CH954

“So, this kind of blew up a bit,” Thera whispered beside him as they looked around, Ben unable to disagree.

“Yeah, this is a bit more than I was prepared for when I first thought to give this another try.”

With something sealed away in a mythic item by a god too dead to explain himself, neither the surviving gods of the sirens nor the rest of the gods filling that world were going to take any chances. While the puzzle was arguably left for the mortal worshipers of Eletar to challenge, Ben could say with confidence that it would be impossible for them. Whatever had been put inside of there wasn’t meant to get out, leading to their present circumstance.

After the intervention of their gods, the puzzle had been moved from the church to the untamed lands, taken through the gate network while both templars and adventurers were gathered and put on standby, all of them prepared to fight whatever they were about to face if that was what it would come to, leaving only to open it.

<You’re up.>

Yeah, I see that. Just remember that whatever I’m about to unleash on the world, it’s not my fault.

“Amy, Jake, come on. Let’s do this and hopefully not live to regret it.”

“Great pep talk,” Amy muttered, even as they went over with him as the two allowed him to take over their bodies to take advantage of the powers they held.

From his first time using it, Ben knew that the puzzle’s design meant matching mana inputs with specific outputs from that entire spectrum of power and while he could cheat that so a person wouldn’t need to be able to personally hold each branch of mana to do it, there was no escaping that the people doing it would need the sort of mana sense to clearly see all branches. Something rare enough that having those two with him was a necessity as three pairs of hands moved to touch the floating orb, watching how mana lit up, flashing and streaking across it until, as one, he used his friends to react to it.

Thus began the chain reaction. Once the first bit of mana was reacted to it set off a wave of more, slow at first but building, both in speed and volume, forcing those three bodies and souls to move under his command until the point that it got to be too much and they finally failed, going beyond what could be managed.

The first failure of many. Each time demanded a repeat but with each they got farther as Ben slowly built on his previous model of the puzzle, deciphering its design and the psychology of its maker.