CH740

With his first plan done, he continued to count seconds until the time the demon would see its inevitable future came forth, waiting for what was sure to be a brilliant distraction but forced himself to continue to jump and dodge in the meantime as he avoided as many spells as he could, feeling his body wear down in the process.

He was straining himself but he couldn’t help it. He was one man against a swarm that was only growing by the minute, even as he fired back when he could to try and thin them out. The demons of the woods were descending on him, with his only benefit being that none were coming too close, instead choosing to fire their spells while keeping some room between them.

It was a gap he’d need to break eventually but the window for it was on its way. With only ten seconds left until the demon would see the future Ben had worked so hard to create he took all but two hundred of his many minds and directed the rest to finding different options for how he wanted to face the future, splitting it into hundreds of thousands of potential paths and stunning the demon in control at the same moment it would have seen the true endpoint Ben had created.

It was enough to create a distraction though, pushing that discovery off just a bit farther as he used that window to shoot himself forward, activating his shoes for all of the extra speed he could get to break the distance between them as the demon looked on, first preparing to reacting but freezing again in realization, with whatever it had been trying to do drawing attention to the end point of all of its paths no matter what it picked. One where the awakened skill holders it had brought into its thrall had all disappeared.

It was a future it couldn’t figure out how to prevent and one that Ben had begun working on creating hours earlier, back when he’d harvested all of his voidstone from his guns that he could.

One piece had gone towards holding Azeezol, Queemit, and Joois but it was the three left that really mattered. Both times Ben had attacked Pato and Fone by trying to batter them away with a swarm of pebbles he’d snuck a piece of enchanted voidstone into each of their clothing, using his magic to bind it to the fabric so they’d be locked in place no matter where either of those two ran and then doing something similar to Thera.

In her case, he had no choice but to be subtler with it though. When he’d attacked the other two it hadn’t been worth the effort to dodge when the demon could see they’d come out unscathed but in her case he could easily imagine a future where it used the barest fraction of her power to block the attack, forcing him to use his mind instead as he actualized around it to slowly carry the small stone over until he could cast his magic to bind it to her outfit in the same way.

With all of it leading to that one result as the demon began to panic. While it could hypothetically avoid that future if it found the stones or thought to do something like stripping them, Ben knew from personal experience that it didn’t matter how smart one was or how far ahead they could think, there would always be blindspots in one’s thoughts that weren’t so easily dealt with.

With its continued flailing making that more and more apparent. It didn’t know what to do about whatever was happening and the time limit was approaching as fast as Ben as he ran to the demon, talking to Myriad as he did to keep the futures around him as varied as possible.

Give me a number!

<Sixty thousand three hundred and four.>

Futures collapsed as Ben materialized oil under around the feet of some nearby demon before casting an enchantment on a bit of stone to make it combust and threw it over, lighting them on fire.

Again!

<One hundred and ninety-two thousand, six hundred and fifty-seven.>

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More materializing as Ben took a deep breath before he created two large blocks of frozen gas in among the crowd that rapidly melted around them and forced everything to deal with its effects.

He’d materialized the one with the lowest freezing point he was aware of and by being created in an otherwise warm woods it instantly began to sublimate into a super-chilled gas that began freezing the area around it while others breathed it in.