The Sixth School.

Chapter Seventy Four: Chase…

Despite the ardor with which they fought, or the focus with which his teacher’s clones worked to set up the formation, none of them had actually seen the doorway between the two realms. This is probably how it had remained hidden for so long. There were no phenomenological signs that there was anything different here compared to anywhere else on the mountain, apart from the high concentration of abyssal mana. The way the healer had mapped the exact location of the convergence was simple but effective. Using the spot where they landed as the beginning point, she had walked forward towards where the abyssal mana felt thickest and then past that to the other side. While she was in the zone of the convergence, the compass would point in all directions around her. As soon as she moved past the zone, the compass would point fixedly behind her.

The moment this happened, she would stop and mark the point. Returning to the midpoint between where she started and where she stopped, she'd turn and go in a different direction. Every time the compass stopped turning randomly and pointed fixedly behind her, she’d mark that position as the boundary of the convergence. Using this method, they found the zone convergence to be between fifty and sixty feet in diameter. Just to be safe, the formation that his teacher laid out covered a diameter of seventy feet out of the hundred that her clones had cleared out using the strange lamp. But while they’d been reasonably certain of the location that they had marked out, the connection between the two worlds remained unseen… until they tried to close it.

Several things happened in the moment right after. The first was the noise. Greg didn’t know how it was possible to produce such a sound, but he was certain that even a thousand tortured souls wouldn’t be able to produce such a haunting sound. Screams of pain, despair, fear, hopelessness, and an endless desire for everything to just end. It was a sound that sucked the very desire to live from anyone that heard it. There was zero doubt in Greg that if there wasn’t a small kernel of himself protected within the secret room that the deity-level being had created in his mind, then he would have completely lost himself just to the sound alone. Even as he currently stood, Greg was actively fighting the urge to slit his own throat with the flying daggers he was currently controlling. He had to send every weapon he’d thus far summoned back into his storage ring as the urge was growing stronger the longer he heard the sound.

The sound, however, was just the start. Barely half a second behind it came a wall of the foulest bit of mana that Greg had ever had the displeasure of feeling. The mana dispersal and ward formations had been activated and all the mana that had been in the convergence zone had been expelled, washing over them like a tidal wave. With few exceptions, ambient mana is made up of most types of mana, and yet, from none of them had Greg ever gotten the dirty feeling that he got from abyssal mana. There was just something about it that felt twisted and wrong in a fundamental way. And looking at the effect that it’d had all around him, Greg was certain that this twistedness didn’t just end at being a feeling. If they were exposed to it for long enough, or in strong enough doses, they too would end up as mindless aberrations like the beasts in this forest had been made into.

This was why Greg couldn’t keep from sighing in relief when a mana shield snapped up around him, keeping the abyssal mana from coming in contact with him. His teacher had remained true to her role as his guardian, always sticking close by. As such, he wasn’t surprised to see that they were covered by the same shield. Unlike the healer, Olivia had been taking the fight to the beasts. Before Greg could even get to most of them at range, Olivia would have massacred half their numbers before moving on, leaving the rest for him and the healer. But like the two of them, Olivia and the beasts around her had frozen mid-battle to look at the spectacle playing out before them. Two shields appeared over the familiar as his teacher extended a hand toward her and the familiar cast a shield of her own as well.

The beasts around her, however, went to either one of two extremes. Having already been exposed and corrupted by abyssal mana, they seemed to be far more susceptible to the wave of mana that washed over them. Out of ten, nine died. The various ways they’d been warped and malformed as a result of the abyssal mana just spiraled out of control. Creatures were turned into husks as tentacles grew endlessly from their bodies. Others had their organs spilled everywhere as large lumps grew out of their body before popping like pricked water balloons. Greg even saw one creature, with zero indication of what was wrong with it, just turn into a puddle of black goo on the ground. It was the stuff of nightmares. But nowhere near as bad as the few that survived.

