231, 1/2

The sky had been dark.

The Old Cosmology above the ruined city of Iben had been a simple night sky, devoid of clouds and empty of most stars. The only real light source anywhere in the city and in the heavens had been the world of Riam, sitting up there like a green and blue marble with its southern Surface peeled away, to reveal yet another world below the original. All of that land up there was a land of plenty. For the last few hours, Riam’s subtle glow had been the only real light cast upon this dead city of Iben, on the dying world of Insten, where Erick stood.

Now, though, in the advent of the Beast of Destruction, red lightning crackled across thin mana clouds above, and the waters that half-drowned Iben in darkness were now illuminated from below with deep red glows. Rapidly, those waters began to drain away, exposing deep red faults in the land, and sending plumes of foggy light into the air.

Most of the redness of the world had collected upon the coliseum in the back of Ramblewood Arcanaeum and University, like it was the only grounding for all the red lightning in the sky. It almost looked like a plasma ball that Erick would have found back on Earth, or how he made his sunform look sometimes.

A monster housecat that was not a housecat roared with fury deep within that coliseum, its main form hidden from Erick’s direct sight. Tendrils of shadow licked out of that coliseum, like negative presences upon the world. Where those tendrils touched clouds and waters, red lightning flickered down those lengths of power, into the bowl of the coliseum, and the cat roared again.

Erick checked himself. Rod of the Lightning Guardian; full power, with the ball-end coruscating with white light, and lightning. [Meditation] amulet; shining gold. Bracelet of [Self Rejuvenation]; shimmering blue on his left wrist. His core, functioning fine and still hidden behind illusion magics, ready to be used in case of emergency.

Stomach with a bit of food in it; sure. Erick wasn’t hungry or tired at all.

Was he ready for this? Yeah. He was.

Erick strode across the rapidly-drying campus, toward the coliseum. Water seemed to rush away from the path between him and the coliseum, to vanish down into red cracks in barren ground. But really, the ground was getting pushed up here and there, and then fracturing even more, spilling red light upward directly into Erick’s path. His heart beat slow and steady, though it began to thump thump thump faster as Erick stepped across a gap in the ground, and saw red shadows swirling in red lightning depths, like liquid souls being tormented on their ways to the afterlife.

But they weren’t on their way to an afterlife at all.

Those red-lined shadow tendrils, thick as a person and kilometers long, snaked out of the coliseum, to dip into those cracks in the ground. Red light shimmered up those shadowed tails, and the tails seemed to be darker and brighter as they drank deep the souls buried in Iben’s land. Because that’s what those human-shaped things in the red light below had to be, right? Souls.

The cracks in the ground widened. The world screamed. And the tendrils drank deeper.

The screams of the dead mixed with the screams of the cat.

Erick reached the coliseum. Walls had collapsed, blocking the way through the tunnels, to the coliseum floor, but those same collapsed walls offered another path. It was an occupied path, though. Those red-lined, soul-sucking tendrils filled every gap leading into the coliseum’s interior.

Erick hefted his Rod of the Lightning Guardian. Power flickered. Erick brought his weapon down on the shadow tendrils and met no resistance as his weapon passed right through. It was like soap being dropped into a greasy pan.

Benevolent Lightning touched red shadows, and red shadows fell away like a soap bubble collapsing, the entire length of the kilometer-long, person-thick shadow breaking apart from Erick’s contact, leaving flickers of white lightning spreading through empty air. As that lightning passed, red souls instantly turned pearlescent and rainbow, as they were released from the shadow’s power, and soaked back into the world, into the very rocks and stone and air and moisture.

For a brief moment, the land around Erick bloomed with green life, and localized sunlight returned. And then all the other shadow tendrils soaked that sunlight and green into themselves, sucking souls back out of the ground, and out of the air.

Erick stepped onto the rubble path leading into the coliseum, and started swinging. Ten shadow tendrils burst in three moments, bringing brightness back to the world, as Erick made his way inward, into the arena. The tendrils never attacked him, but they desperately tried to suck up the souls he had released. Erick just popped them again.

