Lev didn’t get a chance to contemplate. His physical, mental, and spiritual conditions caught up to him at once. Strength fled his limbs as his body slumped inside the barrier armor, though he forced himself to stay upright. A barrier thread tightly tied up the blackened stump that was his right bicep, stemming the blood flow for now.
Just to be certain, he flew up and gazed at the fort. Everything around him looked like a wasteland, decimated and charred with two massive craters. About fifty meters away from the fort, however, the destruction just stopped. Drakys’s doing, no doubt.
No worries on that front, Lev noted, then, under the gazes of thousands, he vanished with an abrupt infusion of shadow mana. A hole appeared in the massive bubble hovering above, through which Lev entered and dismissed his armor.
Tiredness hit him like a truck. Unsteady on his feet, he just made sure to stay away from the thread pillars and summoned a bed. Even getting atop it was a challenge, so Lev just sat down next to it, leaning his head and torso on the delightful softness. A barrier cap formed on his destroyed arm to make sure no blood got on the bedsheet.
After minutes of slow healing and slow breathing to calm himself, Lev finally turned inwards. His condition was… both better and worse than he expected. Physically, he was feeling winded beyond belief. Nothing some rest and a good meal couldn’t fix, aside from intense healing for the arm. Getting his hands on anatomy books was already a priority, though now he really wanted to be able to heal such injuries by himself.
Mentally, his head felt like it was on fire. The sheer control and raw mental strength required to shape lightning as he had was ridiculous, and the consequences were drilling into his pain receptors. He needed to sleep for a long while if he wanted to be operational again.
Spiritually, he didn’t know what to make of it. Lev’s soul was taxed; that much was readily apparent. Some part of him had struggled fiercely against lightning to evolve it, and another part had battled for control. Combined, his willpower felt battered and frayed, and he could see that more combat would make his condition worse at an exponential pace.
What a day, Lev sighed lightly, the motion draining even more energy. With a grimace, he dragged himself on top of the bed, sat cross-legged, and started summoning food. Water first, because nothing could replace water.
Then he ate a hearty meal. A Master could eat enough for multiple people without people noticing, as reflected in how quickly time passed while Lev remained engrossed in eating.
Reminds me, he wondered, sipping on orange juice with his left hand. Drakys was going to send a runner for the threads, right?
Below the invisible bubble, the wave was still ongoing. No more were the monsters held back by third-threshold monsters, and all of the stationed Masters and Adepts were holding back the tides. It also reminded him how negligible his overall contribution was, barring the battle with the Nure. The wave would continue for hours still.
Glancing at the fort, Lev’s hackles rose when Drakys immediately felt his gaze and locked stares through all invisibility enchantments. He might’ve yelped a little when the Exalted vanished, reapparing outside his bubble with two more people in tow a few minutes later.
The workers didn’t even realize that they had phased through the bubble until they were inside. Awe and wonder appeared on their faces before the emotions popped when they noticed Lev. Both of them scrambled to bow awkwardly, and he saved them the trouble of thinking of an appropriate title.
“None of that, please,” Lev voiced, exasperated. “And also not a word of this to anyone.”
“Naturally, sir,” said a boy his age, trying to hide his nervousness. Even then, his eyes sparkled when he gazed at all the threads wrapped around the pillars.
“Should I fetch a healer?” questioned the carrier who had arrived with the boy. The wind mage didn’t look at all surprised, though his eyes lingered on Lev’s missing limb.
“I’ll go find one later,” Lev waved him off with the stump. “In the meantime, how will you go about collecting this thread, and what do I get from it?”
“That depends on the number of standard spools you’ve collected, sir,” the boy hesitantly began. “I will need to oil these threads and create the spools on the spot, though the reward will be decided by the guild managers. You, um, did trespass into the forest and harvest without permission.”
“That’s fine. When do we begin?”
“We?”
Lev instead pointed towards the nearest pillar. Near the bottom, the pillar started to vanish, and the extremely adhesive thread came loose without problem.
Getting the hint, the boy immediately summoned a cylinder and a bowl of oil before sitting down next to the disappearing pillar. Lev could observe several skills activate in tandem, using both mana and stamina as the boy delicately greased the thread with the oil.
It’s drying yet remaining sort of wet, like a jelly, he thought to himself, mildly interested. I’m assuming the thread should be easy to peel off the cylinder if it remains that way.
A curious application, though nothing that helped with his barriers. Lev lost interest after a few minutes, creating a barrier chair for the carrier that sat down with a nod. Below him, an Adept team ran into a high-level second-threshold monster. Before he could help, Drakys vanished, and the monster’s hind legs magically twisted, allowing the team to finish it off.
That works.
The next hour passed in silence. The wave progressed, sound wards blocked out all the explosions, and the boy kept gathering more and more thread. He had to ask the carrier to get more oil at one point. Eventually, all of the pillars vanished, and so did the two workers with bows.
Lev spent a few minutes reworking the bubble. It was reduced to its usual house size, retaining several sections for his projectile reserves. Four seats were carved on the “front,” for his team would also join him soon.
That brought an involuntary smile to his face. It had been a while since he had seen them, and no doubt, they had a lot to show him. The opposite was true as well. He couldn’t wait.
First things first, though.
His arm was starting to hurt a lot. Healing mana was trying and failing to regrow it, and by now, most of the effects of mana poisoning were gone. Delaying would just make the job harder for the healers.
Infusing his armor with shadow mana, Lev marveled at just how potent the invisibility was. No one noticed him when he landed on the wall, and even Masters didn’t show any hints of detecting his presence. Undisturbed, Lev made his way inside the fort, finding it way more… lively, if that was the correct word. It felt like a proper stronghold now, instead of a temporary structure.
