CH583

When Ben had created the matter of his home reality, it had reacted explosively upon meeting the universe, bursting outward and warping space itself in a way that had even damaged the orichalcum armour he’d been wearing to protect himself, but the beast they’d just slain wasn’t made of the sort of stuff that would naturally be found in either his current world or his last. It was instead a third type he hadn’t previously encountered, and without a soul to dominate it, it was left to react to the physics around it.

As kilometers of material were left to interact with reality itself, all at once the world was sucked in under the force of the massive implosion it created, taking both Ben and Thera with it as they were pulled through the air, being the closest victims to feel its effects.

The fastest of Ben’s minds pulled the rest of them to his same speed as he took in the situation before reaching out with connect to link up with Thera, wanting to bring her mind to the same speed so she could use her power to deal with the severe situation they found themselves in, only to find something very wrong. No matter how he poked and prodded in her head, she wasn’t responding.

That set off a whole new wave of panic in him. He knew she was alive at least, he wouldn’t have been able to connect with her otherwise but couldn’t tell why she wasn’t thinking, nor did that give him many options to figure out how to make sure they’d both survive the sudden situation they found themselves in as he looked at all he had at his disposal, finding that despite whatever situation she had to be in, Thera was still his greatest resource for ensuring they’d live through the ordeal.

Given the severity of their situation, he didn’t think she’d particularly mind either as he made use of the connection in a different way, reaching down into her reserves to pull out whatever mana he could for his own use, only once again to come up almost empty as he struggled to figure out where he was failing.

While the experience of taking someone’s mana was different from having someone pass theirs through him, with practice it became minimal. At his current level of deep connection, he could take an equivalent of half his current mana pool from someone at once and from there just keep taking that same volume again and again in a process that would typically overstrain his soul, but as he tried it on Thera he got almost nothing, a few stray points of the stuff at most as what was going wrong snapped into place.

Mana exhaustion. Jesus, if we get out of this then that’s going to hit her like a brick.

In that fight for the safety of the planet, Ben had been taking advantage of her raw strength liberally, getting her to materialize left and right while shooting out attacks and dodging incoming ones just as much, all in an effort to find a way to deal with the creature, and that was the result. He was being forced to see that despite how much power Thera had, it wasn’t actually infinite no matter how she made it look, with her first time experiencing the condition coming at the worst possible moment, forcing him to look for other options of survival as they were pulled through the air.

Even with her in that situation though, she still absorbed mana at a rate far faster than him, leading him to take the few points that were regenerated each second while he was left with his own strength as the source he’d have to turn to as he looked at what he could reasonably do while they were being pulled outward before he gave in to the best plan he could make and put it in motion.

They were still in the basket they’d been flying in and with the strength of his material manipulation, Ben poured out his mana to reshape it, looking at how it was being pulled through the air and stretching out the stone that made it up to create wings to both keep them from tumbling and create a smoother ride as he tried to predict what the best choice to do from there would even be.

If the creature’s body had collapsed into anything like a black hole then that was just going to be the end of the planet so he ignored that as an option. If there was nothing he could even theoretically do to stop it then it wasn’t worth considering. Instead, he looked at two other bits of potential and tried to assess the best course for either scenario.

The first and worst option as far as he was concerned was that the body had some sort of self-generating sucking force that was going to pull everything in and keep pulling up to a certain range, not stopping until it was buried under a mountain of rubble.

It was again a problem he wasn’t sure he could deal with, less severe than the idea of a world-ending threat but would still require him to be able to escape its pull if he wanted to survive, so he instead pinned his hopes on the second option.

Still not great, he was forced to hope that the massive sucking force they were under was all the result of an intense implosion, and that once it stopped they’d all be safe enough, leaving the only issue being how he’d create a safe landing for the two.

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If I had some trees around I could try to hook one to slow us down, but… Yeah, that’s not actually an option.

The few glimpses of the surroundings were even more bleak than they’d been when dealing with the monster. The gorges its blows had created were left but looked so much more shallow from all of the topsoil being sucked in as well, with trees and shrubs flying through the air with the rest to the central point where it all converged while he did the only thing he could think of. He tried to bring them up higher.

Angling the wings to help with lift and once more reshaping the stone that contained them in an attempt to add propellers he could rotate with his magic to add to it, for the first time in a long time, Ben was cursing a lack of knowledge on his part as he desperately wished he’d studied up on aerodynamics a bit to give him whatever edge he could get to make such a hastily thrown together craft function, only breathing the smallest sigh of relief when he felt it work.