Before Erick crested the rubble and saw the center of the arena, he recalled one very pertinent fact about the Old Cosmology that made it much, much different from the New Cosmology. Back then, before the Sundering, everything was made of mana. Everything. It wasn’t that way these days, for the New Cosmology was a world of physics and particles, where mana was a secondary existence which thrived as best it could atop normal physics. People and their souls were not the same thing anymore.

But back in the Old Cosmology, souls and mana were all there was.

Erick crested the rubble. He saw the monster drinking deep all of Iben, trying to consume the souls of this very land; the land itself.

The shadow cat had abandoned its previous, small form, where only the hints of its true form occasionally popped up, in the size of its claws and the largeness of its maw.

It was in its true form now, and it rather more resembled what Erick expected a shadowcat to look like, but bigger. It was the size of a moving truck; maybe 7 meters long, 4 meters tall. Lithe and dangerous, and fully black, except it wasn’t fully black at all. It was bare muscle and sinew and bone at the joints, and large claws and large teeth, but black shadows formed a sort of skin and fur around the whole creature. That skin was not solid at all, and it moved as a shadow moved. Those shadows gave the cat countless tails, but also wing-like projections out of its entire back, like extensions of every joint in its spine, each of them reaching out into the world, to suck down souls from everywhere it could reach.

Red light streamed down those lengths of shadow, into the cat, and the cat’s roars never stopped, but only shifted from loud to less loud. Its eyes were covered in shadow, closed tight, as red light flowed directly into the shadow tiger’s spine. It was in pain.

Erick found he was glad it was in pain, for the horror that it was currently committing was probably that most ancient of taboos; it was taking in the magical power and possibilities of others, and making that power into its own. It was increasing its personal mana gain at the cost of all the world around it.

And just like that, Erick understood the conflict between what Riam truly wanted out of Insten, and how dangerous this transaction was for this land, and those who lived here.

The tiger, whom Erick had called ‘Fyuri’, roared like an animal, and like a woman in pain, as its bones stretched, and muscles grew stronger, and red lightning blasted away shadows from its skin, only for those shadows to reform a second later. With every passing second Fyuri seemed to be getting bigger. Her fangs larger, and her roars deeper—

She suddenly opened her eyes and stared at Erick from across the coliseum.

Her eyes were molten pits of gold with a slitted pupil made of red light that suddenly widened, and then narrowed. Her roars turned from pained to pleasure, into a laugh as deep and true as any horror’s laugh could be. She spoke with an echo of the dead, “Little mouse has become a rat worthy of extermination! Well come get it! Try your best, little guardian of the already-dead.”

Erick strode forward, an anger bubbling within, as he softly said, “Time to die, Fyuri.”

Fyuri suddenly screamed, all composure vanishing as she whipped her head back and forth, her spinal and tail shadows lashing the ground and draining the world of all color. “HOW DO YOU KNOW MY NAME!” She roared, incoherent and furious, and then she yelled, “I didn’t know my name until you said my name! How did you know my name?”

Erick’s anger turned into something softer, more controlled, as he realized he was seeing consciousness bloom within Fyuri, the ‘Beast of Destruction’… Maybe. Could be a lie. Didn’t seem to be 100% a lie, though.

Erick answered truthfully, “I saw it in a [Witness].”

Fyuri screamed at him with incoherent rage, but she did not advance. She did not move.

Erick had not fully entered the arena floor yet, because despite Fyuri’s words, and his own apprehension at what was happening in front of him, every single thing about the shadowtiger’s body language was telling him that the very second he got within striking range, she would attack. She probably wouldn’t be able to control herself, either. She would just attack, because that’s who she was made to be.

She had been a fake thing.

And then Erick had held up a mirror, and Fyuri had recognized herself for the first time.

Erick hefted his mace, and took one step toward the arena floor, saying, “I’m going to approach. If you attack, I will put you down until you cannot attack anymore. And then we’re going to talk.”

Fyuri suddenly roared, “Don’t come any closer!”

Erick paused.

