making my way toward my friend.
I couldn’t notice the black orb trailing behind me.