An extra set of arms that ended in claws several inches long and sharp as knives, this was the most benign of changes that Greg saw. While it killed the majority, the few beasts that weren’t culled by the abyssal mana were turned into horrific beasts of war. Some beasts grew extra heads with maws that looked sharp enough to bite through steel. Others grew faces on parts of their bodies that had no business having a face. And if the looks of pure agony in those faces weren’t enough, the black gas that seemed to be continuously leaking from every orifice on these faces would give anyone pause. The abyssal mana seemed to be trying to turn the beasts into the most vile, distorted, agents of death that it could manage. Sharper claws, thicker hides, faster movements, extra limbs, new tentacles, poison, shrieks that might as well have been sound attacks, and so on. Anything and everything that could be thrown at them would be.

The first hint that something was wrong, even beyond every fucked up thing already happening, was how long the wave of mana lasted. Given that the area being cleared of mana was about fifty to sixty feet in diameter, and that the amount of abyssal mana present around the convergence had been really high, Greg wasn’t surprised by the wave of mana that washed over them at first. However, he would have expected that it would have passed after a few seconds. Fifteen seconds later, however, the amount of abyssal mana the shields around them was withstanding was still holding steady! Greg could tell this both from the aura that suffused the air around them and the look of strain on the healer’s face as she continued to hold up the shields that kept the abyssal mana at bay.

Greg was about to ask the healer about it when the air before them fractured. Greg could intuitively understand what it felt like to have one's limbs twisted. He never thought he’d ever get to understand what it feels like to have one’s sight twisted. From his former life back on earth, he knew that there were higher dimensions other than the two-dimensional and three-dimensional view of the world that most people had. He could feel the headache he’d already developed from overuse of flying weapons grow worse as his mind was forced to look in a new direction that was neither up, down, left, right, forward, or back. Space being stretched, twisted, and then torn apart, as it turns out, wasn’t something that the human mind was designed to comprehend or handle.

“I… Isn’t the formation supposed to stop the convergence?” Greg couldn’t help but ask, unable to tear his gaze away from the jagged tear hanging in the air before them despite his discomfort.

“It… it is closing,” His teacher answered through gritted teeth, the strain she was under clear to be seen from her look of concentration and the beads of sweat sliding down her face. Whatever it was she was doing, it was taking everything out of her. “Bu… But Something is… something is trying to force its way through!” Barely able to spare the effort to speak, she explained the reason she seemed to be struggling.

Greg could feel his heart clench and a deep foreboding feeling overcame him at her words. It hadn’t, by any means, been easy to deal with the relentless assault of the beasts that had been endlessly attacking them as they tried to set up the formations. Still, even at the worst of it, Greg hadn’t been able to shake the feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop! Bad as the beast tide had been, they’d been gradually grinding away at it. Eventually, it would have either broken or been completely decimated by them. In other words, it had been far too weak to be an attack by fate. Looking at the look of struggle that was on the healer’s face, the same wasn’t true of what was about to come out of that doorway.

Greg didn’t harbor any false hope that the healer would be able to close the door before whatever foe this was, made it out. Right from the start, Greg had suspected that the hand of fate was behind this. With this last pronouncement from the healer, all doubt was gone.

A convergence, a vanishingly rare event, just happens to take place in his backyard out in the middle of nowhere. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the maturation of said convergence, something that usually takes decades if not centuries in other cases, happens only a year after he’d crossed over into this world. But even after they managed to get to the convergence in time and through teeth-gritting effort closed it, something that even his teacher was struggling against, somehow thwarts their efforts and crosses through what is supposed to be a broken bridge!

‘Olivia!’ Despite his misgivings, Greg wasn’t willing to break his teacher’s concentration, so he called to his familiar mentally. Greg didn’t know whether it was the urgency in his mental voice or that his familiar could sense that things were about to get a lot worse, but barely a second after calling to her, she was by his side. “We’re running,” Greg didn’t mince words. Unlike his summons, these words were spoken out loud for his teacher’s benefit. Greg had no intention of leaving her behind.

