The inner keep is a very fascinating formation to observe. Right now I am standing in front of it and taking it in at its full glory. It is a elemental separation barrier. All elemental separation barriers look like a chaotic swirl of mana. It is chaotic, but beautiful.

Such a type of barriers are meant to hold back a certain type of mana. In this case, it is meant to stop the passage of the vital mana of humans and also the blood mana of the vampires. I could try and pass the barrier but in the process the very mana that keeps me alive would be left behind. (I even tried to pass the barrier while transformed. A burnt hand is the only result.) The result is not going to be pleasant to observe.

Well, right now my job is to somehow make my way into this inner keep, preferably with whatever is inside the place not knowing that I exist. Before speaking about that, it would be better if I speak about the barrier first and why we have ended up in this position in the first place.

The barrier is a elemental separation barrier, that is at the moment spread across the walls of the inner keep of this fortress. The inner keep is the Homebase of the mayfires, the building in which they live.

It is their base, the largest building in this fortress. It is a miniature fort in its own right. I can sense the mana that is coursing through the fortress, powering the many formations that are guarding the place. Whatever is going on inside, these formations are being used at their full power. I would assume them to be defensive formations like the iron skin, trap formations and the barrier that is keeping us out of this place. Exclusion barriers consume a lot of mana.

It is still a mighty piece of work, explaining why the hexmountain considered them to be useful allies. We don't send agents for just anybody's defense.

Reaching the barrier to the inner keep is easy work, but we need the organisation to provide us a place in which I will be able to mess with the barrier. I am not sure if I will be able to break this formation without attracting attention. If they were to detect the mana fluctuations of barrier being messed with, it wouldn't take them very long to find us.

Naturally, this was before the bastard called as Matthew appeared. Now I cannot dare to even leave the formations that surpress the mana that I emit. Leaving might just be enough to have matthew detect me and that is something that I absolutely do not want.

Trevor thinks that he is one of the noble vampires, though he cannot explain why such a powerful figure would be here. As long as the man exists, my ace is completely useless. Transforming each time now is risking me ending up in their control.

If anything, it might just end up revealing my location to the enemy. Even now, with the sword safely in the hands of Trevor, I am not sure if the man is able to detect me or not. I have to assume that he cannot, but why should I take a risk.

It would be safer to assume that he can do so. While this thing has certain caused a problem for us, it has also given me a certain amount of freedom. If the enemy is able to detect me anyways, I do not need to be worried about leaving my presence to the enemy.

The organisation has even provided us with concealment formations, which we will be able to use to suppress the mana that we are emitting. This includes my blood mana, which I seriously think is the reason that we have ended up here in the first place. It is not a particularly good one, but as long as I am able to breach the barrier quick enough, it will be enough to buy us some time. I can already smell a stench of blood from the room we are presently hiding in. (It is some kind of a warehouse that the organisation has repurposed into a hiding place.)

Well, it is about time that I begin to speak about the breaching process. Well, this is not going to be any fancy work, about which I will be able to boast.

Well, the problem is that this barrier is going to be passively blocking the passage of the mana. It is more mana consuming to do this, but you don't need a person to actively maintain the formation.

This passivity of the barrier means that I either need to break the barrier or atleast create a hole in it or to temporarily encase our mana to protect our vital mana.

For the latter, I am not really a necromancer so the only thing that I can do is to break the formation. This is how they raise undead or atleast it is one of the step involved.

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For this I have three methods. First and the one that I am least likely to be able to do is the formation bomb. These are formations created from materials like sky bamboo, which will be able to output a massive amount of force in a small instance. Crafting them is an art that I have never really gotten the drift of. Anyways, I will not be getting the necessary materials for it here.

The second is more achievable, but is constrained by my mana capacity. That is the process of interfering with the formation. My mana strings can enter into the barrier and mess with the barriers shape. This is kind of like my iron skin formation, where certain parts are meant to define the shape of the barrier. Modifying them will be enough to create a small gap.

It is the stealthiest method of sneaking into the place, since nobody will be able to tell if the formation has been messed with unless they were to seriously study the thing. Nobody would be using such a passive barrier if they had a formation mage, so I think that I can get away with it.

The only problem is even my mana strings are made up of my vital mana, which is restricted. I can force my strings into the barrier, but I will have to keep using considerable amounts of my mana to do so. Five minutes is my limit. After that the barrier will cut into my string like a scissors.

The third and the stupidest method of doing this is the bruteforce method. That is to push all of my mana into a single location of the formation and create a hole in the barrier. It would be literally like using my mana to push away the mana of the barrier. (Which will be replenished in moments.)

I am more than confident that all of my mana pushed into the barrier in a single instant will be enough to create a hole to let a person pass through.

At the moment this seems to be the only method that I have at my disposal which I might be able to execute at the moment. I will have to do so four times, for each member of the team.

I guess I could go and enter the first and try to break the barrier from inside, but that would be too risky. I am the only person in the group that has any combat capability. The troop cannot fight a enemy while I am trying to modify a formation, that I might have never seen in my life.

So that is why we are waiting for me to get a bit fixed up. The fight with Matthew has taken its toll. Fighting the man physically was not a problem, but the way that he can mess with my blood mana is the issue.

Even now I can feel my mana bubbling up. As a formation mage, we have very fine control of our mana. Without it every single inscription of our will tend to have explosive results. Other than that there is quite a bit of internal damage in my body. It feels like I am walking about wearing a coat of thorns. This is especially true when I try to channel mana.

It will take a couple of days to manage that damage. So we won't be entering into the inner keep until then. We could try before that, but at the moment it just seems to be a bit to risky.

To explain this better I will have to explain how we ended up in this place in the first place. I honestly don't remember too much of it. I lost consciousness after fighting him.

I remember vague glimpses of Trevor picking me up, carrying me deep into the forest.

Much of what I have recorded now, I found out from Trevor. Our escape from the fallen ship was mostly due to matthews efforts. Trevor and the troop did not even encounter any enemy forces during our trip. We smoothly escaped into the forest, and we made it to the fort on our foots (well, I was being carried by andrew and Jacob.)

Trevor did not seem particularly surprised with what I had revealed about the motives of matthew. Still, the situation in the fort that was caused by our escape is why I do not dare to make any move now.

Our actions at the ship seem to be a tipping point for the blood heart gang. Right now, they are proactively looking for. They are just not very skilled at it and are very stupidly violent about it.

Right now they are causing so much chaos and violence that I am surprised that people have not gone fully violent. They seem to be readomly forcing themselves into various places, homes and shops to find any trace of the organisation.

It has been a pretty bloody affair too, based on what I have understood. Most people that refused such a sudden and forceful acts of entry have ended up dead. This bit of brutality was enough to finally cause the people of the city to act. They have been resisting their overlords.

Most do this by getting their knives bloody. Any lone blood heart gang member that gets drunk in the bar is more than likely to get his throat slit in the quiet of the night. It could be anybody in the bar doing this too. Most of these are so brutalised that it is clear that multiple were involved in the process.

This has caused all the blood heart members to gather up and brutalise the supposed murderer. Let's just say that they are certainly not merciful to their enemies. Their have just caused the folks to get angrier.

This is a brutal cycle that has worked to protect us temporarily. Right now, the blood heart gang is more busy trying to deal with the people rather than trying to find us. I am not sure for how long but this will happen for a bit at the very least.

Whatever happens, we have a plan for now. If the bastard could track us, we would be fighting him already. Atleast that is what I tell myself. I honestly have no idea what will happen.

It would be a waste of time of the ultimate degree to guess the thoughts of a vampire. They have survived to this age for a reason after all.