Magus Reborn [Stubbing in Three Weeks]

374. Spirit blocking

When Kai had devised the plan, he'd known this moment was coming.The same thing had happened during his advancement. Mana drew spirits, and enough of it drew all of them. They were also deep in a part of the plane where the spirits were stronger than average, and he had known that too. But somewhere in the back of his mind, he had quietly expected to find the earth sovereign before things reached this point.

As it turned out, that was nothing more than wishful thinking.

It started out manageable. Two spirits came at once—nothing the array couldn't contain if they weren't too large. Veridia also handled them cleanly, pushing mana through the formations and sending both tumbling somewhere far across the plane.

Then a few came at once, and Elias had to step in.

The array had limits. It could only hold so many bodies at a time, and with spirits pressing in from the entrance faster than it could process them, someone had to buy it room to work. Elias created the space for Killian, Claire and Elder Caelith to fill the gaps and hold the line just long enough for the array to send one or two spirits out of the clearing. Then they pulled back to let the next ones through in a controlled stream rather than a flood.

But control was becoming harder to maintain.

The spirits soon became bigger, faster and harder to hold in place long enough for the array to do its work. The pressure climbed steadily, and eventually, the point came where Kai couldn’t stay above it all and simply direct.

He looked at the half dozen spirits throwing themselves against the stone wall Elias had raised across the clearing entrance—a thick, dense barrier that the Magus kept reinforcing from behind, his jaw tight with the effort of it.

Some of the spirits clawed at the base, trying to tear through. Others launched themselves upward, trying to clear it entirely, and met Killian's lightning and Elder Caelith's wind attacks on the way over—sharp cracks of electricity and compressed air that shoved them back before they could land inside the perimeter.

The choke point was holding. Kai had chosen this place specifically because three walls of trees and one narrow entrance was the closest thing to an advantage they were going to get out here.

But the spirits were stronger than he had planned for, and they weren't slowing down.

The earthen wall was already cracking.

He could see fractures spreading across its surface. Elias was the first to notice. The Magus reshaped the spell mid-breath, pulling spikes out from the breaking sections and driving them outward into the spirits pressing against it. Several of them caught the spikes clean.

But none of them stopped.

If anything, the pain made them worse. There was a chorus of enraged sounds rolling out from the tree line as they threw themselves harder against what remained of the barrier.

Then one of them made it through.

A monkey-like spirit, lean and fast, found a gap in the wall that Elias was a half second too slow to close and launched itself through before anyone could cut it off. Three attacks came to meet it immediately—Killian's sword, Claire's lightning bolt, Elder Caelith's wind hitting it from different angles at once.

The spirit screeched, and then the next second, there were suddenly dozens of it.

Copies burst outward in every direction, identical in every detail, and the attacks passed through most of them like they weren't there at all. The real one slipped through the chaos and made straight for the array.

Alarm flared hard through Kai's chest.

The array was already full. A massive scorpion spirit was caught in the tendrils at its center, thrashing with everything it had, and Veridia stood at the edge of the formation looking like she was running on the last wisp of mana she had left, trying to push enough through to finish the teleportation.

Realising he needed to intervene, Kai immediately rushed towards the monkey spirit.

But suddenly, the scorpion's tail lengthened—stretched well past what its body should have allowed—and whipped toward him. He saw it coming and flew over it, and as he cleared the arc, he released the spell structure he'd been building in the background through all of it.

Threads of flame shot outward in every direction at once. Half of them coiled around the scorpion, layering over the tendrils, making sure it had nowhere to go even if it broke free. The other half fanned out toward the monkey spirit and its copies, draping across all of them without distinction.

The monkey screeched and ignored them. The copies ignored them too, knowing it could easily dodge through the attack.

But the threads weren't there for that. He simply used them to figure out what was illusion and what was real, as they sent back mana signatures of all the monkey spirits it touched, then as he turned left, and burnt one of the threads instantly.

Flames rushed along it in a single sharp motion and hit the real spirit full on. It caught immediately, the fire climbing fast on its fur, and the copies flickered out one by one as the source that held them together came apart.

The scorpion vanished a moment later as Veridia finally pushed the teleportation through, the glow flaring once before the array went quiet again.

While that happened, he had already finished another spell.

Hands of flame materialized in the air around him. They shot toward the monkey spirit as it whimpered due to the flames. It turned to run, but didn't make it a single step. The hands closed around its neck and hauled it upward, and it screeched as more flames ate into the fur and flesh, before the hands swung hard and threw it back into the center of the array.

Tendrils erupted from the ground to meet it.

The monkey slashed at them, claws raking through two before they could fully coil, but it was already burning and the tendrils kept coming, wrapping around its limbs, torso and then pressing it flat against the ground with the combined weight of the bindings. It tried to split again, reaching for the illusion technique that had worked moments ago, but nothing happened this time.