From both the deity-level being that had reincarnated him and Olivia’s true self, Greg had heard that fate would be targeting him. Neither one, however, had said that Greg was obligated to face whatever it was fate was trying to throw at him. His teacher had made sport of ending the life of a tier-three beast, and yet, just keeping this intruder from crossing over seemed to be taking everything that she had. Greg didn’t harbor any delusions about being able to face such a being let alone beat it. Greg was perfectly aware that their running away might mean the town being wiped out. That, however, didn’t cause him to hesitate or reconsider his chosen course of action, not even for a second.

One thing that encountering truly powerful beings had done for Greg was completely strip him of any delusions of grandeur. He knew perfectly well what true power looked like. He was no hero, and throwing his own life away just so he could die before the town was wiped out anyway, wasn’t something that Greg was interested in doing. Not to mention, he was no saint. Even if he could have saved the town, if it was at the cost of his own life, then he still wouldn’t do it. Cold and callous as it may have been, it was the simple truth and Greg didn’t shy away from it.

“Something is crossing over through the doorway and I don’t think we’ll be able to stop it, let alone fight it,” Despite the confidence in his voice, Greg had looked in the direction of his teacher to see if she’d say anything to the contrary. If she felt any confidence in facing what was coming through, then perhaps there was reason to stay. The silence that met his words from the healer, however, only confirmed Greg’s words. “We need to get out of here and as far away as we can, fast,” Greg succinctly stated.

DO YOU WISH TO BUY THE PEAK-GRADE TIER-THREE HORIZON CHASER FOR 490,000 MAGIC POINTS?

YES/NO.

Without wasting any words, Olivia found the exact vessel they’d need to make their quick escape. Even as he clicked on ‘YES', Greg couldn’t help but wonder if running away also counted as beating this attempt by fate. After all, fate aimed to see him dead. If he managed to escape with his life, then fate would have failed in its attempt to kill him. So, wouldn’t that count as overcoming another attempt by fate?

It was all a vain attempt by Greg to keep his mind occupied and hold at bay the panic that was rising in him. Every second longer that they stayed next to the doorway, the more he felt the cold specter of death hanging over him. In truth, he couldn’t have cared any less whether fate would think he legitimately won this round of their confrontation or not. So long as he managed to keep his little life, then everything else was just a bonus.

“What are you doing?” Greg asked when he noticed Olivia’s mana connect with his storage ring. There was no anger or suspicion in his voice, just simple curiosity.

Shortly thereafter several different vials and orbs appeared in the familiar’s hands, some of them floating around her. Greg couldn’t help but stiffen a little as he noticed that what Olivia had taken out was a mix of all the explosives and poisons among other potions that Greg had brought when preparing for ranged combat. In her hands and floating around Olivia was enough firepower for an explosion that would be felt by someone standing at the base of the mountain. “Leaving behind a welcome gift!” the familiar stated, even as she zipped forward toward the rift that had opened in midair.

Greg would have protested that they were wasting precious seconds, but with her speed, he knew that she would set up whatever trap she wished to and be back even before their new flying vessel had fully taken form within his storage ring. Besides, Greg understood all too well the importance of hitting first and making that first hit count. Whatever it was that was coming through the crumbling bridge, Greg didn’t want to face it while it was in peak form. If they injured it with this first salvo, even if it was just preventing it from being able to chase after them, then it’d be worth it. He could thus raise no objections to Olivia’s plan.

Despite being a mana construct, Olivia easily traversed through the formation placing the various bombs and potion vials in such a way that, no matter where their visitor landed, he was sure to get a nasty surprise. The reason Olivia could traverse through the formation was because it was designed to deprive an area of ambient mana. Structured mana such as a spell or a mana construct like Olivia wouldn’t be affected all that much by the formation. Just because you stood in the middle of mana dispersal and ward formations doesn’t mean a fireball aimed at you wouldn’t blast you away. It might be weakened a bit but in the final analysis, you’d be better served erecting a mana shield as opposed to the formation. As such, despite the clear discomfort Greg could feel coming from Olivia through their bond, she wasn’t that hindered in her actions.