Fyuri’s cat face was filled with a terror that was half of a lie. She was feeling something odd, Erick could tell; something warred inside her for control of her actions. Would she attack? Would she talk? And then something settled inside of her —the barest flinch of a change!— and she rapidly decided to continue to pretend to be conflicted.

Erick realized it was all completely fake long before that flinch, though. She was too good of an actress.

Because she had been snaking her tendrils around the arena, through hallways to the sides of Erick, and then behind Erick, ever since Erick started advancing into the arena. Erick still stood a good 200 meters away from Fyuri, but her tendrils had more than enough range to strike all around the coliseum, to attack him from behind.

Which they tried to do.

Erick flicked his rod through each attack without really looking. Each tendril popped at the touch of Benevolent Lightning, sending rainbows of souls back into the ground, and stone, and air, filling the world briefly with light all around him.

Fyuri, draped in shadows, roared, “No talk! Only kill!”

Erick, surrounded by light, rod crackling, whispered, resigned, “Okay.”

And then he stepped onto the sands of the arena and the world behind him turned into red lightning. There was no going back now.

Fyuri charged, her massive paws and claws ripping up the arena floor, sending sand wide. All her ephemeral tails collapsed down into one thick tail, and that one became a bladed whip sword longer than her, black as the Dark, as she barreled down on Erick. Almost invisibly, her clawing aura reached forward to strike long before she actually got in range.

If Erick had been a normal man, striking at Fyuri with a normal weapon, Fyuri’s near-invisible bladed aura would have carved him to pieces long before he got within range. But Erick was not normal, and neither was his weapon.

Erick met her first claw swipe, coming in at his top right, with a twist of his body, moving into the fight, bringing to bear his coruscating rod, its payload discharging and continuing to discharge well before the metal and lightning actually touched her shadowy fur and skin. Erick’s lightning met Fyuri’s bladed aura, and just like with the tails, Erick’s lightning popped that aura, while the rod continued forward, to glance, ever so gently, against Fyuri’s paw.

Where the rod touched lightning ripped across black fur made of shadows, dispelling darkness and bursting the red flesh below. Fyuri spun away before Erick could connect with her hissing face, her several-thousand kilo body moving a lot lighter than it should, as she spun and whipped her tail right at Erick.

Erick ducked the bisecting attack, the edge of shadow passing right over him, the aura around that tail threatening to rip him to shreds even without a direct blow. His rod passed through that aura, popping it again, and then he gently connected with the flat side of the tail. The damage this time was extensive.

White lightning flickered across shadow and shadow exploded. Bladed bones charred and broke, half of Fyuri’s tail charring instantly. Fyuri screamed, retreating, her tail broken, her left arm charred from paw to elbow. Red light seeped out from her wounds, as shadows tried and tried to cover her flesh once again. She limped.

It was a fake limp; Erick wasn’t fooled at all. Erick had done some real damage to her, or rather his weapon had, but only truly to her tail. That thing could probably grow back if Fyuri wanted it to, but right now she seemed to be having trouble with her left arm. Maybe her limp wasn’t so fake? Hard to tell with compulsive liars.

Fyuri hissed at Erick from half an arena away, and then she looked at her arm.

Among the red lightning, there was white lightning, too. Her tail still sparked vibrant white, and even charred a little bit more as cloying lightning continued to damage her. That tail was a deadly weapon, but unlike the rest of Fyuri, it was physically weak. Erick didn’t expect his weapon to do that well against her, but Lightning was a powerful Element, and Benevolence was multiplicative, and had a lot more effects besides just that. Since Erick’s ‘dungeon mana’ was Benevolence-buffing, though, and had even easily made a [Benediction], with a bit of work it had been easy enough to invert that, and make something truly dangerous; a debuff filled with destructive Lightning and Benevolence.

It might even be a stacking debuff. If he were to make this spell back on Veird, he probably would have gotten a box for [Lingering Lightning], or [Benevolent Corruption Decay of Shadows], or something like that—

Fyuri’s tail flickered with brighter white lightning, and suddenly she lost another three meters of tailsword. She screamed, even as she grabbed her tail in her mouth and chomped off the Lightning-poisoned limb. Several meters of bladed tail fell to the ground and the lightning finally stopped.

