The Third Portal: Chapter Nine

After a bit of discussion with my bonds and Hannah, I reached out my hand, then paused. 

There was something… off… about it, that was tickling my nascent truths, or perhaps the wind of fortune. I didn’t know exactly what it was, or even if I was imagining it, but it was enough to guide my hand. 

“There’s something off,” I said, explaining the feeling to the other two. 

“I don’t really care either way,” Hannah shrugged. “If you’re feeling antsy, go for it.” 

I groaned at the awful pun, then looked to Dusk and Dawn. Neither one objected, so I snatched up the ant colony mission while trying to rationalize my choice. 

It seemed like there were two types of ants – the aggressive desolants, and the more passive earthbound ants. Why would one group from the same colony be aggressive, but not the others? It could be an instance of soldier ants versus worker ants, but I wasn’t sold on that idea. And the Curse of the Wild Spirit spell needed testing, and if these ants truly did have almost pure mana, it should be a good baseline?

No, if I was being honest with myself, there wasn’t much of a rational reason for it. I just needed to see for myself. 

I took the mission and stood in line, then passed over the ID that I’d been issued, completed a bit of paperwork. 

“The Candleseers left a sensory checkpoint out there,” the attendant told me, brushing the hair from his eyes.

“A what?” 

“Do you know any anchoring spells? They’re like those, but instead of being a stable platform to attach more magic into, they connect into sensory spells and mana senses. It won’t guide a teleport to where you need to go, but it will let you know when you’re getting close. And here.” 

He handed me a bracelet, which I picked up and examined. It was clearly enchanted, and though I couldn’t exactly see what was going on, I thought I could feel a mix of third and fourth gate mana running through it, all at fourth gate mana density. The third gate spell seemed to be Seven League Step and a relevant pair of meta spells, alongside two more fourth gate meta spells. 

It reminded me of what Orykson had talked about, specialists who dedicated their entire mana-garden to empowering a single ability. 

“Teleportation bracelet?” I asked. 

“Yep. Snap it and it will call you back to the nearest teleportation gemstone, with a range of about three hundred miles. It’s a one use enchantment, and if it breaks, it’ll be a hundred points to replace it. We do allow a deficit, so long as you’re not overusing them, but you will need to square the debt eventually. Don’t be afraid to use it if you’re life’s in danger, but don’t waste it.” 

“Got it,” I said, tying the band around my wrist. It was going to make forcing Foxstep under my control even more of a bear, but it would keep me safe, so I couldn’t really be upset. 

I thanked the attendant, then headed back to the teleportation room and began charging up the gateway to Port Heliodoor. It took a good bit of mana, same as it had last time, and when we emerged in Port Heliodoor, I didn’t even bother checking in with Mallory’s mom, though I could sense her and another creation mage of roughly the same power in the tent. 

I drew power from the red star trees, pointer moss, emperor’s tree, and blood carnations, restoring as much of my power as I could, then began casting Seven League Step, flexing my sensory spells out around me. Sense Directionality, meant for long range identification of teleportation platforms, spatial anchors, and natural spatial lodestones, was the first to pick it up, and I guided two more casts of Seven League Step to get where I needed. 

On the second cast, I felt the spell reach down into the soil of my mana-garden, rooting itself firmly. The ingrained effect settled through my spirit, and I felt it improving itself, Foxstep, Transport Item, and even parts of Spatial Anchor. 

I rolled my shoulders back at the tingly feeling, then leapt into the air, catching myself with an Immovable Lock and starting to run through the air while Dusk and Dawn flew through the air next to me. 

When we arrived at the checkpoint, I stopped for a moment to cast my senses around me while looking in every which direction I could. 

The area was mostly short scrub and tall grass. A few small patches of the grass glowed slightly with abnegation and creation energy, bound into tight knots that suggested some degree of innate magic. It was weak, barely even first gate, but Dawn tried to eat one of the stalks. She did, then forged one of her mana crystals, and did it again. She ate several more stalks of grass, seeming to process the power into an improvement of the mana crystal spell, so I mentally asked Dusk to zip over and absorb a sample into herself.

My mana senses whipped through the wind, through space, life, death, and remembering the entire escapade with the animation fungi, I also made sure to extend my senses down into the earth below me. There, I could sense the dense telluric energy that the report had mentioned. I didn’t think I’d found the telluric nexus that was growing gold or anything like that, just the side effect of having an extremely strong one nearby. It tickled at my senses a little bit in a strange way that I couldn’t identify. I chalked it up to simply being a particularly rich natural area. 

