Chronicles of the True Wizard

Walking through the cave he had carved out for himself, Felix walked into the small room he considered his current workshop and began finally putting the finishing touches on the constructs he had been creating. All he had left to do was bind the souls he had already created and power them up with his own mana. The souls themselves were as simple as possible because they didn’t need to do anything complicated. The construct’s mana computers handled their own control so all the soul had to do, was bind them together.

Pushing mana into a small palm sized metal orb, the opening on its surface suddenly shot open, revealing an eye ball that darted back and forth. Had Felix not been the one to create it, he would have found it a little creepy and disgusting, as it was though, these eyeballs had literally been grown in his body.

The last step left, was to have mark open a portal to the construct’s internal anchor, connecting it to the overall system.

Felix had already given Mark’s soul the spark of life and bolstered it so it had some measure of mana control but not nearly enough to actually cast spells the way Felix did, at least nothing as complicated as a portal. The connections to these constructs were actually engraved into a series of small discs that were arranged within a simple enchantment that acted as a switchboard. All Mark had to do was channel mana into the respective slots with his new found, very basic, mana control and the connection was made. It also allowed Mark to close the portals if necessary from his end.

The way this was all set up, if the constructs were destroyed or captured, Felix really didn’t lose much. The constructs were powered from Mark’s mana through the portals so there were no batteries. All the materials used in the constructs were simple and cheap, the entire thing relatively easy to recreate now that he had the designs finalized. He couldn’t really mass produce them just yet but, he had managed to create 36 of them for his first batch. That allowed each one to handle a slice just 10 degrees wide from their starting point.

As each one was powered on and connected into Mark, Felix opened a portal to the coordinates they had chosen for that construct then tossed it through. Each one of them zipped off and began flying across the land before Felix closed the portal and turned to the next one.

In the meantime, Grim and Mark were monitoring the feedback to ensure everything was running smoothly in terms of them using Felix’s mana and then updating his map in return. Luckily, everything seemed to be working even better than Felix had expected. Not only was his mental map updated, but his System map and most importantly, his quest list seemed to be updating as well.

Tossing the last one through its respective portal, Felix dumped Nova unceremoniously on a mountain top then hurried to the first dungeon his constructs had found. Smacking his hand against the door, he smirked as he saw that he was the first one to have found this specific dungeon.

It’s like the universe, or System rewarding me for a job well done.

It only took him a few minutes to clear as it was a heavily combat focused dungeon and Zeraxes trick of requesting all the waves at once made it fast. All Felix had to do was blow absurd amounts of mana into ridiculous spells.

As soon as he stepped out of the completed dungeon, he opened a portal directly to the next dungeon his constructs had found.

Not only were the constructs mapping and finding quests for him, but the constructs were also measuring the coordinates at the dungeons themselves and periodically all over the map. He could open portals to the dungeons directly and also had a quickly filling grid of portal coordinates in his mental map so he could get just about anywhere in seconds. Were the coordinates to portal not some undecipherable, arcane gibberish, this wouldn’t have even been necessary but alas, even Mark couldn’t find any kind of pattern to them.

I feel like if there isn’t a pattern… that must mean these coordinates aren’t actually some universal law but rather a System invention… Or maybe I just don’t have the prerequisite knowledge to understand them yet.

With his new constructs, he had completely removed the time it took for him to search for quests and dungeons. He became a machine, portalling to and crushing dungeons at a ridiculous pace.

Over the course of just two days, only two of Felix’s constructs were destroyed. Both of them had been destroyed by some wandering participant and each one, Felix hunted down as Arthur and killed. He didn’t recover anything as the constructs were destroyed but it helped him build up Arthur’s reputation and made him feel a little better.

The speed with which Felix was crushing dungeons actually made him not want to head back for Group Combat, especially considering how hard it was for him to move up the final rung to the first class. With Melody’s advice though, he had hope.

Though, he wasn’t used to being a support caster and was admittedly terrible at it, even just using spells in the way Melody had instructed him, he saw the Adepts take notice. They weren’t ready to move him into the first class just yet but he was confident he was close.

Once the class was over with, Felix left as fast as he could not only because he was excited to get back, but also because there were rumors about his exploits on Ascension day and the other students were even more annoying than usual.

Despite that, Felix returned just two days later for Soul Manipulation. After what had happened with the flames, Felix found a renewed appreciation for increasing his soul’s defenses. He was more capable than most with manipulating and compressing his soul but he had grown complacent because of his arrogance. He had assumed nothing could hurt him and had been injured because of it. Had Melody not been there and accidentally freed him, were it an actual combat situation, he would have been royally screwed.

Despite his new found appreciation, he didn’t pay much attention to the class itself but he would make sure to rewatch it later. In the meantime, he had other, related, matters to attend to.

Walking through his Mind City and Soul Garden, even though Felix’s soul had mostly realigned itself after encountering the flames, his soul constructs had not recovered so quickly. A few of them had been driven completely insane and Felix was forced to essentially recreate them completely. Many of the others were hurt, their soul damage represented as various physical wounds within his mind.

Some appeared to have lost limbs, others had nasty burn scars across large chunks of their body. Despite that, Felix saw the ones that had survived diligently working as if nothing had really happened.

Though much of it had been repaired now, many of the buildings and much of the environment looked like it had been burned and charred as well. Like the city had undergone a siege it had been sorely unequipped to handle.

It just seems… wrong.

He and Grim, despite not being even close to each-other in his mind, spoke telepathically, How so?

Something as traumatic as this, with at least two complete deaths… they should be affected. Mourning and sad.

Why?

At first… I was just going to say that’s what I’m used to but now… I think if they were, it would help them grow. Maybe these kinds of events are necessary for the growth of a people.

Maybe not necessary but I know what you mean.

Felix nodded once, I think it’s time I finally brought them all to life.

Repairing the buildings took a fraction of a second. Carefully reassembling all the souls and imbuing them with the spark of life, took the rest of the class. Once he had though, he happily observed as the constructs began to gradually experience increasing sorrow and misery as they began to mourn. He felt a little weird about his own sense of satisfaction around them feeling awful but he didn’t think too much about it.

Once the class was over, he headed back into the world event and began rushing through the various quests his constructs had found. Things quickly slowed as there weren’t an infinite number of quests for him to complete and his constructs were forced to scan wider and wider areas the more they spread apart.

In the meantime, Felix created more constructs and worked on his own soul. Rather, he didn’t touch anything to do with his own soul just yet but he began reading through the compendium he had received himself. Immediately he was nearly overwhelmed by the very first soul diagram.

The structure was completely ridiculous and used four dimensions to create a series of interleaved three dimensional fractals that moved between themselves, constantly rotating and repositioning themselves. Everything from the individual layers, their structure, the movements and the math behind their speed and morphing was written out and explained.

Felix had no intention of copying just about any of it but it filled him with new ideas. The concepts also overlapped enough with very advanced spell formation that Felix had some starting point for understanding the content.

Over the course of just a few days, the creation of his eye constructs became easy enough that he read mentally while his hands simultaneously enchanted metal spheres. He even ended up minorly downgrading his designs to make them drastically easier to create because what really mattered to him was map coverage and therefore, quantity, not individual functionality and quality.

He also briefly took a break to catch up on some course material which proved far more interesting than he had anticipated. In the lectures for Mana Structures, Spell Formations as well as the ones for Constructs and Elementals and Animancy, which he still watched for the content despite not being in the classes anymore, the respective exams were explained.

For Mana Structures, as he had been somewhat expecting, the exam was simply presenting a ritual to the professor that sent an audible message to the opposite end of the planet. In essence it was simple and were he not being graded on efficiency, he would simple open a portal and talk through it. That was used as an example though and would certainly result in a terrible grade. Opening an entire portal to move a bit of energy was incredibly wasteful, even if that amount of waste wouldn’t entirely matter to Felix at the moment.

In Spell Formations, he was similarly tasked with simply creating a spell that would efficiently move a small block in a predefined, complex pattern. The pattern itself wasn’t very long at all but that just made the spell deceptively complicated. A sequence of events in a spell generally became rather complicated because certain events would have to be delayed or scheduled in some way. On top of that, the previous function, channels and nodes had to either cleansed or accounted for otherwise the pattern would overshoot itself, not to mention plain old inertia.

There were various techniques for doing so but spell formations very quickly became very bloated if there were more than just a few steps. Due to that fact-and a few others-rituals, wards and enchantments were generally preferred for complicated sequences. With the way spells worked by comparison, and considering they were being graded on efficiency, the more elegant and less bloated the spell, the better their grade would be.