Fyuri rubbed at her lightning-infected arm with her uninfected arm, and the white lightning finally vanished. She narrowed her eyes at him, saying, “You found a good toy, too.”

“I made it, actually,” Erick said, fine with talking, even if talking allowed Fyuri to heal. As Erick watched, the shadows around Fyuri’s injured arm began to surround the wound, once again concealing her naked muscle. Erick was running [Meditation], so his rod was regaining mana, too. Only about 8 mana every 10 seconds, but every little bit helped. Both of them were regaining resources from this pause. But. “My spell is a rather economical spell, so my mana will last a lot longer than it takes to defeat you.”

Fyuri narrowed her eyes again. “Hmm. So I can’t wear you down?”

“I’m rather sure we would both injure each other a lot more if we actually fought without breaks. You might even get lucky, though this is doubtful. So: No. You can’t wear me down with one or two attacks every minute. I will win that fight.”

Fyuri sighed, and a great weight seemed to fall from her, as she sat down and stared at Erick. “So there’s no point in fighting.”

… Erick almost agreed with her.

But there was something off about her. She hadn’t actually stood down from the fight at all. She was pretending again. Her next words confirmed that she was just planning on winning a different way.

“We can both wait for the End together.” Fyuri grinned, as she looked up to the red lightning sky. “Won’t be long now, little mouse. I just need to stay away from you long enough, and we both die.”

Erick realized what he was seeing rather fast.

The world beyond the arena was not simply filled with lightning, in order to force this fight, in some sort of narrative sense— Well. It was exactly that. But it was something else, too. The world beyond here was truly breaking apart… As much as a dungeon space can break apart and not really break at all.

With steel in his voice, and in his hands, Erick asked, “You’re controlling this ending, aren’t you.”

“Yes. Kill me and save your city, little mouse. Otherwise Riam is taking this land for their own. Liquidation! We’re finally liquidating Iben for its war crimes, just as we have liquidated all the peasantry for their failure to pay their taxes long before now.”

“… You really do want to die, don’t you?”

Fyuri laughed. “I’ve wanted to die since I was born!”

She attacked. There was no grace this time. There were no probing strikes. She came at Erick with her claws and then instantly with her fangs, her maw open wide and filled with death.

Erick managed to go into Fyuri’s attack, tapping his rod across a paw and dodging the other, twisting inward, his rod smacking Fyuri’s lower jaw. She tried to continue the attack, to bite down on him, but lightning fucked her up, her jaw snapping shut as her lightning-infected leg buckled under her. Erick tapped four more times all across Fyuri’s chest—

Fyuri screamed as she kicked reflexively with her back legs, catching Erick on his left side, and catching Erick’s rod on her back legs at the same time. Erick went flying, but the massive cat twisted and writhed on the ground, her body infected with too much lightning for her to function properly.

Erick rolled to a controlled stop right before he crashed into the arena wall, clutching his ribs. A claw had almost taken out his liver. Blood poured and pain caused problems with moving properly, but Erick had worked through the problem of pain long before now. He steeled himself as he triggered the active form of his [Self Rejuvenation]. Blood still poured from his side, but the pain became something mentally manageable; it still fucking hurt, and it wouldn’t actually heal for ten minutes, but Erick wasn’t going to die from an injury.

Lightning continued to linger all across Fyuri.

Erick decided that there was no saving Fyuri. He went over and did what he had to do.

He had to dodge a few frantic swipes from jittery claws the size of kitchen cleavers, and thrusts from paws half the size of himself, but every attack from Fyuri was just another part that Erick could counter, and could infect with more lightning. It was not a magnificent end for the deadly cat.

Soon, Fyuri was dead, her body smoldering. The corpse still flinched, for that’s what lightning did to living things. But soon, even the lightning stopped—

Some redness broke inside Fyuri’s body.

