Chương 204: 193. The table

I ended the spells still surrounding the three men, retracting the skeletal hands as the dome dematerialized. They quickly jumped up, dusting themselves off, looking warily around.

"W-what was that?" Filip asked, turning his gaze to me. I shrugged.

"I'm not entirely sure, to be honest."

"Is it gone?" Marvin immediately asked. I looked to Myhur. The mushroom concentrated for a second as the moss on his body twitched lightly.

"Gooone," he finally answered, opening his eyes, letting the strands of his body unravel as his beer belly dropped and the growths on his body popped back out.

"Is that normal?" Marvin asked, sweeping his gaze around the place. There was a strange mixture of emotions written across his face, as if so many different things had happened that his body didn't know how to feel and had simply tensed all his facial muscles into a blank, stressed expression.

"No," I answered.

"I meant people like you," he specified, his eyes jumping between Myhur and me.

"That's hard to answer." He was about to say something, but then his eyes drifted to the small pool of white worms still crawling aimlessly on the ground.

"That's disgusting," Rey groaned from behind Marvin.

"We should get rid of them," Filip said, looking at the squirming mass, his upper lip raised as if he smelled something foul. I nodded in agreement. But first things first. I turned to Myhur, who was pulling some of the small creatures out of his body. When the dome broke, he did get hit by the wave. His flesh, upgraded by mana, clearly slowed the things down. Thankfully, the moss protected his vital organs, but I could still see him pull out the worms with disgust.

I approached him as he was looking himself over for any more invaders and passed him a potion. Once he had downed it, I used the bottle to scoop up a few worms from the ground for later experimentation.

"You good?" I asked.

"Yeeeah," he groaned.

"Thankfully, little fuckers aren't as strong by themselves." I smiled and looked at the glass bottle, bringing it up to my eyes and seeing the white creatures squirm inside.

"You think the hive can sense their position?" I asked him. He thought for a second but then shook his head.

"Toooo many, too small. Not unless it's close by or very powerful."

"Well, then, let's hope it's neither of those." We then got to work cleaning the remaining creatures. The three FBI men were sweeping up the worms using whatever they could find as makeshift brooms, while Myhur and I were getting rid of the critters. It took us some time, but finally, the creatures were gone. We then moved on to checking the equipment now lying all around, thrown to the ground by the fight.

"We'll need our technicians to deal with this," Marvin said, seeing the broken electronics.

"Doubt you will find anything," I said.

"It was a trap," Rey finished what I wanted to say, earning a nod from me. Marvin sighed, looking at the scene. A shiver went through his body when his eyes landed on the dead hosts.

"Still, don't touch anything. It's evidence," he finally said.

"Got it." I went on to look around, searching for anything useful. The electronics were most likely fake. We needed to find something the author had left by mistake, something we weren't meant to find. I checked the tables and the magical part of the equipment, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. The whole setup was basic and by the book. But something about it bothered me.

It was a little bit too by the book, like someone searched for "magical laboratory" in a magical encyclopedia and then prepared the most basic setup.

"The magic part is also fake," I groaned to Myhur. I was hoping that at least some parts of it were real, like a real workstation decorated with electronics to draw the FBI's eye. But anyone creating abominations should have some personalized tools. Everyone's relationship with magical concepts was slightly different, so I doubted anyone granting magical powers used the basic tools present. Yet something still bothered me about that normality. I looked over the equipment.

Scalpels, tongs, talismans, potions, and chemicals all lay around the massive table with a magic circle carved into it.

"Wait a second," I whispered to myself, and then, borrowing gloves from the FBI so I wouldn't get whined at, began removing all the equipment cluttering the workstation. Once done, I borrowed a flashlight from one of the men and shone it at different angles as I looked more closely at the granite tabletop. It was massive, long, and wide enough for an adult man to lie on top of it, with space to spare.

I then looked at the entrance we took, then at an opening in the ceiling used to move heavier stuff in and out of the basement. Deepening my frown, I took a closer look at the runes carved into the granite. They were correct, not just for decoration, but by the book. The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

"I need one of you to lie on that," I said, pointing at the granite block. The three looked at me like I was crazy.

"Iii can," Myhur offered from the side, but I shook my head.

"That circle is for humans. I need to feel it operate as it's supposed to." More silence followed, finally broke when Marvin spoke.

"Why?" he asked.

"To confirm a theory. I'll explain if you lie on it, deal?" I proposed.

"Fine." To my surprise, Marvin agreed. The man put on gloves and slowly climbed onto it with a rather sour expression on his face.

"You'll feel something push on your chest. Don't fight it, please," I said and let some of my remaining mana flow into the circle. The spell activated, and I watched Marvin groan in irritation as the magic immobilized him. I, on the other hand, could feel the placement of his organs and his overall vitality through the spell. It was a basic medical check, useful for amateurs when carving someone open if they didn't want to nick an artery, but that was basically it.

I ignored the working spell and then focused on the flow of mana through the circle, following it through every inch. It was smooth, but most of all, even through every part of it.

"Okay," I said, deactivating the spell.

"So what was it?" Filip asked as Marvin eagerly hopped off the granite slab.