He was actually particularly excited for that exam because it gave him a great excuse to work on a new idea he had been playing around with for a little while now. Not that he needed an excuse to test things, it just gave him some more direction and something to compare against and work towards.

The exams for Constructs and Elementals as well as Animancy weren’t entirely relevant to Felix but he found them somewhat interesting nonetheless. For Construct and Elementals, the other students would have to create a construct that could organize a series of colored blocks, like a child. Most of the work seemed to be in the computer but that was only a small part of things. The constructs would also have to be able to handle blocks dexterously and identify them by color. Felix would have been able to ace the exam now but even just creating a construct that could see, he had needed a dungeon reward to accomplish the way he wanted.

As for Animancy, it was all about constructing and binding a soul to a construct. That one would have been trivial for Felix and was much less interesting.

He didn’t dedicate any more than passing thoughts to any of his exams though for the next few dekads where he only really left the event for combat classes. In Group Combat, it took him another three classes until he was moved up into the top class in large part because so many people were missing from the classes. The Adepts told him outright that they were taking more time with things when the classes were smaller but that they wanted to move him up. They wanted to be certain and with so few students, there were less students to compare against.

Admittedly, it took Felix at least three classes anyways to become even somewhat decent as a support caster as it was so unnatural for him to even consider other people.

As for Solo Combat, Felix skipped the class-as most people were doing at this point-but instead of running around in the event, he headed to the combat simulation room. The same room he had fought the Ashound in for his exam.

He started with Ashounds and it took him a full 30 hour day for four dekads in the room to finally beat it. He had already come up with spells that countered it but he didn’t understand enough for them to be completely effective.

As he fought, he learned that the Ashounds Agility and overall speed increased as its temperature increased, not just as time went on. Its temperature increased as it was hurt and as it expended energy. On top of this, the more ash that was created, either from splitting off of its body or from burning anything else, could become a whole new Ashound, though with noticeably lower stats initially. As more Ashounds appeared though, the heat in the surrounding area compounded making them all stronger.

Felix had looked up some research in the various libraries he had access to and found that Ashounds were notoriously underestimated because of their unique abilities. Apparently it was a common trait with other pre-System era creatures that were still walking around. They often had unique and unexpected abilities that made them stronger than System born creatures and therefore, they were generally considered even stronger than their level suggested.

The biggest issue for Felix in the fights, was that he couldn’t really cast cold spells efficiently. He was stuck with low complexity spells and cold was inherently inefficient. Most casters got around this by using ridiculously complex spells that drained the heat from the environment and turned it back into mana. Felix had tried desperately to find a way to do so himself but just couldn’t cast multi-hundred level spells and wasn’t willing to waste much time on it.

Instead, he settled on beating the Ashound before it could heat up or split at all. The first time he managed to kill it, he had ended the fight in a few milliseconds. He knew that was largely luck though as it took him the entirety of his third day just to repeat the feat once. By the middle of the fourth day though, he managed to become semi consistent and by the end, he won 80% of the time.

Having finally beat it and being able to do so somewhat consistently was rewarding but not nearly as rewarding for Felix as the experience he had gained. Battle experience was Felix’s biggest weakness, he knew that.

With each day he spent relentlessly fighting the Ashound though, he found himself getting more lethal and most importantly, faster in real combat.

Having any experience at all meant he made better decisions, faster. He knew what mistakes to avoid and in some situations, the correct choice to make. As his decisions were faster, he was able to quickly out maneuver his opponents more efficiently.

It very quickly became obvious to him that the constructs he fought throughout the dungeons were equally as lacking as he had been. It just wasn’t really possible to imbue battle experience into constructs. Battle experience was too unique in that it required the soul and mind to be in perfect sync on past experiences. Otherwise, you were subject to making bad decisions through faulty logic or poor instincts and kill yourself.

As for Nova, given her consistency, Felix knew she was somehow aware of the quest system but considering how her points were funneled, didn’t have an inventory of her own. He assumed it was because she broke everything she consumed down to or possibly beyond the atomic level but for whatever reason, he got her points and she didn’t seem to need any. It was a ridiculously favorable exchange and Felix was convinced it was intentional but didn’t dare voice that opinion.

At the start of the fourth dekad since Ascension Day, Felix headed out to complete one last dungeon his constructs had found before heading back for supplies and Group Combat.

Felix rushed through the dungeon that was split into rooms, just like the very first one he had completed in the event. Each room he entered, he immediately summoned all the waves at once.

Starting with a spell he had created specifically for fighting the Ashound many, many times, Felix released a whirlwind of nearly invisible blades into the mass of constructs before him.

They sliced cleanly through any weak sections and left thin but deep gashes on the more armored areas. Felix knew that the damage was worse than it appeared though because a construct’s insides were often just as vulnerable as a biological creature’s.

Once their armor had openings within them, Felix was free to drench the room in what was effectively liquid flame. Seeping through the holes he had slashed in the construct’s armor, they were dead before they even had a chance to fight back.

Most of the rooms were similar. Some posed more of a challenge and Felix was forced to activate Reaper’s Movement to dodge. Luckily he didn’t need it for more than an instant as he still couldn’t really activate it on command. He could however, consistently activate the skills for a moment a few times a minute. It wasn’t much but it made a huge difference in combat where a single burst of ridiculous speed or strength could completely win the fight for him.

He was most happy with the blade spell though as that had been the most complex spell he had ever created. Technically he had stolen from dozens of existing spells and consulted Withrel to piece everything together but it was well worth it.

Not only did the Force Blades have to remain perfectly stable so that they remained sharp as the blades inevitably degraded but they also needed to have sufficient Force behind them to actually cut through anything. On top of that, he had an entire second section within the spell that pulled outwards around the blades and moved through the air.

He had finally managed to create a version that required less than 40 focus by employing liberal use of overlapping fractal based channels to remove the requirement for anything more than a single node. All the node had to do was attune the mana to Force, after that the channels did all the actual work. The spell itself looked incredibly complex but simply knowing the fractals that went into its creation and having created the spell himself made him intimately familiar with it. In turn, it was much easier to visualize and actually only cost him about 32 spell levels of focus.

Alongside Mark’s ever increasing capacity, his focus was also slowly increasing as his soul naturally compressed his mind. At first the effect was worrying but eventually he realized it was completely natural and actually a by product of him ignoring his mental computer for too long. His body and soul had actually surpassed the computer and so they were pushing it along to keep up.

He didn’t worry about it too much and was just happy it wasn’t actively harming him as his stats had when they fell behind. In fact, he was actually pretty excited by what was happening because it meant that the mana computer had become an actual part of his body. He had no doubt that that was in large part a product of The System’s hand in his most recent evolution. Still, it was a big step.

Felix completely obliterated the sorry excuse for a final boss in the dungeon and walked over to collect the System Core in the room, an odd one at that. The core itself seemed to have been created with a curse that Felix could only describe as Lust. It didn’t affect the fight itself much, the fact that his enemy was a construct making sure of that. It did throw him off though and his biological brain was constantly filled with hormones he was forced to manually suppress lest they completely distract him.

It was only a minor hindrance though.

As soon as Felix stowed the core, doing so quickly to get rid of the annoying effects, he was presented with a screen he hadn’t opened himself. Normally The System notified him of a screen and let him open it when he wanted. Rarely had it ever forced a screen upon him but that thought was quickly pushed aside as he read through the message.

Quest: The Grand Design

Collect all 256 of the Imitation System Cores. [Complete] (83/256)

Assemble all 256 Imitation System Cores at the specified location. [0/256]

Note: All Imitation System Cores must remain within the event at all times going forwards.

Huh. 83 out of 256 is not bad. Especially considering how many participants there are. Guess I know what I’m doing next.

He had intended on buying the cores from the Event Trove as well but unfortunately, they were bought out within a few hours of The Event Trove being announced. There was no doubt in his mind that the factions had pooled their points to buy them out and he had no hope of beating an entire faction in collecting points but it was still disappointing. That left him with just the cores he found in dungeons which, he was rather satisfied with even if he did have survey constructs now constantly mapping the event.

The other rewards from the dungeon were much less exciting and nothing he really cared about. The facility seemed to have been a plant research facility and the rewards he got were botanist’s notes. Nice to have for identifying plants but nothing he was particularly excited about.

