CH401 Thera’s Perspective

She did her best to ignore the sounds of combat going on around her as she worked to treat the injured enchanters as fast as she could, only keeping a side eye out for anything flying through the skies towards them as she pushed herself to heal broken bones, stitch together skin and stop any internal bleeding she could find to ensure everyone that was meant to be in her care survived through what had occurred.

When the demon’s attack got through she had failed, plain and simple. While she and many others had been placed there specifically to ensure the safety and the weapon, she was the only one who had been equipped to stop the strike, and her lapse in judgment had kept her from doing anything that could have potentially helped. Only as it lay as rubble on the ground that she realized the rare skill the creature had deployed against them; magic nullification.

The skill had to have been imbued in the very rocks that were thrown to let them bypass any potential barrier, and leaving her powerless to stop them as they came since she’d only reached out to them, trusting her supply would be enough when what she should have done was throw something in their path to physically block it instead of just believing in herself.

But it’s too late now.

There was no point in regret, now all she could do was fight the wave that was sure to break through sooner than later, doing whatever she could to keep even one more demon from spreading out into the world, and once she was sure the woman she was working on wasn’t going to die she moved to ensure she got the necessary help in that, rushing back to her aunt’s side to treat her uncle.

She didn’t need to ask how he was, she could see it plain enough. While she’d worked to treat the major damage when she’d gotten to him before helping the others, there was still more. Shards of metal and stone buried under his flesh that she ripped out with her magic before closing the wounds with other spells, trying to increase his vitality as much as she could while helping to reduce the less obvious signs of damage going on beneath the surface, needing him to be back in top shape as he eventually stirred, bring a large hand to his face.

“Ugh, gods above, what happened?” He grumbled the moment he could talk, her aunt throwing her arms around him as Thera went to explain.

“I couldn’t stop an attack on the weapon and it’s been destroyed.”

Guilt was thick in her voice as the feeling of failure threatened to crush her, but Falk only waved it away.

“If you couldn’t stop it then nobody here could have. Now what’s the situation in the battle?”

She didn’t know, her thoughts had been too focused on healing until then, but helped him up to check as they all looked towards the invasion point, seeing the chaos and carnage that was spreading.

To Falk and Sonya, they could see the fights going on, different groups trying not to collapse against the weight of the horde as they tried to hold their lines as long as they could to keep anything from breaking through, and they had the strength to keep it up. These were people who had trained and honed themselves under the effects of the system; creatures that had been brought into it only seconds after coming for war didn’t have the chance to grow under it and were being slaughtered, but a difference in skill was nothing against numbers. Even if a single person only died for every hundred demons, they still knew they wouldn’t keep up.

Thera was able to see even more than that though as she looked out, seeing the same thing that had been there since they’d arrived. The air was filled with spirits, each of them doing whatever they could, causing random spikes of earth to rise from the ground to impale some demons as others were burned or had their vitality drained, and that wasn’t even looking at the acts of the light and life spirits, each putting all they had into healing what wounds they could, saving those who may otherwise have fallen without their intervention, letting them fight all of the longer.

And even that wouldn’t be enough. No amount of stories could have prepared them for the real thing, but with nothing else to be done, she held out her staff and began casting her spells.

The first of which being earth healing, flooding the land with her mana to help those standing around her before ripping out giant chunks of ground to throw at the gate and watching as they came down, crushing everything unfortunate enough to be in their path. With her mana, even from afar she could sow a level of destruction unimaginable to most people, but it still wasn’t enough to make a dent as her uncle fired his own attacks, though in a more controlled way, as his death mana shot out, bullets fired and aimed at wherever he could confidently strike as all of those fighting tried to hold out the best they could, all of them waiting for the eventual call to be made for them to return to their fortified bases, letting the beasts by while the launched more distant attacks from safer positions.

Her heart was pounding at the futility of it all, feeling like the world was already lost, only for her uncle to raise a question that made it all worse.

“What happened to the boy?”

The instant the words left his lips, her head whipped around, trying to find him and coming up blank. The moment she let herself get distracted with her healing she’d just assumed he was staying close by, but in all of the chaos around them he was nowhere to be seen as she felt her panic grow. If he was in danger then the skills he could use were limited and she didn’t even know if he had brought a weapon with him, his entire point in joining having been to work on maintaining a machine that was no longer in a state where it could be saved.

It was as she desperately looked around that his location was given away by a flash of light, pulling all eyes to not only the wreckage of the weapon, but Ben, standing there with a metal sphere in one hand as the other reached out towards the frey as a torrent of mana drew into him.

One of his skills had awakened, she didn’t know which one, she didn’t care enough to guess with everything going on, the only thing she cared about was getting to him to drag him to whatever safety their group could provide, only to stop before her first step as she witnessed what began to happen around him.

Everywhere in front of him, pebbles began rising in the air, not one or two or even ten, but thousands, until that next second they vanished in the blink of an eye, making her question what she’d even seen.

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

Space magic? No, don’t be stupid, Ben can’t use space magic. But the ones he can use aren’t geared for controlling things from a distance either, he can only kind of cheat it with a couple things. So what did he just do?

The question was answered by turning her head slightly to the fight beyond them, where thousands of demon corpses that had been attacking only seconds later now laid, bullets of earth firing out with his will at a fast enough speed to tear through anything that got in their way and to keep going from there.

But his magic also can’t do anything like that, at least normally, so did he just awaken it? If not, what the hell is happening to him?