Chapter 22 | Handyman Theo

“I think this one means ‘connection’.”

“Hm. It’s probably for the transference of the heat,” Theo said. They had managed to complete a part of the circle using the notebook of the goblin.

Fortunately, it contained everything regarding the spell formation.

Unfortunately, the notebook was complete mumbo-jumbo. It seemed that this goblin had quite the ‘esoteric’ way of note-taking. They had to decipher it as if they were reading a completely different language.

“Yes. I will connect it here…” the girl called Nicole mumbled. Her arrogant and annoying demeanor aside, she knew when to be serious. She understood that they were in a dire situation, and performed accordingly.

As soon as she drew the corresponding character, albeit with clumsy strokes, the heat traveled from the nearby inscriptions across the ‘connection’. But when it didn’t find a place to go, it rebounded and spread across the circuits once again.

“Good! We can do it!” Nicole pumped a fist. Theo nodded along and kept reading the notebook.

“The next part is where the heated mana is turned into actual heat and let onto the copper cooling block,” Theo said. The girl nodded and turned her head and checked the notebook herself, her eyes tracing the confusing inscriptions.

“Damn goblin…” she muttered with an annoyed frown. Although it was quite rude to speak ill about the guy while he was, technically, right next to them, Theo couldn’t help but agree.

As Nicole got to work once again, Theo felt a pang in his heart. Somehow, something told him that this wouldn’t go quite as easily as it had so far.

A duck and a weave to the left was enough for him to dodge the oncoming centipede. He was in a clearing in the forest, which was the absolute worst place he could have found himself in.

He was fast, sure. But he was much faster compared to the centipedes when it came to more complex terrains.

Otherwise, they were pretty much evenly matched.

Satou coursed his muscles with aura and jumped. Once the centipede was under him, he landed on its back and ran in the opposite direction. He jumped over their heads, some trying to straighten up and catch him between their mandibles. But it didn’t work; he was far too nimble to be caught like that.

Tch, these things… Have they become smarter somehow?

With every move he made, he felt as if a net was tightening around him. The centipedes learned. They adapted and deployed different strategies. He hadn’t seen such sentient behaviour in the entities of the tower before. But then again, he hadn’t seen a tide of these mutants either.

As he managed to dive into the forest once again, Satou kept running. Running for his and his friends’ dear lives.

After another minute, however, his senses picked up on a couple of aura signatures approaching from the opposite side.

They are quite close; my senses must have been muffled by the centipedes’ signatures.

Shortly after, Satou found himself heading toward whom he assumed to be the Lieutenant in the distance, his squad of elites following along in the distance. The man radiated a blue aura, strengthening his every move. But Satou could tell, the man was a notch below himself, having recently become a first-rate.

Once they met in the middle, they joined together without a word and kept dashing. The two separate groups of centipedes crashed into each other before managing to reorient themselves.

Satou washed his gaze over the group of soldiers following along. They were all captains, 5 of them. They were quite fast and could navigate the forest with great skill.

“You have good men following you, Lieutenant.”

“Mr. Jake, I assume? Thank you for the compliment. They are the Emperor’s blessed,” the Lieutenant said without any particular reaction. He wasn’t nervous or prideful, moving with a sense of duty. Satou appreciated that as he wasn’t quite the type to talk during missions. “Do you assume your mage-in-training friend will be able to fix the barrier?”

Satou thought for a moment as he zig-zagged and launched himself forward from a tree trunk, the Lieutenant following along with similarly superhuman movements.

“He will,” Satou said. Though, even he himself wasn’t sure if he believed in that.

Long Tian was struggling across the outpost’s streets, Tanaka on his back and his hand holding a bag full of valuables. He had managed quite the haul. Not only had he found enough for them to be rich once outside, he had also managed to find some items with energy signatures, similar to that of Senior Theo.

The weird magician was just that: weird. From time to time, Long Tian could feel a sense of kinship from him, a similar foreignness to the world. Not because they were in another world, but in the sense that he felt almost like another sheltered young master.

But at the same time, he had wits. Wits Long Tian had read about in those novels of immortal heroes, but he himself couldn’t replicate.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

What he could replicate was, however…

Daylight robbery… he thought. No matter how wrong it was, no matter how much it clashed with his upbringing, he couldn’t help but raise a wide smile across his face. This is… So fun!

Not to mention, his father was the one who had given him those novels. It was practically an unspoken agreement of underhandedness between the two. For the first time, Long Tian was realizing that there was a shrewd man behind that towering and righteous figure of his father.

And somehow, he didn’t hate it.

Just as he turned a corner, he saw two soldiers jogging toward him. His heart jumped in anxiety. His empty and mangled meridians throbbed in search of qi to circulate, and sent a wave of pain throughout his body.

But, he somehow managed to keep a semblance of calm.

“Sir, what are you doing here?” the soldier asked, his eyes shifting from the bag to the unconscious Tanaka.

“I am looking for my friend. Senior T- Alex. Mage-in-training,” Long Tian repeated the strange alias he had committed to memory.

“Oh,” the soldier exclaimed. He whispered something into the ear of his fellow, who nodded in answer. “I see. You must be Sir Zi Ya. We will take you to his side.”

“This isn’t good.”