Popping out of the dungeon, Felix was ready to head back to the real world for supplies but first, he wanted to see if the Rakyt needed anything. He hadn’t done anything for them in a while and they offered easy points. The points didn’t make a ton of difference at the moment though, honestly he knew he was really doing it to gain favor. Nova had been destroying him at collecting points and because of her, he had far more points than he knew what to do with.

He was really just hoping to get more access to their knowledge, the spells and whatever enchantments went into the massive buildings they had built around them.

Felix didn’t get to head there immediately though as there was a rather dapper looking gentleman standing just outside the dungeon, waiting for him.

[C - Legendary] Talrain (Lvl 1487)

The gentleman wore something akin to a suit although admittedly, it wasn’t really that close to one at all. The straight lines and sharp angles along with the overall fit however, made it so that Felix couldn’t quite get the correlation out of his mind. Talrain’s face looked human in every way except for the long curled ram’s horns sprouting from atop his head and his purplish skin.

With a warm and welcoming smile that starkly contrasted the sheer contempt and derision Felix felt through his soul, Talrain walked right up to Felix and offered him a hand, “Felix. I’ve been looking for you.”

Felix ignored the hand but stood his ground in an attempt to not give too much away, “Why?”

“Ah well, you’ve been spending a lot of time with my sister. I just thought it prudent for us to… acquaint ourselves.”

Felix half nodded in recognition, “You’re one of Melody’s brothers.”

“That I am. I will say, I can’t help but be impressed with how you handled Tanryel. I wasn’t fortuitous enough to see the spectacle myself but I did catch sight of his whimpering to our father and well my new friend, that was a memory I will cherish for a long time.”

Felix just nodded, “Was that all?”

“Was that all? Of course not. We have so much to discuss. You haven’t joined an alliance yet have you?”

Felix resisted the urge to sigh and fought the urge to outright ignore Talrain on account of the fact that there was a slight chance he offered useful information, “Nope.”

“Have you taken the grand tour of both the big ones? Seen what they have to offer you?”

Felix shrugged, “Zeraxes showed me around the Archon alliance… fort? Compound.”

“What about Edras? You aren’t even the least bit curious?”

Felix sighed, “Not really.”

“What if they have unique materials, equipment, spells on offer? Wouldn’t an alliance be the best choice to protect that which you’ve found in here?”

Frowning, Felix took a step back and to the side to try and take his leave, “Not… interested.”

Talrain pivoted forwards ending up even closer to Felix than he had been before, “Alright well, while I don’t necessarily agree, I can’t make the right decisions for you. I must ask, why do you spend so much time with my sister?”

Felix shrugged, “It’s not really by choice.”

“Surely you could avoid her if you truly desired to do so.”

“Maybe. She is useful… from time to time.” Felix scratched at his chin.

Talrain scoffed, “That’s all it is then?”

“Yup.”

Talrain nodded slowly then smiled, “Are you certain you do not wish for me to introduce you to the other alliance?”

“I’m not interested right now and have many other things I’d like to get done. So no.”

“Fine fine.”

Peering over Talrain’s shoulder, Felix caught sight of something completely unnatural. Just shy of the horizon, there was a volcano in the process of erupting. It had been on the brink for some time now and was quite a spectacle with billowing clouds of ash being spewed into the air above. It was easily far enough that Felix wasn’t worried in the slightest and only really registered it as a passing curiosity.

Glancing at it again though, something changed. The actual eruption itself had started with magma spewing out of the peak but that was all it did. It didn’t get anywhere. It was simply, stopped.

Above it, the cloud of ash was growing dramatically while simultaneously, a series of clouds were rolling in from every direction forming one of the biggest storms Felix had ever seen. The clouds though were also moving towards the peak from every direction at a completely unnatural speed for whatever reason.

Seeing Felix staring, Talrain glanced over his shoulder and nodded knowingly, “Some of us just don’t have quite their good fortune, now do we?”

Felix’s brow furrowed, “What do you mean?”

“Romar and Zeraxes over there. Each of them have been feeding off the oddly high amount of magma making its way to the surface and the unnatural storms respectively.”

Felix shook his head, “Wait… Romar is eating the magma?”

Talrain nodded, “Keep watching.”

The volcano itself was already unnatural as a by product of the stronger materials it was made of. Instead of the eruption being slow and taking forever, it was fast. The build up had lasted for almost a dekad, Felix having seen it in the distance quite a few times. Like a corked bottle though, it never quite gave way until now and because of Romar’s intervention, it was completely anticlimactic.

The storm brewing above the volcano and-now that Felix was thinking back and paying attention to them-many of the storms in this event were quite sudden. They didn’t brew and build up like he expected a storm to but instead, it was like the clouds all found each-other and agreed to get things over with as quickly as possible.

That’s exactly what was happening above the volcano, a sudden storm just appeared except this time, it was bigger than any storm Felix remembered. The dark grey clouds all floated in and merged with the billowing ash and, after a few minutes of watching, seemed to reach their crescendo.

Even from the ridiculous distance Felix was standing, he was pretty sure he could smell the static building within the storm. He could definitely feel the mana, not that lightning was fueled from mana but any massive energy expenditure affected the mana in some way.

This time, it was anything but anticlimactic.

The brewing storm built up and where Felix expected a series of lightning strikes over the course of a few hours to drain them along with heavy rain, instead the entire mass of water vapor and ash exploded in blinding white light. Arcs of electricity webbed and arced their way through the mass all converging on a single point right in the middle of the storm.

It lasted for all of a second and then it was gone. The clouds returning to their dark grey, darkened further by the suffused ash spread throughout them.

Talrain shivered visibly, clearly a purposeful action rather than a reaction, “Frightening, are they not? If I were you I would definitely wish to at least find out what both alliances would do for me. After all, how are any of us supposed to fight them?”

Felix sighed, “No thanks. You got anything else or can I go?”

Talrain bowed slightly, “But of course, my apologies for keeping you.”

Felix resisted the urge to sigh and roll his eyes then flew off into the distance. Halfway through his flight, his eardrums literally exploded from the thunder that followed from the distant Lightning. He had almost forgotten about it given it had been a few minutes since seeing the Lightning.

Once he was a safe distance from the dungeon, he opened a portal to his vault and quickly popped through.

Over the past few dekads, his vault had grown dramatically to the point where it was less of a vault and more of a small compound in its own right. He had various sections dedicated to storage with shelves lining the walls along with others that he simply dumped things into when he cared less about the items.

Walking through the storage hall, Felix walked past a large open training room that Zero had been using for the last little while. Felix had brought in stone pillars for him to practice against and Zero seemed to be getting better but they were convinced there was more they needed to learn before heading out into the event. Though it had been a while, Felix wasn’t sure if he wanted Zero participating in the event at all considering his lack of a true class, race, level, profession and skills.

Beyond that were Felix’s various workshops. He had started with one room but eventually, when he wanted to work on a different project, instead of cleaning things he simply dug out a new room. Heading out for supply runs or having Nova produce supplies for him, he was too lazy-or rather busy-to organize things. For convenience sake, interleaved between the various workshops were storage rooms filled with rough materials that he planned on using in the future.

Heading into his most recent workshop, Felix picked up a few things as reference points for the smiths he liked in Telviras. His plans for the moment were to head back to the real world for a little while after heading to the Rakyt city to see if they needed anything.

Opening a portal a kilometer outside of the city, Felix stepped through and immediately, his jaw dropped. The city was still there before him but it was engaged in a full blown war. Completely surrounding the city was a massive hoard of what looked like flesh golems and stitched together chimeras, necromantic minions with little thought or effort put into them. Behind the hoard of garbage were various demon participants currently just standing and watching. The army wasn’t all located in one specific group though, instead they completely surrounded the city evenly.

The hoard itself was almost like a solid mass of hideous creatures piling on top of each-other with no regard for one another. The only thing on their mind was to ravage the Rakyt city before them.

Behind them, the demons formed almost a perfect ring around the city. They seemed to generally be occupied with something but Felix just assumed their shape was the result of the city itself being circular and he figured they were likely preparing spells or something.

None of that was what had surprised Felix, in fact he was kind of expecting this to happen at some point.

What made his jaw drop, was the sheer amount of mana being harnessed and channeled, mostly by the city. The demon hoard seemed to prefer fighting with bodies and flesh constructs more than spells. The city though, waged war in a way Felix would have expected from a city of Wizards.

He had seen much of their defenses as he had approached the city, or at least how it was all set up. Seeing everything in action though was awesome, at least, for Felix. With his impressive Mana Senses and Reaper’s Sense encoding all of that into colors, the display was like nothing he had ever seen before.

