The Third Portal: Chapter Forty-Six

The guild leader and I practiced well past the agreed upon hours of training. The moment she discovered that I was able to use a lot of time and space magic, she immediately insisted on working to weave that into combat as well, making me use Capture Moment on my attacks, working on my speed and reflexes with the spell until it was basically second nature for me to weave the spell into every spell I cast. 

I wondered if that was something Ikki had been trying to drill into me with his endless spars, and hoped that I hadn’t just been stupid and not picking up on it. It would be very like him to let it lie until either I discovered it myself, or he thought it was acting as a major block to my learning. 

Once I was consistently using the temporal anchoring spell on my attacks, she had me start using Reposition Anchor to move the Captured Moment to another point, and then either Material or Magical Echo, depending on which made the most sense. She had me use Reposition Anchor to teleport my illusions around, and to make illusionary versions of my attacks as well. 

The entire time, she also had me working with the Mold Aura spell, which was a task and a half on its own. It was a fairly complex spell that involved concentrating my mana senses on the point that I wanted to project them from, almost like when I was hyper focusing them on something specific, rather than just letting them hang around me. From there, I had to use the spell to do a strange sort of projection, where the mana naturally flowing out of me was spun along a cord and to the concentrated senses, where I then had to project it out, as if I were there. 

The really difficult part was that I could very easily release the flow before it reached the end of the tether, causing the spell to collapse. It wasn’t terribly hard to get it to flow along the full tether while being slow and careful, but doing it quickly required a good bit of mana manipulation skill, especially when I was swapping the location rapidly between teleports and illusions. 

The good thing was that the cord didn’t exactly follow the same logic as if it had been a real, physical cord. It was massless, and not entirely real in the first place, only a projection of my mana, so the only delays existed in my skill, not with the spell itself. The guild leader could whip the spell around in an instant to seemingly cause her presence to teleport around with wild abandon. 

By the time she called it a night on training, I felt like I’d made considerable progress with my understanding of my spells. I hadn’t ingrained any of them yet, but with all the practicing I’d done during the weeks of setting up the array, and with some practical experience, I didn’t think that it would be too terribly long before I was able to make that jump.

Right as I was preparing to leave, though, the guild leader held up her hand to stop me, and extended a card. It was black and silver, and one side was embossed with the symbol of the Nightheart guild – a realistic heart with a fang and claw crossed over it. On the other was the symbol that I guessed to be her personal mark as the local guild leader, a set of five tails swaying in unison. 

“If you want to join, you’d be welcome to,” she said. “I can fast track you through here on Crysite, as I’m sure you learned with Gakodi, but if you wanted to join the main convocation, this should at least speed the process up.” 

“I thought you were focused around beasts and demihumans,” I asked, taking the card and flicking it into the bedroom drawer. 

“I’m pretty sure you do qualify as a demihuman by most definitions of the word,” she returned. “But even if you don’t, it’s not a hard and fast rule of the guild, only a general tendency.”

“I’ll consider it,” I said honestly. “I’ve got a lot to do in my immediate future, but it’s something I’d consider.” 

“Glad to hear it,” she agreed. 

Then there was a flicker as her image winked out of existence, and all trace of her mana faded from the area. Still partially in training mode, I flooded the area with my senses, but I couldn’t pick up on even a whisper of her presence. 

“I guess she is an Arcanist. Of course she has some tricks of her own,” I said aloud, before turning and stretching. My mana was drier than dry, so I started walking back along the road to town.

With the final meeting out of the way, I was able to return to working on the array with abandon, and was able to make excellent progress on it. The time continued to fly by, and before I knew it, whatever security measures had been put in place were apparently completed, and the Organshield crystal was delivered. To my surprise, I even recognized the person doing the delivery. 

“Elio!” I cried, waving my hand to the old dragon. I hadn’t seen him in person since the Idyll-Flume, given how busy he was setting things up and crushing the more powerful slaughter spirits and threats on the island. I sent out a mental call to Dusk and Dawn, both of whom were occupied with their own projects right now. 

“Hello Malachi,” Elio said, stumping down the road towards the plot of land I’d purchased. “I had heard from Idyll that you were on the island, but imagine my surprise when you managed to land one of the top prizes.” 

He shook his head and tossed me the crystal, which I snagged out of the air. It had the strange, mutable feeling that I’d come to associate with a lot of natural treasures, humming with a powerful blend of life and telluric energy, but also with a surprising amount of death and solar, bound into the function of it. The crystal was black, polished until it shone, and had a dozen interweaving lines of red through it, which was where the sensations of death and solar magic were coming from. 

“I got a solid head start by–” I started to say, but he just nodded. 

“I know, I read briefly about it,” the dragon said. He was about to say more when a portal snapped into place next to me, and Dusk and Dawn flew out. Elio nodded his greeting.

“Ah, hello Du…” 

He trailed off, staring at Dawn. 

“That is NOT the shade of a sky estragon,” he said. “That’s purportedly what your bond is.” 

