Chương 225

Dorian's screams echoed off the rocky walls, a guttural sound that made Orion grit his teeth. Though most of the grey sludge had been removed by Pauline's quick intervention, some still clung to the front of his breastplate, eating through the enchanted steel. Where the corrosive substance had found the gaps at his neck and shoulder joints, it was actively burning into his flesh.

Whatever combination of the Silence this was, it aggressively neutralized the passive mana within his body, causing a violently painful rejection response from his nervous system. Flashes of light repeatedly lit up the crevice as Luna and Selene did their best to heal him, but whenever their magic reached the wounds, it sputtered and failed to take hold.

The grey sludge hissed, releasing a thin wisp of smoke, and Orion watched as the healing spells simply faded into the air, completely unable to penetrate the localized dampening field, even though Selene was using more than enough mana to break through the regular corruption they'd been facing.

"It's not working!" Luna yelled. She pushed more mana into her wand, trying to force the spell through sheer output, but the light only faded faster, swallowed by the anti-magic coating on Dorian's skin. Despite spending the last few weeks developing their Knowledge-based casting to counter such an effect, they had concentrated their efforts on offensive magics.

Healing wasn't something Orion had ever focused on much, even in his old world, so there was little he could teach them beyond the basics, which clearly weren't enough here. Having seen enough, he abandoned his watch over the bubbling pool and joined them.

"Stop casting. You're just feeding the reaction and wasting your reserves. We need to remove the sludge before any healing magic can take hold." Extending his hands over the chest plate, he visualized a field of negative gravity, using the CC's full processing power to make it as strong as possible. His goal was simple: reverse gravity, lifting the corrosive liquid away from Dorian's armor and skin without making contact.

Forming the spell, he pushed it downward, only for the magic to rebound, sliding off Dorian's body like water off a greased surface. Orion frowned, immediately using [Hypotheticism] to see what had gone wrong, and clicked his tongue when he saw what was really happening. The Field around Dorian was chaotic, filled with conflicting energies.

In his pain, his friend was acting on pure instinct for survival, and his body was desperately trying to draw mana to cast any defensive spell, attempting to summon a shield to protect himself from the burning agony. This chaotic interference served as a turbulent barrier, tearing apart Orion's precise gravitational vectors before they could even reach the sludge.

"Dorian, stop drawing mana," Orion ordered, raising his voice to cut through his friend's groans.

"You have to stop! You're blocking my spell," he repeated. But Dorian's eyes were tightly shut, and his teeth were clenched so hard that his jaw trembled. He shook his head, completely overwhelmed by the pain, his body still instinctively flooding the area with fractured magic. With a muttered curse, Orion adjusted the spellform, trying to match the frequency of the broken light and slip the gravity field through the gaps. It was a delicate and frustrating process.

Each time he set a vector, Dorian's unpredictable mana flared up, disrupting the alignment and causing the sludge to burn even deeper. Just as he was beginning to lose hope, he felt Pauline move closer, and shadows twisted around them before suddenly gathering around Dorian's head, prompting a surprised cry from the others. A moment later, they disappeared, showing that Dorian had been overwhelmed by their effect, his eyes rolling back as he lost consciousness.

With his conscious mind knocked out, the desperate draw on the Field stopped, and the chaotic aura of broken light magic around him faded into the cold mountain air.

"You were taking too long," Pauline said, stepping back to let Orion work. Orion didn't waste time debating the methods, given their effectiveness. With the interference removed, the way was open. He reapplied the negative gravity field, precisely calculated the viscosity of the Silence sludge, and created a tiny vacuum pocket just above Dorian's skin to reduce air resistance, then activated the [-g] vector. The grey liquid quivered.

Gradually, it separated from the molten steel and charred flesh, rising in a series of trembling droplets. Even though directly affecting the Silence was difficult, Orion managed to gather the floating sludge into a single sphere and push it away, depositing it safely against the far wall of the crevice. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

"There," he said, applying a gentle outward pressure to keep the surrounding fumes away from Dorian's chest as they dispersed.

"Try healing him now." Luna exhaled a shaky breath and lowered her wand. With the Silence no longer actively consuming the mana, the golden light of the healing spell took effect, healing the angry burns on Dorian's neck and shoulder. The melted edges of his skin began to knit together, the red inflammation fading into a healthier pink as the magic accelerated his natural cellular repair. Dorian was still out cold, and his armor was ruined, but his breathing became stable.

"He's going to be okay," Selene confirmed after a moment of silence, and Orion knew she'd done something to check the future. Before they could sigh in relief, however, the stone beneath their feet groaned again, reminding Orion why he'd wanted to keep watch. A violent rumble vibrated through the soles of his boots, much stronger than the initial tremor that had come before the geyser, and the puddle of grey slush started to bubble furiously, releasing sharp hisses as gas escaped. Pauline looked down and cursed.

"The pressure is building again. We need to evacuate immediately." Orion turned toward the bubbling pool, analyzing the data his trait was rapidly providing. The raw mana of the Field was heavily pooling just beneath the surface, directly clashing with the grey alchemical signature of the embedded canister, and he knew they wouldn't make it.