It was half a minute or so before the vessel took form in his storage ring, by which time, Olivia had been back by his side for five seconds. Taking it out, Greg was shocked to see two pairs of what looked like angel wings hovering in midair. Greg assumed based on their climb up the mountain, and the name of the item on the prompt that they’d be getting another flying vessel. Thinking back on it, however, he hadn’t exactly asked Olivia to buy another flying vessel, instead, he’d simply stated that they needed to get away as fast as possible. “Both pairs can be donned by one person for maximum speed or two people can each don a pair for about half the speed,” Olivia explained. It was in moments like these that Greg was reminded of the fact that, as his familiar, Olivia only cared about him. She only cared about others in so far as they were beneficial to him in some way. As soon as his well being clashed with that of others, then the familiar would pick him every single time, without even a hint of remorse. The plain implication of her words that Greg could take all four wings and leave his teacher behind wasn’t lost on anyone present.

Not willing to let any mistrust develop between himself and his teacher, he immediately turned to her. “Take a pair,” He stated without any fanfare. The healer who still seemed to be expending a significant amount of effort to hinder their uninvited visitor’s ingress, just waved a hand causing one pair of wings to float over to her. Greg watched as the part of the wings that were supposed to attach to her glowed golden before sinking into her back. Greg felt a sharp sting on his back at about the same time drawing a wince and sharp hiss from him. Greg turned around to find that Olivia had already attached the remaining pair to his back. 

“We don’t have time. We need to go now!” She urged him. The flash of annoyance at his familiar faded as he found himself unable to argue against her words. Rather than say anything, Greg turned his attention to the wings now attached to him. Greg watched as glowing lines crawled over his shoulder and around his sides. Moving in intricate patterns, the lines crawled across his chest before hardening into a cuirass made of light. The moment he saw it, it made sense. Epic as it was to have wings, being a human, Greg didn’t have the musculature to support their operation. As they currently were, trying to fly with them would probably end with the whole of his weight being borne by a few muscles on his upper back. Depending on how powerful the wings were, there was a very real chance of the muscles being ripped right out. With the cuirass of light redistributing his body weight, however, any such possibility was eliminated.

Having the wings on his back was a mix of strange and natural. Strange because it felt a lot like discovering that you had a third arm that you’ve never noticed before! Being a normal human, Greg had never had wings of any kind. To suddenly have a pair attached to his back, understandably felt very weird to him. At the same time, however, it was as if his mind had been injected with the knowledge of how to operate the wings when they were attached to his back. As such, it felt completely natural when Greg flexed them before having them open to their full span. But while operating the wings felt completely natural, simply moving them presented Greg with a glaring problem. The wings were a lot like his arms, he could move them with but a thought. The only problem was that about ten percent of his mana was drained from simply opening the things. Feeling his mana drain away like water in a bucket full of holes, it suddenly struck him. “These are tier-three items, I don’t have anywhere near the amount of mana I would need to operate them,” Greg stated.

“Here you go,” His teacher said before tossing something his way. Greg reached up to snatch a fist-sized mana crystal out of the air. Looking at it, the crystal he was holding was blue in color. While it wasn’t anywhere near as potent as the purple crystal his teacher produced during his ascension, there was a significant amount of mana in it. His entire pool of mana could probably be replenished seventy, maybe even eighty times over by this one crystal. Greg watched as his teacher produced another such mana crystal and held it to the light cuirass that now encircled her chest. While she may have been the equivalent of a third-tier mage, his teacher had probably expended a lot of her mana trying to force the convergence shut and keep out whatever being it was that was trying to cross over, hence her use of the mana crystal.

Mimicking her, Greg pressed the mana crystal against his chest on the light cuirass. Despite letting go, the mana crystal remained attached to his chest powering his wings. The difference was immediate as the powerful draw on his mana any time he moved the wings was gone. Greg cast one last glance around at the remaining beasts around them. Greg knew that fighting them would have been just as hard if not worse than it had been before their numbers were drastically cut down. Luckily for them, they all seemed to be held in a trance, their gaze fixed on the tear in the air. Greg couldn’t help the suspicion that they would all be under the command of the being coming through the convergence. A fact that made him want to eliminate them to the last. Unfortunately for him, death was fast approaching. Olivia turned into a mote of light and sunk into Greg’s glabella even as he turned his back to the convergence and flapped his wings.