The pyramids had transformed into spell cannons and the spires into solid pylons that formed a mesh of overlapping shields. The statues around the city raised their staves which all cast beams of fiery death from their tips. The Rakyt themselves were entirely within the city as far as Felix could tell. He didn’t see a single one out on the battlefield actually fighting anyone.

Everything he saw from the city defied his comprehension of how spells worked. The beams of fiery death the statues were releasing weren’t just the plain streams he was used to. The streams were complex spells in and of themselves with lines and channels weaved throughout them in three dimensions and constantly shifting.

They weren’t just aesthetic either.

The attacks that were let through the mesh ward protecting the city to hit the opposing army had ridiculous effects. Some of them chained between enemies, others caused them to explode violently.

Sweet. If I help defend the city, as a reward, I bet I could get access to all that knowledge they have from world events.

With that plan in mind, Felix made sure his cloak’s meager mana buffer was full then erected a Force Barrier around himself and flew off towards the demon hoard.

The fodder in the front was already starting to break through the city’s shields but Felix had a different target in mind. Ignoring the hoard, Felix flew over towards the outskirts of the army, towards the demons.

They quickly noticed him and about a third of the demons forming the ring around the outside near him split off to defend their brethren. Dropping low to the ground, Felix knocked a demon jumping towards him aside then released a explosion of blades into the biggest grouping of them he could see.

He didn’t kill anyone outright but he definitely drew blood.

Two of the demons in large sets of blackened plate armor that had braced themselves better than the rest charged forwards. One of them reached forwards to grapple Felix while the other swung forwards, releasing a torrent of dark purple tendrils from their savage looking cleaver.

With an instinct cast Force Push, Felix knocked himself aside and right into another demon who wasn’t ready for his sudden move. The torrent of dark purple tendrils didn’t seem to affect the other demons at all when they passed through his previous position and struck them but Felix wasn’t really expecting them to. As soon as he collided with the demon behind him, he released a massive explosion of flame around himself that completely incinerated all the demons within a few dozen meters of him. It had cost him a fifth of his mana pool but it was well worth it.

The demon he had collided with was lucky as being so close to Felix, it was in the safe area of the spell. A moment later though, Felix blew his head off with a Force spell that cost him another million mana.

Felix had been intercepted and didn’t actually reach the ring but now that he had eliminated a dozen demons, the rest of the guards nearby grouped up and took him much more seriously. Curiously, Felix had expected all of the demons to break off of the ring to deal with him. After all, if they were just launching siege spells at the city, they were better off dealing with him and protecting themselves.

Instead, a small number of demons stayed behind forming a perfect ring around the city, evenly spaced down to the centimeter from each-other.

Ah shit.

Quickly glancing around, he realized he was pretty sure he knew what was happening. The rest of the ring had been obscured by the guards that weren’t in a perfect circle. Looking around now though, and knowing what to look for, Felix spotted demons crouched down with their arms buried in the sand down to their elbows. Dozens of these demons formed a perfect ring around the city, evenly spaced and all in identical poses.

So they aren’t just siege casters.

Having an idea of what was happening and being able to stop it were two very different things. Curiously, Felix found he didn’t really feel any mana coming from whatever they were doing though, he wasn’t very close to them. He just expected massive amounts of mana for a ritual of that size but that just wasn’t the case it seemed.

Returning his focus to the demons racing towards him, Felix saw a mass of the disgusting creatures in the frontline break off and join the demon guards that had surrounded him. With hundreds of demons surrounding him and all of them on guard and aware of his abilities, Felix had no intention of even trying to fight them. Instead, he summoned the slicer on his wrist and floored it right through them.

The sleek black slicer knocked the demons aside and Felix shot far past them and started circling the city. He didn’t actually spot anyone he knew which was unfortunate as he was hoping Peace and the followers of Amatara were still in and around the city.

As strong as Felix was, he knew he didn’t really stand much of a chance fighting the army by himself. If he had hundreds of times more mana and some way to isolate the participants, he thought he might have stood a chance but, not at the moment.

Knowing this, he took a look at the city to see how they were faring so he could strategize his own position and saw the demons pouring into the city through the barrier the Rakyt had erected. It wasn’t just one hole either, despite the shields forming the mesh being completely independent of each-other, they all seemed to have a similar durability because there were no less than 3 holes Felix could see. On top of that, there were streams of demons pouring in from other directions he didn’t have sight of.

Given he was trying to ingratiate himself with the Rakyt, he shot himself towards the barrier and prepared a portal spell from memory. His ability to both visualize 20th level spells along with channeling over a million mana had improved massively and instead of taking minutes, he cast a portal into the city in just over 5 seconds.

Normally, he was even faster but his mana control had to fight the portal anchors within the city so he almost smacked the barrier as he flew. Just before colliding with it, he desummoned Erevos and his remaining momentum tossed him through the portal and into the city.

The portal moved him just a hundred meters forwards and so he caught himself in the air and flew off towards the largest group of Rakyt he could see. To prove he was on their side so they didn’t attack him, he began launching spells into the demons hoard pressing themselves through the street. A few Rakyt turned to him but they quickly got the message and turned back to the hoard before them.

Felix didn’t land but hovered above them and launched spells as fast as he could, even pulling Grim out of his Soul Space just to speed up his casting.

The hoard wasn’t particularly tough but they did have demons amongst them that cast shields. No, the problem was how many of them there were. Down the street Felix was focused on, the creatures created from rotting and reused flesh no doubt animated through necromancy clawed and climbed over each-other forming a complete wall easily 20 meters high.

For Felix who could fly-at will with his matter senses now too, albeit slowly-the wall wasn’t nearly as oppressive as it was for the landlocked Rakyt.

Being in the air, Felix was the first to spot demons pouring in from another street on the other side and immediately started knocking them off the street into the water to either side. The street was almost a hundred meters wide though so he could only really knock off the ones on the very edge.

Running down the middle, Felix spotted a pair of demons riding massive headless lizard creatures wearing matching armor that Felix was hesitant to call plate armor. It wasn’t fully enclosed like he expected plate armor to be and instead, it seemed to be made up of multiple separate pieces. They each wore a rough looking breast-plate along with large curved plates strapped to their upper arms. Each was held on with leather straps and didn’t seem to be a part of the same set at all.

The rest of their bodies were similarly covered in disparate metal plates that all together, made them look like they had salvaged their armor from a battlefield of corpses.

[C - ?] Mecada (Lvl 1428)

[C - ?] Berrdoth (Lvl 1401)

They were at least a kilometer away from the mass of Rakyt he had been helping but they were moving quickly and Felix’s instincts screamed to him that they were strong.

He quickly launched himself forwards to cut them off and buy the Rakyt a bit more time.

Seeing him approach, the two demons spread themselves out across the road to flank him from both sides. As they approached the sides of the road, Felix released two curved Force blasts to try and knock them off. He didn’t manage to push either of them more than a meter though as both Lizard mounts dug their claws into the street and tore up the road beneath them.

Felix didn’t bother with long ranged attacks that gave them plenty of time to dodge and instead forced his way into their range. It was a tradeoff he was more than prepared to make.

Berrdoth was the first to attack, a massive rusty looking chain with each link bigger than Felix’s head appeared coiled behind him. All along the chain-almost like charms on a bracelet-were rusted and damaged blades that matched their armor in looking like it had been salvaged.

The mounted demon slammed his arm forwards, with so much force, the mount beneath him smacked into the ground. The chain followed like a whip as Felix dove to the side but it was faster than he had expected. Halfway through the air, the chain bent towards him and sped up, almost like it wanted to shred him.

He managed to avoid the chain itself but the dangling blades all stretched out to the side towards him and a few of them tore right through his cloak. The enchantment he had wasn’t useless but it clearly wasn’t enough. It definitely slowed the blades down but, that didn’t amount to much if they still managed to rip through and cut a few centimeters into his arm and side.

Felix immediately felt the wounds fester with various venoms, bacteria, rust and diseases but he wasn’t worried. Fighting them off would tax his system but only by a negligible amount. Unfortunately, he still wasn’t quite at the point where he could offset the cost of fighting them by feeding on them himself just yet.

Berrdoth slammed his arm backwards, ripping the chain off the ground and trying to lick Felix once more.

Felix had been expecting something like this though and pushed the blades out of range with a blast of Force. Just as he did, Mecada raced towards him and swung low with his long, curved blade.

Felix had seen the blade in Mecada’s hand when he approached. It was an odd combination between a scimitar and a longsword. Too thick to be a katana with a different curve profile that hadn’t really make sense to Felix before now.