And suddenly the lightning all around the arena began to falter. To stop. The sky cleared. And the sky had changed. Riam in the sky had gained a red light, circling the plane like a sunstone, but smaller. It was a spec of red power, but it was there, and it was the exact color as the red lightning had been all around the arena.

Erick just watched it all for a moment.

All too fast, another light joined the sky above, but this one appeared on the horizon, far beyond Erick’s actual sight. All he could see was that the night began to give way to the day, the blackness up there turning to pale blue. All too fast, in an almost cinematic sort of way, a proper white sunstone began to shine through a crack in the wall of the arena, and to shine down upon Iben… or what was left of it—

Congratulations!

You have defeated the Beast of Destruction!

MP up! +2035 mana production per day!

Choose your reward!

Physical Power. Magical Power. Utility Power.

“Utility,” Erick said, without hesitation.

What remained of Fyuri’s body flashed over as proper sunlight touched it, the whole thing becoming a pile of ashes. Something shimmered silver upon that ashy body, and Erick suspected that was the reward.

He didn’t grab it right away, for he was rather sure that as soon as he picked it up the door to the second floor would open… Or maybe it would be a staircase. Or a [Gate]. Whatever it was, it would mark the end of his time on the first floor.

There was one more thing to do before Erick moved on.

Everything had happened too fast here. He felt an emptiness within that needed answers.

He needed to know what had happened to Ashes.

So Erick relaxed his mana senses, and became one with the past—

– – – –

The city burned beyond the coliseum, raging flames of every color marring the horizon in all directions. Ramblewood University and Arcanaeum was dead and gone, all its people turned to monsters by Riam in one final act of horror, or fled to try and rebuild elsewhere. Some stayed to fight, though. The resistance.

And though Iben had fallen, and would likely never rise again, the resistance had won in so many different ways. The adjudicators sent here were mostly dead, and that was the largest blow Iben could inflict upon Riam.

It was all because Ashes had—

The laughter of a dying cat broke through Ashes’s thoughts; shattering the still of the burning morning.

—because Ashes had finally killed the person who deserved all the death that she had delivered unto others. She just needed to fucking die, though, and then this part of his life would be over.

“Ahh hahahahaha!” Fyuri screamed out laughter again, as she tried to move, but couldn’t. Ashes had finally caught her in a moment of weakness and broken everything about her that he could. Her legs, her arms, her mind. It was only by breaking her mind that she could truly ever die, and Ashes had done that as best as anyone possibly could. High Adjudicator Fyuri Riamiteer lay dying in a puddle of her own shadows, amidst the sands of the arena, and even though she was on her way out, she still refused to leave. Riam had stuffed her too full of natural treasures and life-saving magics. But those magics had trouble with crushing and lightning, and with all the rest that Ashes had done. All Fyuri could really do now was cackle and keen and scream. And maybe die, soon enough. “The traitor was you! Ah hahaha! Ashes! My love! The traitor was you! You’ve grown so strong, my wonderful mouse!”

Ashes stared, impassively.

That seemed to make Fyuri scream with rapturous laughter all over again, though her lungs and her mouth had long since stopped functioning properly. She was only alive because of her magic, and soon, that would run out.

Lightning flickered across her body, interrupting all of her magic.

Ashes almost left her to die alone, for he did not want to see this, but if he didn’t actually see her die, then he would never really be sure if she was dead. So he stayed. He watched. And his rage of working with Fyuri for the last eleven years finally began to ebb, as the beat of Fyuri’s lifeblood finally began to slow.

Fyuri’s cackling slowed, then sped up, then slowed again. And then it stopped. But she was not dead. Through the wreck of her bloodied body, Fyuri tried to crawl her way back out of the horror Ashes had inflicted upon her, but she couldn’t. She was dying.

Why wouldn’t she just fucking die already!? Why wouldn’t she—

She stopped screaming. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t really do anything.

But she could rally for one final taunt.

