The Third Portal: Chapter Sixty

“Take hold of my tail,” Edgar instructed.  Not wanting to waste time, given that I’d already spent minutes fetching Edgar, I teleported behi

“Take hold of my tail,” Edgar instructed. 

Not wanting to waste time, given that I’d already spent minutes fetching Edgar, I teleported behind him and grabbed ahold of his tail. Edgar began to nose at the earth, and as he did, his mana began to pour out of him. A mix of telluric, space, physical, life, abnegation, desolation, and creation mana began to swirl around the tip of his nose and mouth. 

Then before I had a moment to process, we were moving. 

I had a rather odd perspective on power. I was being trained by multiple people who stood at the pinnacle of power, and each of them was radically different from one another. Ikki was calm, precise, and a master over himself and the world around him. Orykson was imposing and ancient, but also softened by a spark of genuine curiosity about the world around him. Meadow was kind, and her power was the easiest to forget, but the way that Orykson and Ikki spoke of her made it clear that she had enough power to command respect. 

I had even personally dipped my toes into some aspects of greater power. I’d touched on soul mana, and formed roots. Edgar might be higher in advancement level than I was, but he hadn’t. 

For all the power he held, my personal perspective was skewed enough that it was simple to think of him as a researcher interested in beast magic and hudau mana. I tended to lump him into a similar category as Liz’ grandfather – more powerful than I was, but not so far above that I was unable to see their peak. 

Even when I’d seen him battle against the slaughter spirit that had given me and my team so much trouble, it had been a fairly close thing, as most of Edgar’s magic had a hard time interacting with the dreamstuff that made up the spirit. He’d been able to drive the spirit to self detonation, but it hadn’t been a crushing victory. 

But Edgar was no fifth gate mage. He wasn’t even sixth gate. 

While he had used an elixir to forcibly open his seventh gate, and thus would never be able to expand his seventh gate mana past the opening, nor advance again, he still had seventh gate mana. He was still four entire gates higher than I was. 

Edgar blasted through the earth like a drill, the magic ripping through soil and stone alike. My spatial sense went wild as it constantly found changes in local space through movement at a speed and in such an occupied area. My grip tightened on his tail, and I was barely able to hold on for dear life.

Moments later, we emerged in a rough, slipshod tunnel similar to the desolant hive that I had invaded with the help of guild members several months ago. Most of the hive was empty, unleashing an all out assault on Port Ruby, but there were still a handful of ants that were keeping things running. 

One of them spun the moment we dropped into the tunnel, fire forming in its mandibles, but before it could even release the flame, a bright yellow blade had speared it through the chest. 

“Which way?” Edgar asked, and I focused on my eyes, trying to feel my faint connection with Idyll. Before I could respond though, Dusk made a sound like wind in trees and pointed. 

Edgar’s body flared with light, a spell that I recognized as Forest Dragon’s Stride, and I barely had time to grab ahold of his tail again before he was rushing down the tunnel; dead roots, air, and earth bending out of his way, space and time flowing to speed his passage, and other, stranger applications of the forest mana. 

Dusk shouted directions, and we had to slow every few moments as groups of Desolants appeared. Each time, I started to prepare attacks, but Edgar simply cut them in half and continued moving. 

The ants, for all their faults, weren’t entirely mindless. They began to lay ambushes, unleashing their waves of magic from every direction at once when Edgar was forced to turn in the tunnels. 

That was when I got the opportunity to see one of the few other true hudau spells. 

Thick plates of hexagons, forged out of hudau mana, appeared in the air around us. The flood of attacks crashed into the shield, and were absorbed into the shielding. Each plate began to suddenly tip, glowing with desolation and whatever other element the ants had chosen to specialize in. The moment the plates were too out of balance, they popped into motes of energy that sank into the world around us, and Edgar had to conjure a new shield.

Honestly, as far as purely defensive techniques went, it wasn’t all that impressive. It was able to move, which was nice, but a thick barrier of force, or one of abnegation’s more imposing defensive magics wouldn’t have required the same, near-constant maintenance of forging new plates, nor would it have opened gaps. 

Then again, hudau mana’s greatest tool was its flexibility, not its defensive capability. Sure, it couldn’t cast many classic spells like Fireball, Force Armor, or Teleport, which only had a few types of mana going into them, but it was able to mimic a vast majority of beast mana types. 

Edgar continued to blaze through the tunnels of the desolant hive. We blazed through a queen’s quarters, but they were empty, so we kept following Dusk’s instructions, until we were there. 