Using an instinct cast to dodge, aiming to overshoot the blade this time, Felix realized why the blade’s curve was so odd to him.

As Mecada swung the blade low, the blade split down the middle to reveal a sharp mess of teeth that were too big to have been hiding within the blade. Disgusting rusty brown colored drool was flung outwards from the maw before it shut itself again at the end of the swing. The blade had obviously been carved out of the jaw of some creature and had retained some of its savagery.

Two weapons with bound souls, races I can’t identify and my instincts tell me they’re strong… I’d been looking for a good fight in here.

Leaping off the ground, Felix followed Mecada and swung his arm to the side, almost like he wielded an invisible sword. A moment later, a deep cut emerged on the back of the lizard mount’s legs causing it to buckle.

Using a Phantom Step to redirect himself, Felix shot himself to the side, avoiding Berrdoth’s chains. Costing him a quarter million mana, Felix released a stream of liquid flame towards Berrdoth. The flame was fast enough, and Felix was close enough, that Berrdoth had to kick off his mount and dive to the side to avoid it. His actions saved himself but doomed his mount which physically melted as it was kicked directly into the flames and drenched.

Berrdoth rolled back to his feet and swung around again, his chain sweeping across the ground. Felix didn’t even try to jump over it as he knew it would redirect itself into him so instead he released a burst of Force into the middle of the blade so it would fold around and swing back into Berrdoth.

As soon as he did, he was forced to shove himself backwards with an instinct cast as Mecada had also dismounted and swung down into Felix. Activating Reaper’s Movement, Felix managed to save his arm but it also meant he couldn’t use the skill for at least another 10 seconds and no more than twice in the next few minutes. Considering how fast these fights were, 10 seconds was far too long and a few minutes was effectively an eternity. If this fight really went on that long, Felix was at risk of running out of mana.

Missing Felix’s arm, Mecada’s sword slammed down into the ground and opened it’s maw, tearing into the sandstone streets and ripping a chunk free. Pivoting forwards, Mecada rushed towards Felix and swung the sword around, causing it to spit the massive chunk of road towards him.

Felix slightly redirected the stone into Berrdoth’s chain behind him with an instinct cast then released a sphere of blades into Mecada.

The sphere was a cross between a storm spell and a Force orb except instead of trying to contain Mecada, it just tried to follow him around. It was one of the most complicated combat spells Felix could cast without Grim and preparation but it was definitely a worthy distraction.

With Mecada temporarily occupied, Felix kicked off a Phantom Step to get as far into Berrdoth’s range as he could.

As his chain inevitably swung back around, Felix let it approach then released two spells simultaneously. The first was a Force Wall to try and stop the chain from hitting him, or at least slow it. The second was a massive burst of Lightning that was largely undirected.

The chain itself was slowed to a stop half a meter from Felix’s body but the blades ripped right through the Force Wall and hungrily drove themselves into Felix’s side. They were completely unaffected by the Lightning but Berrdoth holding the end of the chain was the real target anyways.

Pushing the chain back with an instinct cast, Felix glanced over at Berrdoth and saw a vicious black line running all the way down his right arm, forking around his torso and running into the ground. Smoke trailed off the wound and he collapsed to one knee but Felix didn’t have time to follow up and finish the job.

Without even looking, Felix could feel the bloodlust pouring outwards from Mecada’s blade behind him and he quickly cast a solid and thick Mana Barrier between them. Spinning around to bring him into vision, Felix saw the maw of the blade bite down and tear through the solid wall of mana, crunching down on it audibly, like it was a cracker.

It had bought him just enough time to leap backwards though.

In the air, he swung his arms from side to side wildly releasing invisible blades of Force but Mecada didn’t even bother trying to stop them. Instead his sword greedily swallowed each and every blade of Force Felix released, the blade itself bending and contorting itself to reach each and every one of them.

Felix tried switching over to explosive Fireballs but the sword seemed even more excited to eat those so he switched tactics.

Isolating himself with a simple Force Shell, Felix released one persistent area spell after another all while running away from Mecada. The demon chased after him relentlessly, dashing and leaping with skills, briefly disappearing and even teleporting once which forced Felix to activate his Reaper’s skills again.

Mecada didn’t manage to actually injure Felix but his sword did eat half of Felix’s robes as they danced around.

The threat of the sword wielding Demon lessened with every spell Felix released, starting with Slow Fields, Frictionless Fields, Sound based attacks and other spells the sword couldn’t simply devour.

He still swung through the fields with the sword, using the maw to swallow the effects but he was forced to carve a path through them and Felix saw his ears beginning to bleed from the sound he couldn’t do anything about.

Mecada seemed to largely ignore the sound attack as he didn’t need his ears but Felix was hoping for exactly that. While in most cases fighting a single opponent, sound would never be a huge threat, against Felix things were a little different. His impossible mana pool made some things much more dangerous than they should have been.

The last spell he released was an echoing sound loud enough to obliterate his own eardrums through his Force Shell and was more than enough for Mecada’s body to simply burst. Looking back, Berrdoth hadn’t fared any better though he had almost saved himself by diving into the water.

Checking his mana pool, Felix sighed as the sound spell had cost him about 70 million mana with the Force Shell to protect himself costing him another 10. It was a ridiculous expenditure and not one he had wanted to make except that time mattered a lot in a war and the flesh creatures had started to pour in in earnest from behind them.

The spell was enough to wipe them out and completely destroy a few nearby buildings along with reducing much of the road to sand but he didn’t think the Rakyt would mind.

Rushing forwards, Felix stowed the chains, careful to avoid cutting himself as the blades reached up towards him then ran over towards Mecada’s body which was completely gone. Even the gory stain he had made on the ground had vanished as his sword slurped up all of his remains.

Approaching it, Felix could feel the ravenous hunger coursing through the blade and knew exactly how to handle that particular curse. Reaching forwards with tendrils of his soul, Felix imposed his will causing the blade to cower as he dropped it into his inventory.

Turning back towards the Rakyt, Felix saw only massive amount of blood everywhere. The Rakyt had either run away or been killed off as the buildings around them were covered in blood. Felix was certain he was far enough away that they would have survived his spell so they had long since lost their battle.

Rushing forwards, Felix maintained the Force Shell around him as his ears healed and half of his focus was dedicated to inhaling all the nearby mana. Zipping through the various flesh amalgamations, Felix simply ignored them instead of trying to kill them but the third one he flew past nearly stopped him.

It wasn’t fast enough to reach him, not even close, but it didn’t need to. As Felix flew by, the creature simply exploded in a burst of putrid smelling blood. It had been a large and fat looking creature and judging from all the blood it produced, Felix was pretty sure it was basically a balloon with little to no organs inside.

After that, he made sure to avoid, kill or knock aside demons where he could. Flying upwards wasn’t the best option because looking around, the sky was peppered with flying flesh golems. They used various limbs with skin stretched across them to form wings and exploded if Felix got close to them. Felix couldn’t even see anywhere above him that was clear enough for him to fly through unimpeded.

The flying creatures mostly congregated around the tops of the buildings where they exploded, releasing corrosive blood in every direction to melt down the spell structures the Rakyt had created. Around those, they were pressed against each-other but even above and around Felix, without any nearby targets, there was at most a couple of meters between them.

Coming into the event Felix didn’t think mounting an army of this size was even possible considering how expensive constructs were but there were easily millions of these disgusting flesh creatures. Flying around, Felix just saw blood everywhere.

The once blue oasis was entirely crimson and thick while the water level had risen and completely submerged most of the roads by an inch or more in some places. The sandstone buildings-or at least the ones still standing-all sported multiple even coats of blood painted across them. The sheer heat of so many creatures and so much blood, isolated within the remainder of the shell surrounding the city had become noticeable to Felix. With many of the barriers around the city still standing, it made for a disgusting balloon that was filling faster than it could drain.

Felix had a pretty good idea of where the Rakyt would make their last stand so he flew over towards the center of the city.

By the time he pressed himself up against the wall of the building in the center of the city, he was just shy of being completely healed and his mana was approaching three quarters full. He was lucky that mana was so abundant not just in the event, but in and around the city. He had already theorized that mana grew less viscous and more responsive as it was used and this city only reinforced that theory. The Aether’s reactivity here made it so he could suck in mana much faster than normal as it replaced the mana he consumed as fast as he could consume it.

Resisting the anchors within the city, Felix finally opened the portal he had been preparing and immediately pushed himself through it. He popped into the middle of the building and caught himself a few meters above the table in the center of the room.