Fyuri stared at Ashes through her remaining, bright golden eye, for Ashes had destroyed the other one in their fight. Her voice was soft, “I always knew you were a traitor, but I always tested you, and you always passed those tests. I grew soft. I stopped testing as much as I needed to… Tell me at least one true thing about our time together. Tell me when, exactly, you first planned to kill me.”

“That first time you wrapped your arms around mine, when you taunted me with Markie and Sofie’s deaths, when you massacred those students of RAU.”

Fyuri’s single eye went wide. Her jaw trembled. “… Ha.” She breathed once. She laughed louder. “Ha… Ha… hahaha!”

Ashes couldn’t watch anymore.

He brought lightning down upon Fyuri over and over again, and he did not stop until long, long after she had stopped laughing. Long after there was nothing left of that hateful woman except for a black mark upon the arena floor.

And then he went to the resistance.

He had been feeding them information for a decade, but it was always just enough to prevent the worst atrocities, and never enough to get himself caught. There was no holding back now, though. He handed over a decade’s worth of intelligence gathered from the innermost levels of Riam, from every meeting he had attended alongside Fyuri, and every dalliance they had shared in their house on Riam. From her relatives in the upper echelons of Riam, to cousins and otherwise also in the system over there. Ashes felt a guilty pleasure in handing over information on his ‘family’. None of them had ever accepted Ashes as a member of their family, even though Ashes had tried his hardest. Maybe they always knew he was a traitor? But, no. That would be giving them too much credit. They just hated him.

It was for the best that Fyuri had unilaterally decided against having kids, but then again, it was illegal for a child of a Riamite and an Instenian to inherit anything under Riam law. So it was just as well that Ashes’s false loyalty to Riam had never been tested in that way.

If they had had a child, then perhaps Ashes’s anger would have abated over these past eleven years. Maybe he could have become the person who Fyuri saw when she looked down on him in the bedroom, and everywhere else.

He was glad to finally be done with that farce.

– – – –

Erick thought about what he had just seen.

And then he moved on, distracting himself from all the heavy emotions swirling in his gut through a focus on numbers…

Numbers. Yes. Important numbers…

Okay. So maybe he needed to distract himself a bit more before he got to anything else.

Erick stood there, breathing, for a good while. Why did that [Witness] feel so… So deeply?

Erick ignored it, for now. Later, he would ask questions. For now, he ignored it.

And then he started to move once again. There was still that bit of silver to pluck from Fyuri’s ashed corpse, but he would get there eventually. Firstly, Erick wondered about that +2035 mana reward he had gotten for beating the floor. Was that odd number specifically to bring him up to 5000 base mana production? Seemed that way. He almost asked the dungeon if he had been ‘underpowered’ for the fight, but that seemed like a question to save up for the people running this place, for Erick was certainly going to be talking to the people here…

Or maybe not.

Maybe he could just continue to run through this dungeon? See what it showed him, and not ask questions yet? Aside from the [Witness] stuff… This was kinda fun. It was certainly wholly different from what Erick was used to, and something very strange and magical was going on here. Erick liked dealing with strange things in magic. Now that seemed kinda fun.

He probably had a lot of time to kill, too, waiting for Denutha Odaari’s trial to get up and running. He could save the questions for the people who ran this place for a month from now, or whenever his cover was finally blown.

Yes.

Plan made.

Erick went over to the ashed corpse of Fyuri. A wind picked up as he approached, scattering flaking ash to the wind. The ashed meat went first, followed by bones collapsing inward like a house of cards knocked down, and then turned to ash as well. The final thing to vanish from the corpse was its heart.

That heart, before it lost its shape, looked exactly like a normal heart sized to a semi-sized cat should look. Funny. Erick expected Fyuri’s heart to look more monstrous, but even the hearts of monsters were mostly normal-shaped.

When the heart finally vanished into the wind, all that was left was a strip of loose, silvery metal that had fallen into a pile. It had a latch on one end, and was unmistakably a belt, though it was made of flat links and wires and three thicker plates, so it didn’t look like any sort of normal belt. It didn’t have a clip for his Rod of the Iron Guardian, but it was obviously a magical belt, and those were generally not made with any sort of utility function as base as ‘holding up pants’ or holding a weapon’s sheathe. The silver coloring painted it as metiron, and those three plates were locations for metamonds, with the leftmost metal plate already filled with a smoky grey metairon.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Erick picked it up.