The array was also built to siphon mana from anything caught in its grasp, feeding itself off whatever it held. Every time the spirit reached for its ability, the array took the fuel before it could form. The monkey spirit could struggle all it wanted—it wasn’t going anywhere.

Kai turned away from it and looked toward the wall. Or what was left of it.

More spirits were coming over and through it. The barrier was failing in too many places at once for Elias to patch faster than it broke. Three of them had already made it past the line and were fighting his party, and he could clearly tell they wouldn't be able to hold them back for long.

He moved toward them immediately, more hands of flame conjuring in the air and moving ahead of him.

The spirits were varied and none of them were small. A thick-bodied beetle spirit the size of a cart, its shell dark and ridged like hammered iron, was grinding toward Elder Caelith with its mandibles. Beside it, something that looked like a bear stripped down to muscle and stone moved with a low, rolling weight towards Claire, its every step leaving cracks in the ground. A third snake spirit—long and serpentine, its scales a deep earthen green—had coiled partially around Killian and was trying to squeeze, his lightning sparking against its body without finding doing any real damage.

As the spirits were focused entirely on his party, they never saw the hands coming.

Three of them shot in from the side simultaneously, each one finding a spirit and closing hard.

The beetle let out a grinding shriek as flames wrapped around the joints in its shell where the plating didn't quite meet. The stone bear roared, the grip burning into the rock of its hide. The serpent released Killian instantly, thrashing against the hand locked around its midsection. Then, the hands threw them straight into the array.

The tendrils surged up the moment the three spirits hit the ground, locking each one down before they could orient themselves. The array was full now—four spirits pinned and held, the formations working hard to keep them there.

But the wall wasn't going to last much longer.

More spirits had gathered on the other side of it, pressing in with a weight that Elias was visibly struggling to push back against. Kai looked toward Veridia first and felt his stomach drop slightly. She was still feeding mana into the array, hands pressed to the formations, but the output had thinned. The glow wasn't as sharp as it had been. Her reserves had to be running close to empty.

He reached into his robes without breaking stride, pulled out a high grade mana potion and sent it cutting through the air toward her.

"Catch."

She looked up, hand already rising, and snatched it cleanly. For a brief moment she just looked down at it, then she pulled the stopper and drank it in one go, barely pausing between swallowing and setting her attention back on the array.

Kai blinked, mildly surprised at her speed. Then again, they were in a desperate situation.

He finally turned back to the wall.

It was worse than it had been ten seconds ago. The spirits on the other side had multiplied, and the sounds coming through the cracks were getting louder. Layers of growls, screeches and heavy impacts told him the wall breaking was only a matter of time.

He started building another spell immediately, letting a plan take shape in his head as the spell structure formed between his hands.

"Elias," he said after a second. "Drop the wall."

The old man turned and looked at him like he'd misheard. His eyes went to Kai's face and whatever he found there made him close his mouth again. He released the spell structure without another word, and the earthen wall came apart all at once—chunks of stone and compacted earth dissolving as the magic holding them together simply stopped.

The spirits came through like a boulder down a slope.

Kai activated the spell the next second. Dark flames rose across both his hands, and he let them pour outward, streaming from his palms in a steady torrent aimed straight at the mass of spirits flooding in through the gap.

The spirits at the front didn't even flinch. They came forward anyway, some of them barely glancing at the fire rushing toward them.

Then the flames expanded.

What had been a stream became a wall, and what became a wall kept growing—surging outward and upward, swelling in every direction, climbing larger and larger until the wave of dark fire dwarfed everything standing in front of it.

At the last second, the spirits at the front finally understood what was coming.

They screeched and turned, scrambling over each other trying to reverse direction. It didn't matter. The flames hit them before any of them could do anything. The flames clung, latching onto fur and carapace and hide alike, spreading along the surface and eating into the spirits with a persistence that ordinary flames never had.

A few spirits at the edges managed to pull back far enough to run, disappearing into the trees the way they had come, but the others weren't so lucky.

These were no ordinary flames. They burned the body, but they were also like a poison that seeped inward, finding the mana running through a spirit's system and corrupting it from the inside, unraveling the core that made them dangerous in the first place.

The rest of his party also moved the moment the wave of flames landed.

Elias drove thick square platforms of spiked earth forward into the struggling mass, grinding into anything that hadn’t gone down yet. Killian closed on one of the smaller spirits, blade opening a cut clean across its torso before it could orient itself.

Claire and Elder Caelith held their ground behind the line, Claire's projectiles snapping into the burning bodies, while Elder Caelith's wind fanned the dark flames higher, spreading them further across anything still standing.

Then a sharp purple light pulsed from his back.