He was ready for it so he managed to easily block and dodge the reactive attacks before Arysha commanded what was left of the Rakyt army to cease.

Felix dropped down amongst the understandably wary guards and approached Arysha, “How can I help.”

The wave of relief he felt from the guards was palpable as Arysha nodded her thanks, “Halwarume, Felix. This day lost. We choiceless. Must flee.”

“Okay. What do you need from me? I can open a portal deep into the desert to get you out of here.”

She shook her head, “Today, I die. The knowledge, our people, live on. We sent all knowledge and young in a ship. They rebuild. We fight.”

“You sent all of your collective knowledge and some people out, have they already made it out?”

Felix felt a sense of despair and hopelessness despite how she portrayed herself in front of her people, “We hope. We no know. We fight to distract and create opening. Will fight with us?”

Felix nodded, “If that’s what you want, I’ll fight with you. I’m not dying today though so I will portal out if I have to.”

Arysha nodded, “Agree. Today, not your day of death. You see salvation, you escort? Portal them?”

Felix nodded, “Sure. If I spot them, I’ll do what I can. In the meantime, what do you need me to do?”

“You are magic man, yes?”

Felix nodded.

“I seen you break anchors. You are special.”

Felix fought the urge to deny her and just nodded once.

She nodded once very seriously, “You help me final choice.”

“Sure.”

Arysha nodded in thanks then yelled out some commands in the Rakyt language to the army around them. Their faces grew solemn but their resolve also hardened. Felix didn’t know what she said but he was pretty sure it wasn’t good.

As soon as she finished talking, they all said “Alaro’wun” in unison then everyone but Arysha and Felix ran off down the various halls.

Turning to Felix, Arysha pointed upwards at the massive ball of mana Felix had been curious about the first time he was in here, “This cannon. We overfill. May explode, all dead. You help, but run before.”

“What does it shoot? Beams of Fire, Force?”

Arysha shook her head, “Mana, spells.”

Felix contained his excitement and nodded seriously, “Okay. How much more are you pumping into it?”

“All. At double now. Filling fast possible.”

Huh.

Slightly cocking his head, Felix squinted just slightly, “How much do you think you’ll be able to pump in until it explodes?”

Arysha clapped the backs of her hands together, “Not much more. You special, help keep stable. We pump more mana?”

Felix nodded, “I think I can do that. I’ll worry about surviving, you just figure out how to pump everything into it. I’ll handle the stability.”

Arysha bowed her head deeply, “Halwarume Felix and Alaro’wun.”

“Uhm… Alaro’wun you too?”

She nodded so he was pretty sure he had said the right thing.

As she ran off down one of the halls, Felix flew upwards towards the massive ball of mana above him. Last time he had seen it, it was massive and he could sense parts of it but now it was at least five times the size and double the density. As he approached, his mind and senses were expanded as he realized so many things.

The ball itself was not a ball of mana. It was a massive spell form. Physically it was huge. While Felix had cast a few spells of similar radius in two dimensions instead of three, those weren’t nearly as dense. In terms of complexity, Felix was actually scared he would never have the focus required to cast something at this level. He couldn’t even begin to measure it.

The anima around it could feel how significant it was too. The experiences he felt leaking out before, he know knew as hints of the arcane truths the spell form held.

The closer he got, the more complex the spell form was as his senses continued to feel at the enchantments and inscriptions within the walls. Each meter, his mind filled with inscriptions as he desperately tried to map them faster than he flew. He didn’t dare slow down though and risk not being able to reach the core.

As soon as his nearly 30 meter mana control range pierced the outside of the spell form though, his mind was completely overwhelmed. There was no chance he could have mapped the spell form. Even given an epoch just to observe it, he wasn’t sure how much he could have discerned.

The spell form was both fine and complex, made up of both three dimensional and two dimensional channels that formed fractals and shells and solids all interleaved and constantly shifting. Some of them grew and shrank, others spun and some phased seemingly in and out of existence right before Felix’s eyes. On top of all that, Felix’s anima senses screamed at him loud enough to overcome his sheer awe.

Focusing in on those, he was struck with the sheer complexity once again as the spell form itself was fused and bound together with the most complex soul construct he had ever seen. The construct completely surpassed any of the diagrams within the compendium he had gotten from The Reaper, though those admittedly served a different purpose.

The orb only got more complex towards the center too as the complexity and density of the spells forms, constructs and channels intertwined themselves in ways Felix couldn’t fully comprehend.

Despite all of that, it wasn’t too difficult for him to spot various flaws and instabilities. As complex as the spell form was, it flowed and morphed itself slowly and with purpose. In various areas he felt the channels jerk and flicker in ways that distinctly stood out from the rest of the spell form.

Flying up and around the orb, Felix was forced to exert some of his will to keep the mana of the orb from reaching out towards him and just a touch more to keep his own mana within his pool. Once he was on top of the orb, Felix reached into it with his mana control and began to carefully pick and prod at the flaws.

As he did so, he felt the mana throughout the building that was pouring into the spell form very slowly accelerate. As it accelerated, the spell form only grew increasingly more complex and dense and he began actively holding the more problematic sections stable, once he had mapped their normal movements.

Gradually he found himself able to hold more and more of the spell form stable with his abilities and as he did, he began to pull on the mana fueling it to speed up the process. With the utmost caution he could muster, Felix began to pull mana just 10 percent faster, then 25 then 100 all the way up to nearly 10 times as fast. At that point he had to slow down a little as he was only just barely able to keep up with the growth of the spell form. He wanted to keep going, see how much more he could do, how the spell would change, how devastating it would be with even more mana and just how far they could push it but any more was just too dangerous.

After just a couple minutes of Felix holding the orb stable, he almost missed his queue to leave as he was so focused on the orb itself. The mana pouring in from throughout the building began to slow just a little at first then quite dramatically as they simply ran out of available mana. The sources around him began to sputter and only the large flaws they created were able to awaken Felix from his trance.

Knowing that as soon as he released the orb it would begin collapsing in on itself, Felix very slowly released just enough focus to grab the coordinates next to him and open a portal out. As soon as it opened, Felix stepped through and closed it.

He had opened the portal to a point beyond the horizon and near his vault as he hoped to be close enough to see something but far enough that he wasn’t directly affected by whatever happened. He had strongly debated keeping the city within his visual range but ultimately, staying alive was a worth while tradeoff, though only barely.

10 seconds passed where Felix was unsure if anything was going to happen at all. He wondered if something had gone wrong or if the orb had simply degraded and collapsed instead of having any effect at all. Another 10 seconds passed and Felix debated opening a portal back into the city, just to check on things. Ultimately he decided to wait a bit longer and after another 10 seconds passed, Felix just couldn’t stop himself any longer.

He didn’t portal directly back into the city but instead, opened a portal a few hundred kilometers closer. When he still didn’t see, hear or otherwise detect anything, he opened another portal. Finally, four portals later, Felix saw the city on the edge of the horizon and was completely awestruck.

The massive spell form had gone off and was still in the process of going off but the entirety of the effect was contained by a sphere surrounding the city itself.

Felix’s mana senses didn’t detect anything but even without them and the additional colors they added to his sight, he couldn’t stop looking. The sphere itself was a slightly translucent crimson and so he could see the spell beneath pushing against it like a balloon desperately trying to inflate. Felix was convinced for a few seconds that the pressure alone would force the crimson barrier to expand but it never did.

The spell form beneath the shell pushed, spun and smashed against the barrier and desperately tried to break free. The spell forms, fractals, channels and volumes that formed the orb originally spun, shifted and morphed in arcane patterns Felix was vaguely familiar with. It almost looked alive in a weird and inexplicable way.

It didn’t behave like anything organic but it also didn’t seem to move robotically either, instead it felt to Felix like a being beyond his comprehension. Despite its elusive nature, the way it smashed and pushed against the crimson barrier was oddly childlike.

Once he managed to get over his awe, apprehension and general confusion, Felix opened a portal even closer and found the source of the crimson barrier. He could have guessed what had created it but even then, he was astonished the barrier had managed to hold back what was likely trillions of points of mana.

Finally opening a portal just a few hundred meters away, Felix realized the spell form wasn’t entirely without effect. The ring of demons from before that had formed a perfect ring with their arms buried in the sand were still present but not entirely intact.

Many of them were actively collapsing before Felix as the strain of trying to maintain whatever ritual was holding the orb back became too much to bear.

One by one, almost like dominos considering how they accelerated, the ritual demons collapsed.