BOOM!

Several things happened in the moment right after. First, Greg almost immediately found himself a hundred meters in the air. Greg had expected to have to flap his wings a few times just to get off the ground. However, the name ‘horizon chaser' suddenly made sense to Greg as he found himself having crossed a hundred meters in a single second from a single flap. A small bubble of light had formed around his body, protecting it from the forces that such drastic speeds could generate. Not only was he not being suffocated by the g-force that such a change in speed generated, but Greg didn’t even have to squint his eyes as there was no wind hitting his face.

Barely a split second after he’d flapped his wings, Greg felt a thick and baleful aura engulf him. This was the second thing to happen. As soon as his teacher stopped trying to keep the being on the other side of the collapsing convergence, it crossed over. Bad as the aura of abyssal mana was, there was no mind behind it. Simple abyssal mana lacked a will. It was in a way, blind, in the same way that a flame burns blindly. The same was not true of the suffocating aura that billowed out in thick waves from the being that emerged from the tear that had been hanging in midair.

The aura from this being spoke of a deep and unrelenting hatred. Greg had to consciously bite his tongue to keep from losing himself. To call it a bone-deep hatred was to barely scratch the surface of the feeling that had engulfed him. The most chilling part of it was that it wasn’t focused on any single target. No. This was an all-encompassing hatred of all that existed. If the being from whom this feeling emanated could wipe out all of existence up to and including itself, then it wouldn’t even hesitate for a second to do so. And as if all that wasn’t bad enough, any hope of fighting back against this foe was extinguished as they could all clearly feel it, this being was far more powerful than his teacher was.

The third and final thing to happen in that moment was probably the loudest explosion that Greg had ever had the displeasure of hearing. At the speed he was already moving, not to mention the shield around his body meant to protect him from physical forces, Greg wasn’t hit as hard as would have been the case had he still been stationary. With his feet not on the ground, Greg couldn’t feel the seismic impact of the explosion. However, the cloud of both dust and debris rushing to meet him a hundred meters in the air spoke of just how powerful the explosion had been. There was no doubt in Greg that as soon as the dust settled, there would be a deep crater left behind where the formation had been.

‘Don’t stop!’ Olivia’s sharp admonition reached him just as Greg was thinking of pausing and turning to look back to see if their unwelcome visitor had been done in by the explosion.

While he hadn’t been planning to disregard Olivia’s words, the inhuman roar of both pain and rage that reached him from within the dust cloud only added to the urgency. Angling his body forward, Greg flapped his wings a second time sending him shooting forward fast as a comet. Any remaining curiosity that Greg might have had over the fate of the abyssal creature behind them was lost as he felt the specter of death hanging over them. At the speed they were moving, it should have been difficult if not impossible to see them, and yet, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the creature had locked onto them.

‘No matter how powerful, Abyssals are known to be vindictive to an absurdly petty degree.’

Greg couldn’t help but recall the words of the deity-level being that reincarnated him when she had been warning him against ever going to the abyssal realm. How the being could possibly know that the specks currently shrinking on the distance as they flew away were its attackers,  Greg didn’t know. In a little under ten seconds, they’d already crossed a kilometer and were still picking up speed. Yet, somehow, Greg couldn’t keep his heart from hammering inside his chest. Try as he would, he couldn’t shake the feeling that they were marked. Their attempt to injure if not outright kill the abyssal creature behind them might have just signed their death warrant.

“Dodge left!”

Not wasting any time with questions, Greg tucked one wing close to his body, and with one flap of his other wing, pushed his whole body into a barrel roll to the left. A dark grey beam cut through the air, right where he had been just a second before. Greg didn’t even understand how light could be made to appear grey but that was the least of his concerns at that moment. Having missed it by a hair’s breadth, Greg got a feeling of wrongness coming from whatever spell it was just by being close to it. A curse. Greg wasn’t sure how he knew given that the spell looked a lot more like a laser of some kind than anything else, but there was zero doubt in him, that what he had just dodged was a curse. And just as icing on the cake in the middle of his barrel roll, Greg had gotten the chance to look back at the monstrosity that was chasing after them. The maneuver was too quick for Greg to get a good look, and in an odd twist of fate, this was the very thing that saved his life.