There were a few animals moving about, most of them fairly weak normal animals like deer, choruks, and opossums, but I caught a small group of trolls, but their bodies were currently made of stone due to the sunlight out and about, and even if they weren’t, most were only first or second gate, with a few third gate. I didn’t sense the ants that I’d been promised, but this was where the team had begun their scouting. It was probably deeper into the wilds. 

“This is a pretty place,” Hannah sighed into my mind, and I felt her legacy change slightly as she looked over the place. I was making a bit of progress on fulfilling the dream that she’d died holding, and that left me feeling a mix of sadness that I wouldn’t have her around all that much longer, and happiness that I was giving her spirit what she needed.

Shaking off the feelings, I started walking deeper in, moving faintly in the direction of the floating mountains. As my vampiric senses flared out, I wrinkled my nose. Something in the area smelled. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant, but it reminded me of the groves of olive trees that I’d seen in Delitone, but slightly more sour. It was too cold for olive trees, and most of what was around me were pine and cherry, but even those only grew in small clusters. I turned down the mana that I was sending to the spell and kept walking forwards. 

I caught the first ant at the edge of my senses after about a half a mile hike. It glowed with telluric energy, that was true, but I thought that the Candleseers guild members had been selling them short. The mana was more complex than just telluric, even if it was very heavily earth based. It also held a decent swathe of creation, knowledge, and physical mana, plus I could also feel faint traces of other things like life, death, solar, and lunar mana. Fainter even still, I could sense desolation mana woven through them. 

This particular ant was weaker than I was, nearing the middle of second gate, but its power seemed unusually solid for an animal. Without the ability to cast Analyze Mana-Garden, I couldn’t be sure, but I’d have bet at least ten points that the ant had fully mastered or ingrained all of its first gate spells before it broke through into second gate. Different from some instinct driven animals, who tended to advance when they got the resources to do so, rather than waiting. 

Was this luck, or was it endemic to this species? 

I bounced over in the direction of the ant, and Dusk whistled, asking me what I’d felt. I explained, and she zipped over, rushing faster than I could move without Foxstep. Dawn and I followed at a more reasonable pace, landing next to the ant. 

It was roughly the size of a medium-large dog, like a collie, with six large legs. The legs were a lot thicker than I’d expected for an ant, but given how much larger the ant’s body was, I supposed that it made sense for the legs to have bulged as well. The mandibles loomed bigger than I’d expected too, extending close to a foot off the ant’s face, but they looked less like jaws than they did… shovels? Hands? Shovel-face-hands! Something of that sort. 

 Its two large antennae waggled in the air around it as it tried to study us with its large compound eyes. They gleamed like multifaceted jewels in the light, and I had to wonder how well it could actually see. I couldn’t imagine an eye shaped like that would be very good at precise vision. 

Its mana senses reached out and brushed me, and I brushed it with my own. It was clearly weaker than me, and I could have shoved it aside, even without casting something like Impel Senses, but I didn’t see a reason to. 

Its legs twitched, and it tapped the ground delicately. There was a slight pulse of power from the ant, which seemed tuned to the vibrations in the ground, and I waved to it. It froze for a moment, then tapped the ground again and sent out another pulse. 

“Hello there,” I said, and my voice was caught in the vibrations of the ant’s spell, causing a slight warping and distortion. It caused the ant to twitch its antennae a whole bunch, then it slowly took a step forward. The motion of its legs was markedly different than those of humans, probably due to the fact that it had six, and the entire affair looked unduly complicated. I had a sudden surge of gratitude that I hadn’t been born an ant, because just walking that way seemed annoying. 

When I just watched it, it scooted away, and the air filled with a citrus scent as it released some sort of compound into the air. If I didn’t have Vampiric Senses and the innate lifesense granted by ingraining Analyze Life, I couldn’t have caught it at all. Heck, if I hadn’t gotten the boost from the petrified omnieye egg, I probably would have missed it. 

I narrowed my eyes as I recalled how Kene had gone completely unattached when I’d fought a swarm of Crystaldigger Wasps. 

Pheromones. 

They’d used a potion made with the leaves of the blueshade plant to coat themselves in pheromones and present themselves as a non-threat. 

Dusk came to the same conclusion that I had, as she started laughing so hard that she almost fell off her flying cloud. Between gasps, she tinkled out that I’d just been marked as a non-threat by something a full stage below me. 

I snorted in amusement, but wasn’t actually that annoyed by it. Dawn didn’t seem to realize what was happening, and when I tried to explain it to me, she attacked my mind with innate mathematical understandings that left even Hannah’s head spinning. I didn’t think it was supposed to be a mental attack, just her way of repeating what I’d said to make sure she understood correctly. 

I let the topic drop and summoned the blueshade plant from Dusk’s realm. 

It was time to see what I could do with pheromones.