As they did, Felix expected the crimson barrier to crack or give way but it didn’t. Instead, it seemed to almost reinforce itself as streaks of gold began to swirl their way into the barrier. At first Felix just watched as the gold slowly spread and the barrier grew increasingly more opaque. Once the gold made up half of the barrier though, something else changed.

In the same dirty, black and brown tainted crimson color that formed the barrier originally, a ritual circle even bigger than the barrier itself began to rise and with it, so did the city itself.

Once he realized whatever was happening wasn’t just about containment and that killing off the demons performing the ritual didn’t stop it, Felix sprang into action.

Flying forwards as fast he dared, Felix grabbed the closest collapsed and unconscious demon and removed their head with a flick of his wrist. He didn’t bother activating his rings and instead, manually grabbed hold of the demon’s soul before it managed to escape. He manually tore the outer layers free then sifted through the remaining experiences as quickly as he could.

He quickly dismissed all the experiences that had nothing to do with the ritual, which was the vast majority of them, and focused in on the ones he was looking for. There was a weird and painful experience that involved the fusing of souls which Felix mostly dismissed followed by a confusing mess of experiences that were weirdly fused into each-other.

The mess was difficult to process but Felix didn’t have time to waste trying. Instead, he flew to the next demon in the ring, one who was still awake, but quickly ended them without much trouble. He found a similar set of experiences starting from a soul fusing followed by a confusing mess.

One by one, Felix killed each demon around the circle and processed their experiences, ignoring the messages from The System about his ever increasing bounty. At the moment, he didn’t really have a choice. He needed to figure out what was happening. He was better off trying to explain what happened and dealing with the consequences later than getting caught switching to Arthur now.

At about three quarters of the way around the circle, Felix fought with one demon who put up a more admirable resistance but nonetheless, was significantly weaker than any participant should have been. Before they died though, they sputtered out a chuckling prayer, “An offering this size, only salvation awaits for me.”

Killing a few more, Felix realized what the common soul fusing experience was all about. Whatever this ritual was, they didn’t have enough experienced ritualists in the event to cast it. Instead, they fused ritualists into participants to get them in. The souls fought each-other in what was inevitably a painful existence but they all seemed completely willing for the sake of whatever ‘salvation’ was for them.

He still though, wasn’t really sure what the hell the ritual was. He cursed himself silently for destroying The Mind Devouring Crown so he could kill Erolan and not having come up with a sufficient alternative by now.

There was nothing he could do about it except kill the rest of the ritualist demons though.

Global Quest: Massacre

For surpassing 100 stacks, you have been rewarded with a permanent buff so long as you are within the event:

All creatures will be visible to you on your map at all times along with their stacks.

Current Stack Leaderboard:

Felix: 304

Iravyne: 239

Zeraxes: 117

Once they were all dead, Felix had held out hope that the ritual would stop or fail but it showed no signs of doing so. Instead, the ritual continued to whir into existence, various rings and nodes began spinning and shifting as the ritual began to activate in earnest.

Standing perfectly still, Felix forced his consciousness into his Soul Garden for the time dilation then began recklessly tearing through the mess of experiences he had retrieved. Now that he understood the mess was caused by fusing multiple souls together, it was slightly easier for him to separate them out. In doing so, he managed to get nearly nothing out of the experiences with respect to the mechanics of the ritual and how to stop it.

What he did manage to learn was that these demons were worshippers of Akaroth. Salvation had something to do with saving themselves and the city was an offering to Akaroth which somehow contributed to this salvation. Given he didn’t have time to rope Melody into this and get and explanation from her, he instead popped back out into the real world and walked over to the edge of the ritual.

The ritual itself had continued to, and was still, accelerating. As it spun, the sand and viscera that tainted the crimson blood forming the ritual was flung free which slowly purified it. Seeing this, Felix got and idea and began trying to shove sand into the blood forming the ritual to add impurities.

As soon as he did though, the sand was flung back out at him, tearing through his flesh and chunking his health by not an inconsiderable margin.

After that he tried to slow down the ritual with a Force spell but no amount of Force he could create with a spell was enough. Each and every spell he cast on the ritual itself was shredded on the spot. Given that, he didn’t dare try and touch the ritual as it began separating but he did fly over and place his hand against the barrier surrounding the city.

Luckily, it didn’t immediately sever his hand or anything and just felt mostly solid. It shifted slightly under his hand which was a weird feeling but Felix wasn’t overly focused on his sense of touch. Instead, he pushed on his Soul and Matter senses and began feeling out the orb. As far as he could tell, it was exactly what it looked like. The crimson was mostly blood and the gold was formed from the trapped souls trying to escape the ritual.

Curiously, the souls in the barrier weren’t just anima but they were actual souls. As he examined them, Felix felt thousands of souls pass through his senses. Many of them were creatures that had been used to necromantically raise and create flesh golems and demons but a decent proportion of them were noticeably Rakyt.

Blood ritual and the souls are trapped… Most of the blood I saw was from the front line demon hoard so they carted all that in for the ritual but a lot of these souls are Rakyt, at least the undamaged ones… They’re the offering then. The city itself-even if the last resort was contained-was definitely obliterated so all that’s left in there is sand, blood and souls. They’re offering the souls to Akaroth for their own salvation… Grim, what do we know about Akaroth?

We didn’t bother with information on any of the gods other than the big three.

Okay, let’s fix that after this. In the meantime, it feels like a safe assumption that any god who makes their worshippers do this is bad.

Grim nervously sighed in Felix’s mind, Good and bad are relative and there isn’t really anything we can do to stop it at this point anyways.

You might be right but… I don’t need to stop it.

Flying a short distance away while he prepared the spell he wanted, Felix slammed his body into the sand to stop himself then opened a portal only slightly bigger than his hand. Reaching through, he activated The Soul Devouring Ring and made absolutely certain his harvesting skill was disabled.

Rivaled only by the time he harvested the Grelmite hive, souls gushed into the ring. Everything contained within the orb was rushing towards him and he intended on stealing all of it. His ring could handle the speed but its capacity wasn’t nearly enough as the souls themselves were denser and more significant by orders of magnitude than the Grelmites had been.

As his ring filled, Felix began manually shredding and removing the demon souls, not daring to touch the Rakyt souls until he absolutely had to. The demon souls all ended up in his Soul Space where they were completely obliterated into raw anima with no regard for the souls themselves. There were far more demons than Rakyt which helped but he quickly realized it wasn’t enough.

Sifting through the demon souls, he wasn’t entirely paying attention to them as he didn’t really care about anything other than the raw anima. The Rakyt though, as soon as he was forced to handle them, he was as careful as he could be while sorting through nearly a hundred thousand souls a second. The only thing making it remotely possible was having his consciousness entirely in his Soul Garden with its time dilation. Even then, he was pushed beyond his limits for Soul control. In practice what that meant was that all he could do was remove every layer from the core souls and dumped that into his Soul Space.

The core souls themselves, he kept in the ring in the hopes that he could preserve any knowledge they may have once contained. He knew that the souls held significant and personality altering experiences, not knowledge. Especially not logical, mathematical, arcane and emotionally detached knowledge. He held out hope that he could get something out of this though, like the location of the arc they had sent out with the entirety of their knowledge and some survivors.

Harvesting in this way, Felix was giving up a lot of stats but realistically, he didn’t think he really had any other choice. Placing the souls in The Kryptos Repository would result in them degrading before he ever got a chance to use them. The necromancer’s battery didn’t preserve experiences and often drove the contained souls insane. His own Soul Space completely obliterated souls and effectively wiped them clean. All he had was the space in The Soul Ring to work with.

After a minute, it became very clear that Felix wasn’t going to be able to hold nearly enough souls in the ring and he had to come up with an alternative. The only thing he could come up with though, was to move them into his own soul. His Soul Space wasn’t an option but he did have some souls living within his own soul. The issue was that they all held pieces of his soul within them. He didn’t have enough to inject all of them so he decided to try something new.

Up until now, Felix had been reading through and lightly experimenting with the designs in the Soul Structure Compendium from a theoretical standpoint. He hadn’t found anything he thought fit perfectly and none of his experiments were so beneficial that he felt he had to implement them. He had however, read through and memorized the entire thing.

He hadn’t conducted experiments on everything as some of the structures he didn’t see a point in implementing within constructs. He didn’t have a choice now though so, he mentally flipped to the corresponding pages.

With the Soul Ring halfway full after just a minute with him manually filtering and processing out the demons and stripping the Rakyt as fast as he could, Felix didn’t have much time at all. There was no way he could implement anything fine or precise so his only goal was function. If it worked, he could fix things later.