After a few minutes of gymnastics to avoid bumping into hunters and staff, he arrived at the white rooms with a familiar aura. As much as he wanted to prank her, Lev just formed a barrier thread behind Beatrice and poked her shoulder. She jumped, face scrunching into something between a smile and a frown when she realized who it was.
Lev’s invisibility dropped, and so did Beatrice’s smile. She was on him in a blink, skills prodding the stump and the rest of his body for any injuries.
“So it was you?” she questioned, already in healer-mode.
“Probably?”
“The boy with white lightning,” Beatrice voiced, her tone showing that she was repeating someone else’s words. She paused when the sounds of the medical ward stopped reaching them. Looking back, she found a lot of injured hunters and healers staring at them, most of them hastily turning away from her gaze. “This is going to start a few rumors.”
Lev blinked, then just shrugged. He hadn’t thought that far. “Not like it matters.”
“It does matter.” Beatrice gave him a side-eye, coating his stump with films of mana. “You won’t hear a word of it, but half the world will now ask me what I am to you and vice versa.”
“Will someone give you trouble over it?”
“Well, no,” she answered with a chuckle. “I’m still a high-ranking Master aura mage.”
“Then that’s that,” Lev said. “If someone tries anything, just call for me. I’ll deal with them.”
She slapped him gently on the intact arm, shaking her head. “So violent. We’re all civilized people here, right under the noses of an Exalted and several absurdly strong Masters. No one will do anything stupid.”
“Still, just in case.”
“Lev.”
“Alright, alright.”
The “discreet” staring was becoming uncomfortable, so Lev wrapped them both in a bubble that carried them to a quieter corner before making it invisible. Two chairs formed, and they took their seats for some long yet comfortable healing.
The process wasn’t painful, though it did leave him feeling frail. Lev’s eyes drooped, so he closed them while extending a headrest from his chair next to his face. Beatrice snorted at his state, and Lev smiled as well.
“Drakys wanted me to fight a tough bastard,” he explained, though it wasn’t like he needed to. “I did something stupid in the name of science, and well, now I have lightning that kills me to kill monsters harder.”
“So you did evolve it!” she exclaimed, excited. “What is it called?”
Lev’s brain ground to a halt. “Uh… am I supposed to know that?”
“What?”
“What?”
“Lev, did you not get a title or anything?”
“…No?”
“Huh,” Beatrice mused. “Do people really just give their elements names of their liking?”
“Probably?” Lev answered. “Not like there are many of them. The few I know of are… Wither and Raze?”
“Frostbite, Ashstorm, Binder, Blast, Chill—”
“Chill?” Lev asked, curious.
Beatrice thought for a few seconds. “I think I overheard one of my managers talking about it? Yeah. They mentioned someone with that element.”
Interesting. It would fit Melvine’s element quite nicely. More so than Frostbite.
“I see, I might have met someone with that or a similar element.”
Beatrice didn’t press it, opting to instead ask more casual questions while focusing primarily on the regrowing process. Casual questions being where he was for a month, why did he need to fight something so big, if the Exalted was stupid for risking him so, and why he attracted some weird people if Aurora was anything to go by. Lev refrained from asking if Beatrice counted herself as one of them. She certainly had turned her life around in a single month.
While the arm regrew and they chatted merrily, Lev also paid attention to the hunters being brought in. Most of them were missing limbs, but they also survived such encounters. Some of them could be attributed to Drakys’s interference. Others could be explained by the various trinkets on the injured people.
“I’m going to ask Aurora for a few runes…” he mumbled.
“What runes?” Beatrice voiced.
“Something related to sensing life, heat, and the state of one’s body. Barriers are quite good at life-saving equipment, but I still don’t have any suitable runes to craft them.”
“Do you think the noble has them?”
“Easily. I probably won’t even need to press much to get my hands on such runes. They’re not that rare. I’ve just not needed them for anything before now to try and obtain them.”
“And what do you need for them now?” Beatrice humored him.
“Kinetic energy, mainly. I wanted to use it against the Nure, but the mana costs involved are too high. It would also barely be affected, so it wouldn’t have been worth it. I almost bottomed out already as it was.”
“Blue flames, white lightning, and kinetic energy,” she counted aloud. “You’re working on a lot of things.”
“I… have reason to,” Lev answered, embarrassed. He couldn’t exactly tell her about the Arcane Supremacy rune and his plans for its eventual activation.
A pinprick made him jolt. Beatrice regarded him with bemusement. “I’m just happy you have things to work towards, Lev. No need to feel bad about it.”
Yeah, I just need to master ten whole elements or more to use a single rune. A totally possible goal, a totally sane person would have.
He wasn’t exactly averse to talking about Arcane Supremacy. Lev just wasn’t sure how to explain the fact that he needed to do so much for it, and how all of it involved repeatedly risking his life against worse and worse enemies.
Better off keeping that burden to himself.
The mood became a bit more somber after that. Conversation petered off, and the only thing Lev focused on was how the aura mage regrew his limb. Healing mana always required intense focus, partially why he couldn’t truly explore its depths. In a battle, there was already too much going on for detailed healing.
Now, however, it seemed essential. Lev wasn’t even sure that he could survive a single direct hit from the Nure. Sure, he had 800 Constitution, but what was that going to do against a monster nearly double his level? Even worse, the attribute wasn’t backed by any skills or associated bonuses. To top it all off, Lev also had no experience in dealing with petrification and similar attacks. A single graze might’ve killed him without the Exalted’s presence.
Next up, sourcing anatomy books… after a decent bit of rest. And after dealing with these notifications.
Tired as he was, he ended up asking something he normally would’ve put more thought into.
“Hey, are you free tonight after the wave?”