Belt of Many Functions. (depleted), (depleted), [Unsensible], 5/250

… Plus-3 utility functions. Ha! Erick smiled a little bit, feeling something like joy crawl into the arena with the sunlight, and then coax itself into his heart.

“Right,” Erick reminded himself. “All of this is history. I wasn’t actually there.”

Weird!

Erick banished his thoughts on the story he had seen, and then he wrapped the belt around his waist. It fit well, though he did have to do some rearranging with his belt to hold his rod. Soon enough, he wore both just fine. When he found another metamond workshop cube, he would fit this belt with a [Benediction]… And maybe some more stuff. That [Memorize] might go well with [Benediction], actually. Putting both together might give him some sort of ‘All Stat’ equivalent… if he turned the power on both of those metamonds into an all-the-time thing, instead of a temporary boost of power. Erick preferred reliable, low level power anyway, over high-powered, emergency-use magics. Such a working would likely go very well with the belt, since that’s the type of magic it already contained.

Now Erick wasn’t completely sure, but [Unsensible] was probably an anti-sensory self-buffing magic. An illusion spell, to hide himself from others. Erick couldn’t really tell the difference, sense-wise, as he put on the belt, but he was pretty sure he was now subject to the same sort of anti-sensory magics that he had already seen a bunch of people using on the entrance zone, and what Fyuri had used, too.

He could still mana sense out to around 100 meters, but that level of mana sense was probably going to go way, way down in the next floor, when the mana saturation went from 80% to 60%…

Erick wasn’t exactly looking forward to that, but it would be good to get used to that sort of thing in case he ever had to go back outside the Edge of the Script again. He would probably need to vent a good portion of the mana in his core before he went down another level, though, just so he didn’t have to hold in so much against that pressure gradient. Erick checked his core, and guessed he was at around… 95% contained? So he had leaked a good 2500-ish mana into the dungeon.

… Like, honestly, he could just go down to 80% mana and match the dungeon’s mana density, and avoid this whole bloated feeling altogether. 80% of his max was still 44k mana. If he matched the next floor’s mana density for 60%, that was still 33k mana. More than enough to save himself if the worst should happen.

But that was rather irresponsible, wasn’t it.

Erick sighed, and contented himself with containing his mana, for now. Maybe he could construct a magic that would allow him to hold in more mana in the face of the void of space, but he had already tried that after facing Holo, the Wizard of Anarchy, and he had failed miserably, because he already had the best possible containing magic; a Domain. Which he was already using, internally. But a Domain still faltered in the face of outer space.

Maybe this dungeon had a specific solution for his problem, though? A solution that existed only here, inside this Second Script? It was possible. Erick was rather sure that permanent enhancements wouldn’t work inside a manaless environment, so maybe they had… Domains of different sorts?

The Edge of the Script, that most strongest of barriers against the void of space, still leaked, to this day, even after Erick had given Rozeta the knowledge of Earth’s magnetosphere. Veird’s new magnetosphere certainly helped, of course, both to keep mana in, and to keep the cosmic radiation of the sun and the rest of the New Cosmology from impacting Veird and cleaving away mana. It helped a lot. But mana still leaked.

Erick had already tried making a personal magnetosphere, but that didn’t work—

Oh.

He looked at the rod in his hands.

Metal was a much better container of power than flesh, and cores. Radiation barely impacted metal’s mana containment properties, or the mana therein, and pressure differentials certainly didn’t matter…

Ah.

… Well duh. These properties of metal was why Atunir had made this Second Script using metal containers as substitutes for cores, and interchangeable mana crystals as substitutes for soul-imbued spellwork; both metal and mana crystals were very good permanent holders of magic, if they were made correctly.

Erick briefly considered casting his core in platinum, or something like that, but rather instantly discarded the idea completely. Bad, bad idea, for too many reasons to count.