The first thing he did was off load as much of the filtering as he could on his mental constructs. With the smidgen of his will that he had freed, Felix began constructing a wall that was as dense as he could fashion. It wasn’t just a solid sheet though, it had structure both physically and experientially. Physically, he crafted a lattice of sorts only because he absolutely had to.

He had already tried creating a simple layer within his Soul Space to avoid the obliteration issue but it wasn’t enough. He didn’t have enough time for a complex lattice though so all he managed was an isometric grid of triangles that protruded in the third dimension to give it some added structure. The repetitive and easily digestible pattern made it much easier to create quickly which was just an added bonus.

All references within the compendium described complex weaves of intent and convictions but Felix didn’t have time for that, all he had time for was one thing, his own conviction. What he could do, was remove the affinization it had towards him so instead of giving in to his soul, it would actively fight back against it. In reality it had no way to attack so he wasn’t worried about it fighting back. What it would do-he hoped-was keep the contents from being obliterated by his soul, protect them in a sense.

Having the two fight each-other wasn’t ideal but it was all he had time for.

It luckily didn’t take long for the lattice to be complete as he didn’t really need much of it. His own soul wasn’t very big after all.

Wrapping the lattice around, Felix fused the edges together to form a tube then pulled one end through his outer soul layers towards the core. Within his soul, he began pulling and shaping the tube into a circle, connecting the two ends together making his core soul look almost like a planet with a ring around it.

Returning his consciousness to the ring, Felix desperately tossed demon souls and began funneling every soul within the ring, and entering the ring, into his soul. He had to be careful about how he transported the souls themselves but he had thought of a rather crude solution. Using some extra lattice tubing, he ran it through his soul, down his arm and into the ring itself. Once again, there was no time for caution so Felix simply ignored the pain as he recklessly ripped an open wound into his own soul.

As soon as it was connected, the souls slammed their way into the pipe causing such a massive build up of pressure, the tube itself began stretching to accommodate. Felix pushed against the tube with whatever focus he could spare while simultaneously filtering out the demon souls and crudely removing the outer layers of the Rakyt souls.

A few minutes passed like this until Felix began to feel ill. The feeling was nothing physical though as he wasn’t sure if it was possible for him to be physically sick. Instead, he felt a deep seated sense of wrongness emanating from his soul. He ignored the feeling though and pushed onwards. There would be time to fix things later.

Another few minutes passed and Felix wasn’t sure he would be done by the time the ritual completed. He had no way to know how many souls were left, just that they definitely hadn’t slowed at all. The new ring around his core soul luckily showed no signs of filling up.

As the souls poured into the ring, they were naturally compressed just from the sheer pressure his own soul put on its surroundings. He wasn’t confident yet that that didn’t damage the souls but there was nothing he could do about it at the moment so he didn’t worry about it. Worst case, he might be able to read some of the experiences that remained if they were too significantly damaged to otherwise use.

The influx of souls finally began slowing after 8 minutes but only slightly. Felix was confident at that point though that he could contain all the souls but still wasn’t sure if the ritual would complete before he stole them all.

The ritual itself had raised the city over 50 meters into the air and kept it contained within a crimson blood orb the entire time. The orb had begun filtering out corruption in the form of anything that wasn’t blood, mana or anima which mostly meant sand. As it did so, the crimson grew more vibrant and less murky while the gold within the orb began to gradually disappear as Felix removed it from within.

After a grand total of just over 11 minutes, the souls finally ceased and Felix deactivated his ring as he collapsed to the ground. He just couldn’t stand any longer, not with how hard he was fighting with his own soul to not remove what it saw as corruption. That resulted in his feeling ill which had mounted to Felix feeling more sick than he ever remembered being. It was so bad that it affected everything, his mind ached, his joints tensed, his vessels constricted, his skin tightened and his muscles burned.

He did manage to turn himself over though to watch as the-now entirely crimson-orb that contained essentially just blood at this point, rose up the final few meters into the air before shrinking down to the size of a basketball and vanishing in a pillar of crimson light.

There was no response to the offering of the ritual which was slightly disappointing for Felix. He had been hoping for a frustrated scream or something equivalent though, realistically knew it wouldn’t happen.

With the orb gone and the ritual complete, Felix was left in the middle of the desert, next to a massive crater with his name firmly at the top of the bounty list. He didn’t worry about it for the time being and was happy to try and beat his own record with his persona in the future. For the time being though, his soul was as close to in tatters as it had ever been.

He could barely move which made it all the more important that he got himself somewhere safe, like his dorm. Rolling over, Felix pulled the event marble out of his Soul Space and was about to press it into the ground when he saw movement over a dune to his right. It was further from the crater than he was so he was pretty sure it was another participant. Given his current state, he moved as fast as he could.

In his current state though, he wasn’t fast enough as the source of the movement vanished and reappeared standing above him. Felix turned towards the shadowy silhouette with a handful of spells prepared but let them dissipate as soon as he recognized the face.

“Felix. You live.”

Felix coughed out a chuckle, “Isn’t that my line? I was supposed to live and you were supposed to die.”

“Yet, I in better shape. I no points pay you but, what happened?”

“Demons sacrificed the city to their god.”

Arysha’s face contorted in a combination of sadness and disgust, “We…” She sighed then tapped at something before continuing with much less stinted speech, “We were so confident in our preparations, so sure we could handle the rest of the multiverse. Now my people are dead.”

Felix resisted the urge to gag and vomit bile, “You had that cache, didn’t you? With your knowledge and some people?”

She shook her head lightly, “They didn’t make it out. I just… didn’t want to tell anyone I…”

Felix didn’t question her decision and instead changed the subject, “How did you survive?”

“I didn’t intend to I… My survival instincts kicked in and I used a spell… relocate… I made it out. It shouldn’t have been possible but… you held the Arcane Torrent’s Eye stable long enough that even our anchors were drained…”

He nodded as much as he could which amounted to his chin shifting by just over a centimeter, “Why’d you turn on the translation?”

She scoffed, “What’s the point… Words are sacred because they represent our history, our legacy and they…” She sighed, “My people are dead. There is no legacy. Upholding customs now is… foolish.”

Felix coughed and felt his throat tear itself apart, “Well… About that… Your people aren’t completely gone. Yet…”

Arysha looked towards him and leaned in, “What- Explain.”

“The demons and the Eye we released killed and disintegrated their bodies respectively. The whole god thing was about offering souls… I think. I kind of… stole them though.”

“The souls?”

Felix gasped for air, “Yeah.”

“I… How?”

He waved her off with a slight wiggling of his fingers, “Long story.”

“How many?”

Felix laughed, “I can’t count that high. Not even now. All of the ones in the city… trapped in the ritual.”

“All of them? Where are they? What will happen to them?”

“Inside of me for now. I was planning on putting them in my head. Long story but there’s a city up there.”

Arysha had far less questions than Felix was expecting, “And they can live… in this city? In your head?”

“Pretty sure. I have to… heal myself first but… Should be possible.”

Looking at him very seriously, she leaned in until her snout was just a few inches from his and he could feel her cool breath through the desert heat, “Take me too.”

“Hold on. They won’t remember… everything. I’ve never done this before but I have no way to… encode your memories, with their brains gone, there’s no hope.”

She shook her head, “But their souls remain.”

“Yeah, they’ll retain significant events and experiences. Life changing, personality defining things.”

She nodded, “That is more than enough. Take my soul as well, let me be with my people.”

“You would die.”

“I was already ready to die this day… Felix, you know very little about our language and our people… do you know I had two daughters?”

“I… didn’t.”

“I already told you, today I die. When I told you that it was because I didn’t want to live without them. They died in the city. Now you tell me there’s a way I can.”

“Right bu-”

“If they live, in any way. I will be with them.” Standing faster than Felix could realistically react in his current state, Arysha made a quick gesture with her hands to cast a spell that caused her head to literally explode.

Holy fuck WHAT! DAMNIT, We could have saved your memories.

Despite the shock of what had happened, Felix activated his Soul Ring and made certain there was room for her soul. Given how she had gone about killing herself, Felix held out no hope he could somehow reanimate and steal her memories. He grumbled about how idiotic and emotionally blinded that was for the few seconds it took him to open a portal and roll through into his vault. He quickly dropped off the Imitation Cores with Zero then dropped through one more portal back to his dorm. Once there, he let his consciousness fall inwards towards the mess that was his soul. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .