Magus Reborn [Stubbing in Three Weeks]

373. Holding cheese for rats

PS; i've messed up the chapters and just edited it. so you probably missed 2-3 chapters whole. i suggest u go back and read them and then come here! thank you and im sorry. -

Making an array wasn't easy.

It was even less easy for someone like Kai, whose expertise had never really leaned that way. He knew enough to get by, but arrays as a craft had always sat just outside his main focus.

What he did have, though, was something that made up for a lot of that.

His master's room.

Tucked inside his astral space, it was less a room and more a library that had never quite decided to stop growing. Books lined every surface, stacked and shelved in an order that probably made sense to his master, just not necessarily him. There were all sorts of books there, including ones on arrays.

So while the others cleared vines, Kai sat with his eyes closed, looking every bit like someone deep in meditation, but he was actually moving through the shelves and taking out books on arrays.

Finding it didn't take long, and once he had it open in front of him, it was simply a matter of pressing the array into memory before bringing it back out into the real world through the tip of his finger.

The drawing itself went smoothly enough.

Most arrays demanded materials, specific components that created various magical effects. This one only needed mana, which on the earth plane was almost funny to worry about. It was everywhere.

Thick in the air, soaked onto the ground, running through the roots of every tree around them. Kai worked in modified mana transference seals to let the array feed directly from the atmosphere, and once those were in place, he had a quiet feeling that it could even run indefinitely if left alone.

The plane simply had that much mana to give. That part went well, but the next part did not.

For the array to be of use to them, Kai needed to add a manual control seals, something that’d let him turn it on and off rather than just let it run. Without that, the whole plan fell apart before it started.

The problem was that those seals had never been part of the original structure. Adding something new to an existing array wasn’t like slotting in a missing piece. It was more like adjusting a knot in the middle of a rope and hoping nothing else came loose.

He sat with it for a while, turning the problem over, testing small additions in his head before committing anything to the ground.

The progress was annoyingly slow, so much so that even Veridia who had been working on the vines walked towards him, and asked, “What’s wrong?”

He looked at her, briefly considering the question before he explained, half expecting her to just listen. Instead she looked at the array for a long moment, then quietly pointed out where the control seals could be worked in without stressing the surrounding structure.

As it turned out, she was quite good with seals and arrays.

She walked him through it clearly once he laid out everything he knew—where the structure was flexible, where it wasn't, and exactly what parts shouldn't be tampered with. The solution came together faster than Kai expected.

It worked out well, too, because he'd already been planning to talk to her about it since she would be a central part of running the array.

But working that closely with her came with a cost.

The more she heard and saw, the more interested she looked. The array Kai was building wasn't something from a common textbook. It was advanced, developed in a different era entirely and any decent Mage can figure that out, much less Veridia.

She started asking questions. Casual ones at first, slipped in between the actual work like they were just passing thoughts. Kai caught onto it quickly enough and kept his answers light, offering just enough to satisfy the surface of each question without giving her anything real to hold onto.

When she pressed closer, he told her simply that it was an array his mother had developed.

She didn't look like she believed it. Kai didn't offer anything more.

Fortunately, by then the array was finished, and the clearing had been cleaned up enough that it was almost unrecognizable from what they'd found. The vines were gone, the space was open, and everything sat exactly as it needed to.

Kai rose into the air without a word, turning slowly to take it all in from above. Below him, the rest of the party moved into positions along the edges of the clearing, settling into place like he had told them.

"I hope this doesn't go wrong," Elias muttered, his gaze drifting across the tree line. "We won't even be able to run away properly here."

"I don't think you should be saying anything negative, Magus Elias." Killian replied in a steady tone. "Especially not right before a battle."

"Hopefully it won't be a battle," Kai said from above. "Not if the array works the way it should."

Elias made a low sound that wasn't quite agreement. "I don't think so, kid. If something has to go wrong, it will go wrong."

"Very optimistic of you," Veridia said flatly from the opposite side of the clearing.

Elias glanced across at her and snorted. "If anything does go wrong," he said, "it'll be because of you."

Veridia opened her mouth to retort.

"You two, shut up." Elder Caelith's voice cut through the argument with a heavy tone. "Let Lord Arzan focus so we can get this over with."

Kai glanced down at the elder and gave a small nod of thanks before turning his attention back to what was ahead of him. He took a slow breath and let his mind run through it all one more time, every step of the plan, every point where it could break down. Bad scenarios surfaced easily. Too easily. Spirits arriving in numbers they couldn't manage. The array failing at the wrong moment.

But then, they hadn't exactly been swimming in better options.

Searching the forest on their own wasn't a real choice. Most spirits here would attack before anyone got close enough to say a word. This way, at least, they had some control.

They were calling the spirits here, to a place they had already prepared, on terms they had at least partially shaped. That would have to be enough.

He closed his eyes.

For a moment he just breathed, turning his attention inward, feeling the depth of the reserves sitting inside his Mana heart. Then, steadily, he began to let it out, slow pulses at first, rolling outward from him in waves pushing further and further into trees.

It wasn't easy to stand out here. The earth plane's mana was dense, almost oppressively so, thick enough in the air that anything smaller would simply dissolve into the background noise.

But when Kai had reached the fifth circle, he had let out a heavier, richer wave of mana, more concentrated than what the atmosphere carried. He’d done it unconsciously when he reached that threshold.

Now he did it on purpose.

The waves thickened. Each pulse pressed further than the last, spreading through the undergrowth and up into the canopy, reaching as far as he could manage. His Mana heart shivered under the strain of it—a deep, uncomfortable tremor rolling inside of him.

But he didn’t pull back. He kept pushing the mana until he felt the coverage stretch across a good portion of the forest around them.

"Is it working?"

Claire's voice came from his right, just above a whisper. The scream came a second later.

It split through the quiet from just beyond the tree line, and Kai opened his eyes and snapped his attention towards the clearing's entrance before the sound had even finished.

Heavy footsteps followed, shaking the ground in a steady rhythm as the spirit closed in.

"First one's here," Elias said, and the next second, it came through.

The spirit burst between the trees and into the clearing in a single motion, landing hard enough that the ground cracked beneath it. It was massive—easily the size of a wyvern—with a body that looked less like flesh and more like the earth had decided to take a shape and start walking. Dark stone made up its hide, rough and uneven, with spikes jutting up along its back like a ridge of broken rock. Its claws were sharp cut stone, each one gouging into the ground just from the weight pressing behind them.

It stood there for a moment, round yellow eyes sweeping slowly across the group as if it hadn't quite decided what it was looking at. Then its gaze climbed upward and found Kai, hovering above the center of the clearing.

Something shifted in those yellow eyes.

It roared—a sound like a rockslide given a voice—and coiled back on its legs, claws extending as it launched itself straight at him.

But before the spirit could go anywhere, the ground lit up purple.

Tendrils of compressed earth surged up from below, whipping through the air and coiling around the spirit before it could clear the distance.

They caught its limbs, its torso, dragging it back down and slamming it into the ground with enough force to shake the surrounding trees. The spirit screamed, thrashing hard, the spikes along its back grinding against the tendrils as it tried to use them to cut free.

"Veridia, now!" Kai yelled.

The very next second, mana flooded into the array beneath them from her hands and the purple glow surged, climbing brighter and brighter until it swallowed everything inside the clearing in sharp, cold light. The spirit let out one last roar, and then the light closed over it entirely.

And when the light finally eased, it was gone. Kai let out a slow breath.

The array had worked.

He looked down at Veridia who still had her palms on the edge of the array. "How much mana did that take?"

She was quiet for a second, checking inward. "Around seven percent of my reserves." She glanced up at him. "I can keep this going for a while."

"Good," Kai said. "That should be enough. We'll be getting more of them soon."

"Are you sure it's not going to come back, Lord Arzan?"

Kai glanced at Killian and shook his head. "Probably not. The array teleports whatever enters it to a random location across the earth plane. There's a small chance it ends up somewhere nearby, but I don't think our luck is that bad." He paused. "And if it does come back, we teleport it again."

He said it looking toward Veridia, though her attention had already drifted back to the array. She was studying it—he could tell by the way her eyes moved across the formations, the way someone reads something they're trying to fully comprehend rather than just skim. She would pull a good amount of understanding from it, he was sure of that. But some of the seals were going to remain out of reach for her regardless of how long she looked. They simply didn't exist in this era. There was no reference she could cross them against, no foundation to build understanding on.

Although he hadn't intended the array to be complicated, it was undoubtedly that too. Without the books in his master's room to work from, he wouldn't even have been able to construct it at all.

It wasn't just a teleportation array after all—though that alone would have been enough to work with. It was also a binding array, capable of locking anything that stepped within its boundary in place long enough to do something about it. And twined into the base of the whole structure was a self-destruction seal. If something came through that was too far beyond what the array could handle, they could trigger it, turn the array itself into a weapon and either finish whatever had entered or damage it badly enough that running became a real option.

The teleportation aspect, though, was the hungry part. Moving something across the earth plane, even randomly, demanded a great deal of shadow mana. That was where Veridia came in, feeding the array each time a spirit needed to be pushed out, keeping the whole thing running without burning through it too fast.

It was a good system. Now they just needed it to hold.

That was why he had let her bind herself to the array—giving her the access needed to control it manually when the moment called for it.

Part of him still didn't find it easy to do so. Trusting Veridia with something this central to the plan wasn't a decision he'd made lightly. But she had been reliable, consistently so, and the mana oath was still in place.

And even setting that aside, he doubted she was foolish enough to try anything in a place like this. Breaking the party apart on the earth plane wasn't a power move. It was just a good way to die.

The thought barely finished before the screaming started again.

It came from ahead, sharp and growing louder with each second. Kai immediately pushed out another wave of mana, drawing whatever was out there toward the clearing. Less than a minute passed before the next spirit came crashing through the gap. This one was built like a lizard, long and low to the ground, scales that looked like compressed slate catching the light as it moved. It spotted Kai the same way the last one had and launched itself upward without hesitation.

The tendrils caught it mid-air like the previous spirit—wrapping around its body and tail, then yanking it back down—and a moment later the glow surged as Veridia pushed mana through the array and sent it somewhere far across the plane.

They didn't get a moment to breathe this time.

Another spirit came through before the light had even faded. Then another. They arrived in a steady stream after that, one after the next, each one drawn in by the mana and each one meeting the same end. The sequence started to feel almost mechanical—spirit enters, tendrils rise, glow flares, spirit vanishes.

One spirit even tried to burrow in from below, bypassing the array entirely. It didn't get far. The array had protection built into the ground layer, and the spirit hit it like a wall it hadn't seen coming.

It screamed once as the teleportation kicked in, and it was gone, sent tumbling to some distant corner of the plane without ever breaking the surface.

But for all of the spirits that came through, none of them were what Kai was looking for.

A thought crossed his mind that maybe they were in the wrong section of the plane entirely, that the earth sovereign simply wasn't here. But he pushed it aside.

It was too early to start second-guessing the location.

Hence, they kept at it, holding their positions, running the array through each new arrival.

Then suddenly, the pace changed. The spirits stopped coming one at a time.

***

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