A massive shaft, hundreds of feet across, and nearly half a mile deep, spanned out in front of us, and desolants were climbing up and down out of the hole. We were near the top, which appeared to open out into the forest. A quick pulse of Sense Directionality confirmed that we were a few miles away from Port Ruby, in an area of wilderness that had been set aside for a park. I could see multiple other paths branching off of it, like spokes on some absolutely massive wheel. 

I stretched my mana senses, and started to put together a picture of just what was going on.

Below and around me, the passages led to other colonies, all present within the supercolony. There were about seventy passages that I could sense leading off in distinctly different directions, which meant there were probably that many queens running around on the island, barring any that had entirely split off, like I was guessing my own had.

Far above, I could feel sources of mental mana, with the barest hint of abnegation. They were broken, having been completely disrupted by the horde of ants, but I could still feel the power they’d once held. Attention wards, designed to divert the focus of anyone who had stumbled upon the entry to this grand working. 

Except, that was a problem. Desolants were unusual among beasts, containing almost entirely pure desolation mana. They tainted it to other fields through the creation of specific beast cores, like how the fire ants created cores of solar energy in their body linked to their spellcasting, but they were still ultimately destructive. Even the mind ants that made up fourth gate soldiers were still, ultimately focused on attack, ripping and tearing at the minds of their enemies. 

It was possible, technically, that the ant queens had used their Arcanist ability to command lesser beasts to form the wards and seals around this place, but those wards were also quite exact. They’d been formed by a human mentalist, or a beast that also broke the general tendency, only having mental mana. 

And there wasn’t any sort of beast like that in the area.

No, a human had built those wards, or else a mental magic elemental that was coordinating with the ants, but that seemed supremely unlikely. I’d have bet everything I owned on it being a human. 

Dusk snapped me out of my line of thoughts by pointing downwards. She made a river-rushing noise, indicating that it was down there. 

I peered over the edge and cast Surveyor's Eye, zooming in my vision until I could see the bottom.

Sure enough, deep down in the bottom of the pit, I saw battle. 

Constructs, seemingly crafted out of quartz, and in the shape of drakes, swarmed, battling against waves of lesser desolants, unleashing sparking breath weapons from their maws and smashing down with enhanced tails. The desolants fought back, and in their midst, I spotted a somewhat familiar face. 

A young man with gray hair, spinning a puzzle cube, sent out waves of different attack magic, and seemed to somehow be using it to organize, command, and direct the ants, in a similar manner to how the queens had. 

But the battle between the crystal constructs and the ants was just the periphery. In the center, a far more intense battle raged. 

Idyll had manifested over a strange, twisting knot of magic that resembled a watermelon made of crystal and silver light, whipping her body back and forth. Her body was girded in stone armor, she wielded a blade made of glittering jewels, and she looked like a painting of a warrior out of myth and legend

With each motion, she cast shockwave spells, ones almost identical to the one that Dusk favored. I could see the air itself twisting to give the shockwaves more power, and the earth beneath and around her opponent rumbling to rip up and tear through her opponent, in a fashion very similar to the rippling of earth within Dusk’s realm when she reshaped it through the use of her dominion. 

Her opponent was no slouch, though, and I blasted my sensory spells, then infused them with resonance, reaching down even as Edgar leapt into the pit, using some sort of magic to slow his fall. 

A desolant queen, one who was standing solidly in seventh gate, was battling against Idyll. She threw out attacks of every element, as I expected from a desolant queen, mixed in mental assaults, and even conjured up waves of power that tore Idyll’s spells apart in some sort of horrifically unstable counterspell. 

But there were two attacks, clearly pinnacles of her magic, that held more power than anything else. She used them sparingly, so they were clearly seventh gate spells, but each time she cast one, it shifted the flow of the fight. 

The first was a spiritual destruction attack, one that almost reminded me of Dawn’s dragon breath, which tore into Idyll’s damaged form and sent cracks through the magic keeping Idyll alive and tethered to the land. 

The second were arcs of pure silver, destructive magic with a sheer purity that I had never seen before. Anywhere it touched, matter was simply destroyed. It left nothing behind – not ash, nor dust, nor bone. It simply… deleted.

Idyll continued to fight, pressing shockwaves forward, sending glowing crescents of energy through her blade, and taking blows on her amor, but she was outmatched. Her mana felt thin and fragile, and while the shockwave spells did have the density of her high advancement, it was clearly the only spell she had managed to repair. If not for the jeweled blade and impressive armor, which I had no doubt were crafted by Elio, she would have fallen already. 

Then Edgar slammed into the ground, I teleported, and the second wave of the battle began.