"We can't leave," he said, planting his feet.

"Orion, that is an order," Pauline warned, leaving no room for negotiation.

"This is far too dangerous!"

"If we leave, it will detonate," Orion countered quickly, pointing at the fissure.

"The canister is acting as a plug over a highly concentrated mana pool. The Field is trying to flow upward, but the Silence is reacting with it, creating a massive buildup." Even as he spoke, he mentally ran the calculations, assessing the fluid dynamics of the trapped magical energies. The pressure building beneath the crust could be modeled as the stagnation pressure of the suppressed mana flow, combining the rock's static pressure with the volatile reaction's dynamic pressure.

P = P_static + (1/2)\r v^2 where r is the density of the compressed mana and v is the velocity of the Field's upward current. The values are climbing exponentially with each passing second. No, we won't be able to fly, and any attempt at teleportation will result in disaster, as the spatial deformation will trigger the explosion.

"The rockbed can only handle so much stress," he explained.

"When the threshold is exceeded, especially if we use any powerful magic, the whole pocket will blow and cause an earthquake. It will collapse this entire crevice and probably trigger avalanches across the nearby peaks, with us at the center." Pauline weighed his assessment, narrowing her eyes as she did something to verify its accuracy. Eventually, she seemed to realize he was right because she frowned.

"Can we defuse it?"

"We'll have to vent the pressure and extract the catalyst," Orion said, stepping forward.

"Luna, Selene, get Dorian behind the outcropping and shield yourselves as best as you can." The ground bucked again, knocking loose stones from the walls of the gorge, and the hiss of escaping gas turned into a high-pitched shriek.

"I have already done this once, so I will try to create a funnel for it to pass through. Try to empower it as much as possible, but wait until the very last moment before casting," he muttered, vaguely noticing Pauline taking position next to him. At a moment like this, the temptation was strong to draw as much as possible from the Field to empower his spell, but Orion knew it would be a mistake.

The ambient mana was already severely unbalanced, and its high density meant he couldn't introduce another volatile element. Plus, he already knew he couldn't stop the eruption, nor could he simply block it. That said, he could try to give the volatile mixture a chimney to pass through, so that when the tension did break, it wouldn't wash them away with it.

Carefully yet quickly, he used minimal mana to project a cylindrical gravity well over the fissure, creating an inward-facing gravitational boundary that formed an invisible pipe stretching from the ground straight up into the open sky. In some ways, it was very similar to what he'd done for the canister they found in the treant forest, but the stakes here were much higher.

"It's about to burst," Orion grunted, feeling his mind strain as he locked the spell structure in place. The moment the eruption happened, he would have to feed it as much mana as possible, but for now, it was entirely up to him to sustain it. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on the perspective, he didn't have to wait long for the crust to shatter. A deafening roar filled the crevice as the geyser erupted, and a massive column of boiling grey sludge and highly pressurized blue mana exploded upward.

The sheer force of the eruption slammed into the walls of Orion's gravitational funnel. The spell shuddered violently under the impact, threatening to fracture, but Orion grit his teeth and poured as much energy into the matrix as he could, reinforcing the containment boundary. A moment later, Pauline's shadows gathered around it, providing additional stability.

In fact, the surge was so intense that he realized she had used a tier three spell, and he thanked his lucky stars for her presence as he watched the lethal mixture rush upward through the invisible pipe, roaring past Orion just a few feet away. It soared high above the peaks, safely dispersing into the upper atmosphere where the volatile reaction could burn out without harming the mountain.

Still, it wasn't over, as the geyser continued for several seconds longer than the first, and the strain of holding the funnel against such constant pressure was significant. Orion's muscles tensed, and a sharp ache spread behind his eyes, but he knew he had to keep the chimney open long enough to bleed the stagnant pressure from the mana pool. Knowing he risked the spell failing before the geyser was done and having no way to know when that would happen, he went with plan B.

Extending a separate, thinner thread of telekinesis straight down through the center of the erupting geyser, he felt around blindly in the churning sludge until his magic brushed against the solid metal of the canister, though it felt strangely large. It might be fused to a rock. Damn it, I can't pull it out completely. I'll have to find a way to separate it. Once he was sure he had a firm hold with the telekinetic thread, Orion started to pull.

The canister was deeply lodged in the stone, possibly even fused to it, but Orion increased his upward pull, diverting some of the power he was channeling into the gravitational structure toward the second spell to break apart as much of whatever it was attached to as possible, and trusting Pauline to do her part. With a faint crunch, the canister popped free. He guided it up through the gravitational chimney, pulling it out of the geyser's path and depositing it onto the snow beside him.

Almost immediately, the intensity of the eruption started to wane. Without the Silence actively resisting the natural flow of the Field, the reaction faltered. The roaring column of gray and blue energy gradually diminished to a spray, and finally, to a quiet bubbling. Once Orion caught his breath again, he walked to the edge of the now-quiet fissure. The pool of toxic slush had mostly drained away, carried off by the eruption or absorbed back into the deep earth.

With the grey liquid gone, the metallic glint he had seen earlier was fully revealed, showing it wasn't just a rock that the canister was fused to. It was a body.