"How did they carry that in?" I asked. The rest looked at the door, then at the opening in the ceiling and immediately noticed the same issue. Both were slightly too small for the slab.

"Maybe it can fit at an angle?" Filip proposed.

"Myhur," I said, and my mushroom friend, to the surprise of the three, lifted the entire plate. He then marched with it to the entrance and tried fitting it through, pushing as hard as possible, but to no avail. We then took the measurements and checked the opening in the ceiling, opening it from the first floor since it was covered. But no dice. It would be impossible to fit it through.

"Maybe they crushed it and then glued it back together?" Filip proposed.

"I imagine if you can do whatever it was you did, you can reattach some stone."

"Possible," I said, nodding.

"But if you break apart a magic circle, then glue it back, the flow of mana will be terrible. You can't just move entire ritual chambers like that. To remake a spell requires a lot of effort. But here the flow is smooth, and the carving's edges are slightly rounded, meaning it's old."

"Maybe they made that effort to make it flow smoothly?" Filip continued. I shook my head.

"That's a lot of work, way more than was put into the entire setup. The laboratory, at least from a magical perspective, is a cheap lure, just good enough to require a closer look. But once examined, it's all just a collection of common tools and magics. But to remake a spell just for that? It would be strange." Silence descended over the room.

"Teleportation?" Rey proposed. The rest looked at him while I smiled.

"Now that would take a metric fuckton of effort," I said. The same went for spatial artifacts. One capable of storing something that big would be extremely rare, not to mention the power needed to operate it.

"So there is another entrance," Rey caught on to my suggestion.

"Should be," I said. I was quite sure of my theory. So sure, in fact, that I stayed longer, looking for any hidden passages even after Myhur got transported back, even after the FBI technical team arrived to collect evidence and the bodies. I was sure the granite was wrong, but even after trying the walls, floor, and ceiling, I found no hidden passage. In the end, after a good few hours, I finally went back home in a sour mood, with the granite table still on my mind.

"No, he's going to be fine, really," Elias said into the phone, raising his hand to the waiting men.

"Yes. Yes," he continued into the phone.

"Look, he doesn't remember him as you did. Give him time." He paused, clearly listening to a rather emotional speech from a woman on the other side.

"Look, honey, sorry. Honey," he tried to cut in, finally managing to get a word in.

"I have to go to work. Just give him time. We can take a drive on the weekend. Bye. Yes. Yes, bye. Love you. I have to go," he said and then disconnected, the smile wiped from his face.

"Trouble in paradise?" Filip asked.

"It's my stepson," he said, sighing deeply.

"Don't worry about it. We have bigger trouble on our hands, if I understand correctly." Marvin and Filip both nodded as Elias's hands went to his temples.

"Are your reports correct?" he asked. Once again, they nodded.

"Fuck me," he exhaled.

"Raining death, summoning skeletal hands, and punching clean through bodies."

"And a new species," Marvin chuckled.

"Mycanoids," Elias said, earning a flinch of surprise from the two.

"Yeah, we were more or less aware of their existence. Stuff of legends and superstition, revealing itself to us just because the guy gave it a call." Silence descended.

"I wasn't even aware something like that could exist," Marvin said with a hint of accusation.

"Had I been, I might have acted less surprised."

"Clearances," Elias replied flatly before changing the subject.

"So we're either that unprepared and uninformed or…"

"Or we hooked a big fish," Filip finished his sentence. Elias nodded.

"We need a baseline for what to expect from mages. That and…" He didn't finish and just sat there, unmoving, for a good few seconds as thoughts churned in his mind. He finally woke from whatever he had been considering and looked back at the report.

"So the guns were useless, huh?"

"Yes," Marvin nodded.

"I'm sorry to say, but we either have to get better weapons or mages of our own."

"Is that your official assessment?"

"Yes," Marvin said without hesitation.

"Better bullets or better armor are one thing. Doing this mind stuff and creating force fields is another, sir. I…" He winced involuntarily at the memory.

"I heard this… thing, this slimy presence in my head. It took me over. I almost ripped my skin off to get out of that bubble, or whatever it was he created. I don't want to repeat that." Elias nodded in understanding.

"Fine," he finally said.

"We'll put our cards on the table. Do you know where our mage friend is?"

"He said he'll be away for a day or two," Filip said.

"Good. But offering just information is a weak hook, especially against someone this proficient in magic," Elias said, drumming his fingers on the desk.

"Use that time to look into him, everything there is, without actually tapping his phone or other devices." Marvin frowned.

"Why? Isn't that the best way?" Elias hesitated for a few seconds.

"I have someone working on his profile, and we suspect that, had he found out we were listening in on him, two things might happen. He might find it amusing and let the thing go, assuming we didn't get much. Or he might find it offensive and… Well, my profiler suggests it's hard to predict what he's capable of, but the strong suggestion is not to find out."

"How would he figure out he was tapped? What, divination or something?" Filip asked, frowning. Elias looked into his eyes until Filip realized the implication.

"Oh," he said.

"For now, nothing invasive. Figure out as much as you can about him and all of his close friends, associates, everyone and anyone. And once he's back, I believe it's time we showed some of our cards and see what he plays in response," Elias finished, his face set in a deep frown.