Kai turned. The array was empty again. Every spirit that had been pinned inside it was gone, the tendrils retracting back into the ground.

He looked at Veridia.

She looked better than she had a few minutes ago—the mana potion had put some color back into her face—but better was relative. The strain was still written into every part of her expression, the particular kind of exhaustion that came not from physical effort but from hours of sustained magical output. Teleportation arrays were hungry work, and she had been feeding this one for hours now.

She turned and met his eyes before he could look away.

"Arzan, I think we should stop. The earth sovereign isn't coming, and you've ended up attracting too many strong spirits."

Kai didn't answer right away.

He knew she was right. The plan hadn't produced what he needed, and the situation around them had been steadily climbing past manageable for a while now. Continuing meant more of the same—more spirits, stronger ones, and a party that was already being stretched thin.

But did he really want to give up on it like this? And if he did give up, what then?

It wasn't like another option was waiting for him. The earth sovereign wasn't going to walk up and introduce itself, and every spirit they had encountered so far had been far more interested in tearing them apart than exchanging words. He could see it clearly enough without needing to think too hard about it. But their situation was also going to simply get worse. Even if he managed to drag more spirits into the array, he wasn't sure Veridia had enough left in her reserves to teleport more. She needed to stop, and rest.

The decision was made quietly. His party came first. Pushing them further into harm for a plan that clearly wasn't delivering wasn't something he was willing to do.

He opened his mouth to say it. Then the scream came.

It tore through everything—louder than anything that had come before it, the kind of sound that didn't just hit the ears but pressed against the chest and told every instinct in the body to run away. Even Elias, mid-battle with two spirits still burning from the dark flames, went slightly pale.

"What now?" he said.

Kai didn't answer. He was already building a spell, hands moving through the structure on reflex, because whatever was coming, he was going to need it ready.

Then the second scream rang out, and every spirit in the clearing stopped trashing.

It happened so fast it took Kai a full second to process what he was seeing. Spirits that had been pressing forward through flame and injury and blood, simply turned and ran. All of them. At once. Disappearing back into the trees without looking back, the sound of their movement fading quickly into the forest.

Silence settled over the clearing, and Kai went still.

He knew what this meant. Smaller creatures didn't run from a fight like this from screams until they realised whoever it belonged to was dangerous. There was an order to every wild place, and the spirits of the earth plane were no different.

Something stronger was coming. The question was what to do about it. If he just stood here and waited, whatever was on its way would arrive and—

The third scream split the air, and this time the ground trembled beneath it.

Vibrations pushed up through the earth in rhythmic waves. The trees around the clearing shook, their massive trunks swaying and cracks split open across the ground in jagged lines spreading outward from the tree line.

Claire and Elder Caelith went down immediately, losing their footing as the ground lurched beneath them. Killian and Elias managed to stay upright, but only barely, fighting to keep their balance.

Wind gathered at Kai's hands immediately and he split it fast—dividing it into separate hands, one for each of them, sending them sweeping down across the clearing. The hands closed around all four of his party members and Kai pulled, lifting them off the shaking ground and swinging them clear to the side just as the vibrations surged into something violent.

The next second, something came through the trees.

Massive didn't describe it well. It moved through the treeline the way something moves through tall grass—the trees simply gave way, snapping and tilting as the spirit's body pushed past them without slowing.

Kai threw himself upward to clear its bulk as it crossed the clearing in a single stride and landed directly inside the array.

The ground cracked beneath the impact.

The spirit let out another scream, and then the tendrils came, surging up from every formation in the array at once, wrapping around its legs, its torso, trying to press it down the way they had pressed down everything else before it.

As they did so, Kai finally got a clear look at it.

It was enormous, far larger than any other spirit he had seen, and it looked extremely similar to the storm sovereign.

Its body was layered with rock and soil, with dull veins of ore running across it. Thick roots coiled around its limbs and torso, grown so deep into it that they felt inseparable from its form. There were particles of rocks gathered around its horns.

When it turned, its brown eyes swept across the clearing with rage.

It was the earth sovereign, he was sure of it. Angrier than anything Kai had seen inside this plane, but it was the spirit they had been looking for.

Despite everything–the hours, the chaos, the near collapse of the whole operation—the plan had worked. That was what mattered.

Kai turned immediately. "Claire! Get the storm sovereign out. We need to—"

The earth sovereign roared.

The sound hit them all at once, and Kai's eyes snapped back to the array. The tendrils; the same tendrils that had held wyvern-sized spirits flat against the ground without straining—were breaking. One by one, then faster, snapping apart as the sovereign shifted its weight and pulled against them with a force the array simply hadn't been built to account for.

Then its brown eyes moved.

They found Veridia, standing at the edge of the formation.

***

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