131 – Catch Up

Vivi was in the middle of a lesson with Saffra when the magical flare exploded across the city. She broke off halfway through her sentence, head jerking toward the Thaumaturgical Institute where the burst of mana had originated. Saffra also turned. Even lesser mages could sense the emergency alarm—the idea wasn’t to be subtle.

“What was that?” Saffra asked, startled.

“I’ll be right back.”

Vivi [Blinked] away without explaining. The spell spat her out in the center of a wide chamber located on one of the higher floors in the Institute. The scrying room.

A handful of Institute mages were posted inside, though only one stood next to the scrying pool, presumably the senior staff member. Vivi hadn’t given much thought to the logistics of the safety system Rafael had organized, and she briefly wondered whether these people had known who they were calling for help. Regardless, the man’s eyes widened upon seeing Vivi materialize next to him.

“Where?” she asked.

To his credit, despite looking dumbfounded, he responded without delay. “Prisma—”

She started pulling the [Greater Warp] together before the first syllable finished leaving the man’s mouth. Prismarche. Of course it is, she thought sardonically. For all that she had tried to reassure the Guard Captain of the city’s safety, if the next void invasion hadn’t appeared directly above her, then where else besides the other city where the boundary had been shattered once before?

Vivi disappeared into the black ether of space and hurtled across the continent for an infinitely stretching millisecond. She appeared in the town square with a pop of displaced air.

With time slowed down to a crawl, she took in a number of important details in less than a heartbeat.

More than hearing or seeing anything first, she felt. The residue left behind from the enormous quantities of energy channeled overhead slapped her in the face like the rancid stench of a sewer. Nausea clutched at her stomach. Unclean. Unnatural. Magic of the worst origins imaginable had taken place here, and she was equal parts disgusted and outraged.

A darkened, half-obscured sun cast the city in too much shade for the time of day, and seven massive bone pillars floated high above, each of them inscribed with… utterly fascinating High Arcana, actually. She tore her eyes away. Not the time to get distracted, Vivi. She forced her gaze higher up, and her eyes landed on what mattered more: the breach into the Void. Which she had expected, given the alarm that had gone off, but not such a small breach. And one so symmetrical. A perfect circle.

[Lesser Voidbeasts] and [Greater Voidlings] were struggling their way through that gap between worlds, though an invisible figure was cutting them down as fast as they could come out. The beasts needed to claw and wiggle against each other to escape, the aperture too small to allow a proper flow—or even anything stronger than a Lesser Voidbeast.

Corpses littered the town square. The unknown figure had been fighting for a while, she surmised. The alarm had gone off late. Why?

Details later. First, clean up and secure the area.

“[Tempest Vortex].”

A mass of rotating mana erupted at the mouth of the breach, the air inside accelerating as the spell expanded outward. Within moments, the conflicting currents of air were tearing through the monsters caught inside as easily as if they were made of brittle ice.

The invisible figure jerked back in surprise. Vivi squinted as she tried to see through the concealment spell without using a skill. The [Invisibility] was well-constructed, but not good enough to fool her. She identified the shimmer of two large wings spreading out from either side of an armored woman.

Vivi was briefly taken aback. Wings? Princess Embralyne? Dragonkind’s non-interference policies were abundantly clear, and applied universally. That fact was actually Vivi’s largest problem with the Dragon King, whom she otherwise thought well of. She couldn’t endorse how little he involved himself with the outside world.

It seemed his daughter didn’t agree with his policies. Or had otherwise felt compelled to intervene. Vivi couldn’t say she would have expected that given what she’d seen of the eccentric young woman. Embralyne hadn’t made a bad impression, but she had seemed… disconnected from reality. In the way any spoiled young princess might be, much less a dragon, who were less human in nature and behavior than the mortal races.

That also doesn’t matter right now, though, she reminded herself.

She wrapped herself in her own [Invisibility] as the dragon turned to look down at her, sharp draconic senses identifying the source of the twentieth-tier spell that was even now acting as a blender to any monster idiotic enough to slither into their world. Though Vivi couldn’t see through the dragon’s [Invisibility] that clearly, she imagined the woman’s eyes searching the town square for the mage responsible.

But Embralyne found nothing. Vivi’s control of mana wasn’t sloppy enough to be detected by someone of roughly Aeris’s strength. Perhaps her father might have seen something, but not the daughter.

The shimmer in the air appeared to hesitate for a moment before facing the portal again. Seeing the city’s defense well in hand, Embralyne thus turned and flew away.

Vivi watched her go. A second passed as she debated internally, and finally she grimaced and pointed her staff. She wove together a tracking beacon and placed it on the injured dragon. Vivi would no doubt have questions that needed answering, and Embralyne herself might need help. The seven bone pillars floating in the air, the reek of profane magic, and the unsteadiness in the young woman’s flight warned Vivi of nothing good.

She [Blinked] up closer to the breach and dispelled [Tempest Vortex]. The spell had been overkill. The puncture in the world was simply too small to allow in anything besides Lesser Voidbeasts. Even before she’d learned how to bypass void resistances, she could have created a defensive shield that none of the creatures could batter through.

Except, I suppose, a voidgod. Those had broken the trend of stronger voidbeasts being larger. She’d honestly expected to teleport into a fight against one when the kingdom-wide alarm had gone off.

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She summoned up a fully reinforced [Void Barrier] to replace the offensive spell. The shield had been capable of holding back even [Greater Voidbeasts] without flinching, and she’d been improving the design over the past several days. It should buy time even if a voidgod arrived, though she had no idea how powerful those could get.

She looked around and made sure there weren’t any other ongoing disasters. When she saw nothing, she allowed herself to turn and study the magical phenomenon itself.

Who did this? she thought with begrudging admiration. How is the cut so clean?

She hadn’t known it was possible to do anything more elegant than hammer one’s way through the barrier between worlds. Which wasn’t the same thing as saying she had thought it was impossible, but it still suggested that whoever’d been responsible knew more than even her in this field of magic. Which was always rare, but especially so for an esoteric branch that she’d been making an effort to study.

More importantly, she thought, I’m not sure it’s going to heal naturally like the others did. She didn’t know where that deep magical intuition came from, but magic rarely had logical explanations.

Her eyes drifted to the remnants of the ritual. Seven gigantic bone shards floated in the air, all of them covered from top to bottom with red runes. A conspicuous gap marked where an eighth pillar should have completed the symmetry. She doubted he or she had designed it that way. Embralyne’s involvement? Something else?

She floated down to study some of the High Arcana decorating the arrangement, but once again shook herself and refocused before she got distracted. That might take all day to decipher. She glanced at the [Void Barrier], saw it holding back the flow of monsters without difficulty, then [Blinked] to the scrying table in the guard headquarters.

Guard Captain Soren was the only person present, and he was stuffed up against the westward window, clearly having been watching the portal—and her dealing with it. Even as composed as the man tended to be, he jumped when Vivi said from behind him, “Guard Captain?”