Percy and Sol might be able to take down a few dozen eels, but there was no way they could slaughter the entire school by themselves in a direct confrontation.
They could try to have their subordinates attack from the periphery of the battlefield, whittling the creatures down from afar, yet there were several problems with that idea as well. The Blue and Green-cored mages should be able to keep themselves safe, but there was no universe where the Yellow-borns would manage to outswim the aquatic monsters.
The other issue was that Percy’s army had to hurry up, as the construction team was going to overtake them in a few hours. While the eels were highly unlikely to leave the water and pose a threat to the men and women working on the wall, the serpentine creatures weren’t necessarily the only powerful beasts left in the lake. The sooner the Melodians got rid of them, the sooner they’d be able to search the region past them.
Since a direct confrontation was unlikely to work, Percy had no choice but to fall back to the true and tested method of solving his most difficult problems: magiscript.
This wouldn’t even be his first time partially freezing a lake. During his time with Marnok, the glacial platforms his enchantments had produced had mainly served as footholds to keep the sailor out of the dangerous water, allowing him to drill through the lakebed in search of Saint Ludwick’s tomb.
This time, Percy’s safety wasn’t necessarily under threat, since he could freely scan the lake with his sensory domain to locate the hostile creatures, and had plenty of ways to keep his host’s body away from harm. In other words, he didn’t have to worry about protection, information gathering, nor mobility, so he could focus on creating a purely offensive formation meant to deal as much damage to the eels as possible.
Camouflaging and deactivating most of his sentries, Percy only kept an eye on nine sensory domains, including his own, spreading them out in a thin line that connected the west and east shores of the lake.
The data flooding his brain still occupied over three-quarters of his cognitive capacity, which wasn’t ideal, but he would have to soldier through this handicap while preparing his enchantments. If he didn’t, he might give beasts the opportunity to slip past his army and into the area that they had already cleared, wasting their previous efforts.
Cooperating with his main body, he requested a trickle of soul-freezing ice, carefully adjusting the quantity until he reached the maximum that his host could handle. The poor woman shivered as the potent resource brushed with her soul, but the clone mitigated the damage by expelling as much mana as possible directly from his own wisp, without letting it seep into Sol’s channels.
It wasn’t possible to completely avoid injuries, but Sol’s Blessing of Permanence and years of experience with the Dance and her spectral traits had left her soul several times more resilient than the average Green’s. The regular soul mana circulating through her body helped her undo what little damage Percy failed to prevent.
Using soul-freezing ice, Percy produced and replicated several palm-sized slabs enchanted with all the standard features of his formations: self-repair enchantments, concealment, heating, amplification, and ice resonance runes.
Unlike the last time he had tried to freeze a lake, he didn’t stop after preparing enough slabs for his own three-layered formation. Instead, he created two variants: one set of runes had to be drawn and fuelled exclusively out of his own ice mana to maximize its potency, while the other had to be drawn out of his mana but could be fuelled by any affinity or mage.
About an hour after embarking on this project, Percy had hidden all the slabs inside the muddy lakebed, arranging them into a pair of giant formations. The inner part was far more powerful. He was going to personally activate it to slaughter the eels.
The outer section was an additional, independent layer that stretched over a much wider circle. He instructed his subordinates to spread out and prepare to pump their own soul mana into the runes at his signal.
The efficiency of his subordinates’ enchantments would be abysmal. Not only had Percy prioritized versatility over potency while drawing them, but it also wasn’t a good idea to have so many people mixing their mana to fuel a formation together. This was why Percy had chosen to keep this formation separate from his own – he didn’t want to water down the efficiency of his own slabs.
That said, the collaborative output of over six hundred Yellow mages was nothing to scoff at. Percy hoped that the Melodians would jointly cool down the water in this part of the lake by several degrees, slowing the eels down slightly and priming the liquid to make his own decisive strike even deadlier.
Once everything was ready, he used his host’s soul mana and willpower to lift himself up by about a metre, stepping atop the surface of the water. The mundane lake lacked the magical properties that made it easier for somebody to run atop the Elemental Source, but Sol was much stronger than she used to be during the expedition. With a body as fast as a Blue’s, running on regular water should be doable. In fact, even standing still wasn’t an issue, because Blues were technically capable of flight.
Granted, the situation was a little different when it came to soul affinity users. While Violets could support themselves solely through their willpower, Blues had to partially lift themselves up using their mana, which was completely ethereal and didn’t interact with physical matter in Sol’s case.