There was no explaining the abomination that was chasing after them. From what little he had seen, there was a mass of tentacles, several clawed hands, and even more terrifying maws, none of which was arranged in a manner that made any anatomical or even morphological sense. Two wings made of flesh, large enough to give shade to a hundred people were what allowed this monstrosity to keep up with them despite their blistering speed. But even more than the morphological paradox that was the creature’s physical appearance, it was the mystical aspects of the being that made Greg abandon any desire to get a better look at the being.

Foulness! Madness! corruption! contamination!

Given how fast he rolled, Greg only got to see the creature for less than a second, and yet, his very sanity had started fraying from just that small glimpse. It was as if the thing behind him was the very embodiment of madness. To merely look upon it would be relinquishing any hold one had on sanity. This wasn’t a spell or curse of any kind. It was as if the being had merged with the concept and made them part of it just as much as Greg’s flesh and bones were part of himself. Greg could remember his teacher once speaking of ‘aspects’ when explaining one of the flaws in the sigil. That mages as they progressed on their paths, would have to imbibe truths from the school of magic they pursued and make them part of their path of magic. It now struck Greg that he’d never truly understood what she meant. Greg had taken it as simply an intellectual understanding of a particular aspect and how it interacted with one’s school of magic. That single glance, however, disabused him of the notion.

The creature chasing after them had madness as one of the aspects that it had imbibed into its path, along with foulness, contamination, and corruption. The being was madness incarnate, and any mana it produced was tainted by the same madness. This fact, paired with the gap in power between them, made it so that even just being close to this creature was a life-threatening prospect for Greg. He’d only been exposed to its aura just long enough to feel its unrelenting hatred for all of existence. If he had lingered longer, however, Greg suspected that the effects would have been far more detrimental if not outright lethal. This realization put a new fire of urgency under him as Olivia warned him that the distance between himself and the creature was gradually closing.

“Dive!”

Even before he could fully register the word, Greg had angled his body downward and with a powerful flap of his wings, sent himself hurtling towards the ground at incredible speed. By now they had left the mountain far behind them and the plains around it were now just a blur of motion under them. Greg had caught sight of small towns and settlements every now and then, but they were usually far behind him by the time it registered in his mind that he’d just seen a human habitation. Casting a glance to the right, Greg noticed that his teacher who was around a hundred meters away had followed in his dive, though delayed by a few seconds.

While it would have been reassuring to have her a bit closer to where he was, Greg could understand the wisdom of not having them bunched up together, making themselves an easier target for the creature after them. Of course, this just led to the creature ignoring his teacher and exclusively targeting him. One could logically assume that the creature had chosen to ignore his more powerful teacher and go for the weaker target. Greg, however, didn’t harbor any such delusion. He was a man marked by fate and by hook or crook, fate seemed intent on eliminating him. That the creature had chosen to fixate on him was probably fate’s meddling. Luckily for him, Greg wasn’t alone.

“Right! Hard climb! Dodge right! Fake right and go left! Another dive…

It was a mercy that the horizon chasers had injected the instinctual knowledge of how to use the wings into his mind, otherwise, Greg was certain he would have probably been splattered on the ground from an inability to maneuver the powerful artifact. Olivia, who’d thus far been acting like a pair of eyes at the back of his head, had probably saved his life fifteen or so times and still climbing with every curse that she helped him evade. Not only was she calling out the right moves to make, she was transmitting the intent half a second before he even spoke allowing Greg to be able to react at the drop of a hat. It was through her guidance that Greg somehow managed to stay ahead of the abyssal creature for almost an hour. Eventually, however, the inevitable happened and Greg found himself caught up within the large sphere that was this abominable creature’s aura. As soon as that happened, Olivia didn’t even have the time to call out her next warning before a curse slammed into him with the force of a comet…

***