“It was the best cover I could think of, to be perfectly honest,” I admitted. “It’s pretty good, though, isn’t it?” 

Elio ignored me, stepping forward and extending a hand to Dawn, who floated through the air and curled around his arm. He examined her for a long time, his mana senses pouring over her, before he looked up at me. 

“Incredible. A soul dragon. I’ve only seen two others in all my years, and…” 

He flinched, then shook his head. 

“One was already dead, and its body was breaking apart and dissolving into threads of magic again, and the second was the experimental creation of a mad Occultist. One deranged enough that even the so-called-sage found him worthy of killing. That dragon was infected with the same killing desires and hatred as its creator.” 

In a strange way, I was relieved to hear that Dawn wasn’t the only starfall dragon that Elio had ever encountered before, even if the other had tragically passed. The dragon was old, even by dragon standards. He was older than Meadow, though still younger than Orykson, and unlike Edgar, Elio was a true Occultist, albeit one that hadn’t formed a Title. If Dawn had been the only one that Elio had encountered in his centuries-long life, then it would have been aweing, but it would have also been rather terrifying. 

“Well, for what it’s worth, I can attest that Dawn isn’t planning to kill anyone,” I said, causing Dawn to burble her agreement. Elio let out a long, tired sigh, then turned to Dusk.

“For your purchase, you’ll need to come with me to my laboratory after your brother is finished subsuming the power of the crystal.” 

“Oh, what did you get?” I asked, looking at Dusk. She put her hands on her hips and proudly announced that she’d purchased a custom growth item, constructed by Elio. 

“You… You what?” I asked, gaping at her. “Primes, how did you get all of the points for it? That’s more than I had, and even counting the land and potion against me, I had a four thousand lead head start.” 

Dusk giggled and flopped onto her cloud, making a noise like rolling winds across the desert as she told me that unlike me, she’d been working 

“Hey!” I protested. “I have been working. Just… Mostly on the array. And the myrmekes queen.” 

Dusk floated over and patted my cheek to let me know that of course I had been, so I glowered at her, while Dawn radiated waves of amusement. Elio coughed, and I turned back to him. 

“Sorry.” 

“It’s fine,” he said. “Probably healthier than some bonds, to be truthful. But you do need to get a start on using the crystal.” 

He raised his hand and ruby red light began to leak from the ground around me. It formed into a circle that condensed into a sort of semi-corporeal form. Bands of emerald green began to rise from the edges, outlining the edges of a full sphere, before turning into a sphere of strange multicolored light with flowing enchantments in blue and purple. 

“As a part of earning one of the top prizes, I’ll use my gemstone magic to assist with the incorporation of the treasure. It is a crystal, after all. Just take a seat and absorb it into you so we can begin.” 

I sat, just as I’d been instructed, and gripped the fist sized crystal, and squeezed, running a thread of my ungated mana through the treasure to activate it. It melted into my body, and I felt myself begin to shift and change. The root of resolve that had bound the intersection point of my full-gate spells glowed, reaching for the power of the stone, and of the surrounding enchantments. I was wary, after Idyll’s warning, and after what had happened with its false promise before of being able to consume an endless number of full-gate enhancements, but the power didn’t seem to have quite the same edge to it that it once had. I allowed it to start drinking from the crystal, and from the enchantments in the air around me. 

The power rushed into my body and spirit, and my body lit up in pain. It was like something toxic had been injected right into my veins, and it was burning my organs apart from within. Thanks to my training of internal energy array manipulation with Espen, I was able to feel a bit better as parts of my vital energy were unwound, the very energy that made my heart beat, let my brain transmit mental and knowledge energy, and let my lungs absorb tempest energy from the air, melting like ice cream left out in the summer sun. 

The power of the crystal rushed in then, burning new pathways within the empty space, laying the routes for the telluric energy. Like putting metal bars in concrete to reinforce it, it would make everything stronger. The root of resolve leapt into action then, burning more and more pathways with the power stolen from the enchantments that Elio had laid. I felt it draining them, then another surge of mana came from the old dragon. 

The more it drained, the more it wanted to drain. If I just let it take–

I cut it off, forcing my will on the root, slamming it shut. The power died, and my vital energy returned, layering around the telluric energy. As my beast core connected, soul mana began to rush through the energy, which ran back into me on a spiritual level, tingling, flooding into my soul mana and back out again. 

Faint tinges of earthen power began to flow up into my mana-garden, not enough to change the mana composition, but enough to slightly aspect it, like when I’d used a death scorpion in amber as a Temporal Basin. 

It seemed… suitable. I wasn’t sure how else to put it. I wondered if, perhaps, if I’d gotten a non-choice legacy, if I’d have naturally had telluric mana. 

The magic settled into place, stable, and I opened my eyes. I rose to my feet, and as I did, I felt tougher. Stronger. It wasn’t as drastic of a reformation as breaking into a new gate, but it was absolutely an improvement.

“Well,” I said, turning to look at Dusk. “Seems like it’s your turn now?”