Chương 86: Chapter 91: Miscalculation

We nearly circled all around the spider queen; the ritual was nearly completed. It took Rhea nearly twenty minutes to draw it, not just for the speed – she could have done that in five – but because she needed to recharge her mana.

Her stats were simply not high enough, and the "ritual" was more of a series of pre-programmed spells than a real ritual; there were basically zero materials involved in it, except some spider eggs, that Rhea swore were a good way of connecting the ritual to focus all the damage on the queen instead of losing a part to environmental mana diffusion. As she worked, I tested my new skill, gaining multiple levels.

The skill was, as I thought, not the best use for projectiles, not that they were weak; on the contrary, a simple pebble-sized fragment of my aura I shot at a wall created a little crater and garnered me valuable data and Rhea displeasure as I distracted her. But the problem was that my aura took a lot of time to come back after that; there was a kind of hard cap on how much aura I produced at all times, like a mana pool.

There was an upper limit, but the regeneration was simply atrocious, and despite consuming part of the aura to achieve the effect I wanted even when it stayed linked to me, it was just way more efficient this way. But another discovery I got was that I could control constructs made from my aura away from me; they weren't directly connected, but still it was my aura; there was a kind of invisible tether to any part of it, even when separated.

The commands I could give were less precise, but I could potentially control various weapons made of the stuff and then reabsorb them when I was done; if only I could manage to make it sharp, it would become one of my strongest weapons.

"I'm done!" Rhea said she was massaging her arm after furiously scribbling on the ceiling all this time.

"Let's do it then." I brought us down to the ground; I could see two giant ritual circles. They looked perfectly aligned when viewed together. Despite the roughness of the stone, she did an incredible job. Hundreds, if not thousands, of lines, symbols and glyphs were interconnected to form this massive ritual. It emanated a kind of oppressive feeling just by the amount of mana it was made of.

If I found myself on the receiving side of it, I would be toast for sure, no matter how much aura I could deploy to protect myself. Rhea looked both nervous and excited at the prospect of activating it. As she hesitated, we heard noises coming from the tunnel; they were here.

"Now or never, girl; don't think about it, just do your best," I told her. She nodded, then performed a series of gestures. One by one, parts of the ritual seemed to come alive; the circle on the ceiling started to spin clockwise while the one on the ground spun anti-clockwise. Lines and geometrical shapes expanded and started to interconnect. At the same time the spider queen started to squirm again; the little mountain of eggs it produced during our time in the chamber tumbled on the ground.

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. But its physical body couldn't move; the spider queen was trapped, and there was nothing it could do to move outside of the ritual. Rhea finished her preparation; my arcane sense was going haywire by the amount of mana emitted by the ritual, and then even more by the amount of energy generated by it. As the lines and symbols started to glow more and more, Rhea turned to me.

"I think I miscalculated; the energy released is too much, and I can't stop it! We have to escape!" Escape where? There was no place to escape to except that in the tunnel, which was still half collapsed and crawling with spiders.

"How much time do we have?" She looked at the ritual, then back at me.

"Maybe a minute if we are lucky!" Fuck, this was bad, like real bad. The amount of energy ready to be released was massive; there was no time to think. If we stayed, we were going to die; if we tried to escape, maybe we were going to die. My body was still hurting everywhere, but the adrenaline was making me work at my maximum. I took Rhea and put her on my shoulder like a sack of potatoes. She screamed something, but I paid her no mind, and then I mobilised my armour, flooding my body with life force.

At the same time I started pushing all the mana I could into my new skill; the world became monochrome, allowing me to see even in the dark of the tunnel. As I shaped tendrils of aura into a multi-pronged drill, I kept a shield in front of us, and then I started to rotate the construct and push it into the stone. A lot of earth and rocks started flying everywhere; only the shield allowed us to remain unscathed, mostly Rhea. This kind of damage shouldn't be capable of hurting me anymore.

In any case, I proceeded forward into the stone as the sound made by the spiders digging from the other side was growing stronger and the energy behind us was reaching a crescendo.

"Faster! Dig faster is about to go off!" I put my all into pushing my construct as hard as I could. After five more seconds of expending aura, mana and lifeforce at the highest rate I could, a breach appeared on the other side; a breath of foetid air came through, but at that moment it seemed like a divine sign. As soon as the tunnel got opened, spiders of all sizes started pouring through, only to get blended by my drill.

I retreated the aura construct and created a shroud around me and Rhea – no blades or barriers or discs, just formless aura, pushed against my body to allow me to accelerate and bulldoze through the tunnel full of spiders. Speed was the name of the game, so I moved as fast as I could, crunching spiders under my boots, against my aura-shrouded body, and the tunnel walls; I just demolished them all. Luckily there were no spiders strong enough to really stop us; they basically all died before.

The few remaining I tossed aside or ploughed through. I was jumping more than running, every bound throwing me on the wall, where I redirected and jumped again until the next curve made me repeat the process. After a dozen seconds of escaping, I saw the blue light of the crystals in the cavern. As we exited, bringing with us broken spiders, I heard a rumble from behind us.

I quickly moved aside on the right, and while creating a disc of aura and jumping on it, I flew up the open-pit mine while Rhea screamed her lungs out. I didn't look back, but I simply entered the tunnel we arrived from. We left a sign for finding our way back, and I had a good memory, but at the moment I only wanted to go as far away as possible. I wasn't scared of the blast reaching us now, no. What worried me was the rumble I could feel in the mountain…

If it came down on us, there was no spell that would save us. So I flew forward into the tunnel, hoping to make it on time, a red glow illuminating the whole cavern behind us.