Fortunately, soul mana could still touch its owner’s soul, which was rooted firmly inside their flesh, indirectly allowing someone like Percy’s host to counteract her weight. She wouldn’t be soaring through the air as fast as mages with other mana types for another grade, but standing atop the lake or even hovering a few metres above it wasn’t out of the question.
With another task ticked off his mental checklist, Percy shifted his attention to his fellow aspect. ‘Micky, do you mind if I borrow a couple of seals?’
The Huehuan groaned internally but didn’t decline.
Peeling a few microscopic flakes from the inner wall of Sol’s first core, Percy activated the self-repair enchantments to replicate and spread the seals through his host’s channels.
Micky was months away from completing the Cradle and elevating the woman’s grade to Blue, but Percy could still take advantage of the secondary functions of her seals. The concealment runes in particular would allow him to completely mask his host’s mana signature, allowing him to approach the eels undetected.
Once he was just a couple dozen metres away, he tuned the intensity of the runes down slightly, revealing Sol’s mana but making her appear as a Yellow, to present her as a juicy yet manageable target.
It worked like a charm. The lake’s calm water stirred and frothed as hundreds of aquatic creatures shot toward Sol like arrows.
Maintaining his composure, Percy turned around and began running toward the formation. He carefully controlled his pace to keep the eels on his host’s tail without letting them sink their sharp fangs into her flesh.
Despite his back facing the creatures, he could still see them clearly through his sensory domain. Nearly the entire school had shot after him, though a few individuals scattered around the edges hadn’t deigned to move. He guessed that those aquatic monsters had either not registered what was going on, or had judged that the eels closest to Sol would devour her long before they got their turn.
This wasn’t ideal.
While designing his formation, Percy could have prioritized strength or reusability, but he hadn’t had the time to choose both. He doubted that his slabs would survive the first activation, and he currently lacked a good way to lure the remaining eels, meaning that his task force would have to manually eliminate them later. Hopefully, the Melodians would have an easier time slaughtering the surviving eels after he cut their numbers down to a tenth.
Taking control of one of his sentries, he signalled his subordinates to activate their formation. Countless tiny ripples of slightly colder water entered the range of his Sage’s Pond a few seconds later, confirming that the Melodians had started pouring mana into the runes.
The effect was barely perceptible at first, but it accumulated fast, slowing the incoming eels down and causing a few isolated pockets of ice to randomly crystallize in the water. The temperature still wasn’t even remotely low enough to threaten the Orange beasts – let alone the Yellow ones – but that wasn’t the goal.
Percy kept running until most of the eels were inside his own formation, at which point he asked his main body to send him soul-freezing ice once again. He even requested a little more than before, since Sol would hopefully not have to endure it for long.
Directing the resource downwards, he easily located the slabs that he could still see clearly through his sensory domain, pouring his mana into certain spots that he had designated as the primary inputs of the formation.
At the same time, his host used more of her own mana to cushion her soul from the damage and to lift herself up by a few metres, making it harder for the eels to reach her.
A handful of opportunistic creatures tried anyway, but Percy made quick work of the airborne beasts with a few rapid cleaves from a Soul Harvester that he brought out of his spatial seal, buying time for his enchantments to do their job.
The runes that he and Marnok had used on Robari hadn’t been meant for slaughter of this magnitude, but Green soul-freezing ice was far deadlier than regular Yellow ice mana, and Percy’s magiscript skills had improved massively since his time with the drowned sailor.
Beasts on Melodia admittedly had much tougher souls, but it wasn’t enough to protect the eels when their world lost its colour. A sinister grey wave rippled outwards, shattering the souls of the gluttonous monsters like glass and sapping the life out of their bodies in an instant.
Percy’s formations collapsed shortly afterward, though he didn’t mind, having expected it. Reuniting with his subordinates, he led them to the remaining eels, wiping the creatures out within minutes.
Splitting his army in two, he ordered half of his soldiers to drag the carcasses to shore, and the other half to help him clear out the rest of the lake. Percy braced himself for more problematic groups of monsters, but his luck came through for once, sparing him and his exhausted subordinates the trouble.
A couple of days later, the Melodian leaders received word that the base of the wall was complete, mere hours after the task force was done with the lake. Sol’s people still had many weeks of killing fish and stacking additional layers of stone onto the enormous barrier, but the worst of the beast tide was behind them.
They had won.