Chapter 81: Not Good

’Not good.’

The red dots kept moving inward along the edge of Jaxir’s map, and dealing with them would have been annoying enough without Rovan sitting on a bear that could erase him in one hit. With only 50 HP, even surviving a single attack would probably leave him too damaged to keep moving properly, and once the players reached him, that would be the end of it.

There had to be a way out of this.

Jaxir had only just started feeling like himself again, and he had no intention of letting some random lunatic on a bear knock him backward after everything he’d gone through. His expression cooled as he stopped watching the map and turned all of his attention toward Rovan and the Twinkle Twinkle Bear beneath him.

He started firing Casts as quickly as he could form them, but this time he wasn’t trying to force damage through. Every shot came from a slightly different angle, and while Rovan continued sending twisting lances of Twinkle Mana back at him, Jaxir watched where his own attacks began to bend and how far the invisible field extended around the pair.

There had to be some kind of limit.

If the barrier was constantly active, then Rovan shouldn’t have been able to fire through it either, unless the bear’s control was so ridiculous that it could distinguish friendly mana from hostile mana without dropping the effect. Jaxir watched the next attack form more carefully and realized the answer was much simpler than that.

Rovan thrust his spear forward before releasing the lance.

The spearhead passed beyond the edge of the warped field, Twinkle Mana gathered around the exposed tip, and only then did the beam rip toward Jaxir. Once the attack was gone, Rovan pulled the weapon back inside the barrier and returned to the same protected position as before.

’So that’s how.’

That also told Jaxir something else.

The barrier probably wasn’t stopping physical objects at all, which made sense when the bear had already smashed through several trees without the field reacting. Branches, bark and dirt passed through the warped mana normally, while every Cast Jaxir sent toward it was twisted aside the moment it crossed the same boundary.

Unfortunately, knowing that didn’t make getting close any smarter.

Rovan was already dangerous from a distance, and Jaxir doubted the spear became less deadly when there were only a few feet between them. The bear itself was an even bigger problem, especially when ordinary Level 5 Twinkle Twinkle Bears had nearly flattened him before and this one was clearly far beyond anything that belonged near a tutorial village.

Jaxir ducked behind one trunk as another lance carved through the branches above him, then pushed off and landed farther to the side. Even if he somehow slipped through the barrier and landed a physical hit, there was still a giant tank of fur and muscle standing between him and Rovan.

’There really is no justice in this world.’

The thought almost made him laugh, but another glance at the map wiped the humor away.

The red dots were closer now, enough that whoever was chasing him would probably enter sight of the fight soon. Once that happened, Rovan wouldn’t even need to land his own attack anymore. A stray arrow or random Ability from the crowd would be enough to ruin Jaxir’s day.

’Come on, come on.’

Jaxir jumped aside as another twisting lance tore through the air, but instead of answering with several smaller Casts, he gathered more mana into the Staff of the Light and compressed it into a single beam. The attack tore through the forest in a straight line toward Rovan, cutting leaves and smaller branches apart before reaching the point where Jaxir knew the barrier should be.

Right before impact, he split it.

One stream curved toward Rovan’s head while the other dropped toward the bear, forcing the invisible field to respond in two places at once. For the first time, the amount of Twinkle Mana moving around them became large enough for Jaxir to see it clearly.

The barrier rippled into existence.

Warped lines spread around Rovan and the bear like grooves cut into glass, bending and feeding into one another as both halves of Jaxir’s beam were dragged off course. At the same moment, the pair finally appeared on his map, but Jaxir barely spared the new markers a glance.

He could already see them. The changes to the mana itself was what mattered more.

Jaxir leaned harder into the Cast and began changing the paths of both beams, forcing the barrier to keep adjusting as his Light Mana pressed against the Twinkle Mana surrounding it. He tried to tear some of that mana away from the bear’s control the same way his Light had interacted with the mana of the Goddess of Light’s three sisters, twisting his beams so they followed the warped channels instead of simply fighting against them.

For a brief moment, some of the Twinkle Mana shifted, but the bear corrected it almost immediately.

Jaxir felt the control snap back into place before he could take anything meaningful, and he hadn’t expected much else when the creature’s manipulation was this precise. Stealing the mana had never really been the point, though; forcing it to move was.

Every change in his beam created another response.

When Jaxir drove one stream lower, mana flowed down to meet it and weakened somewhere else. When he pushed the second farther around the opposite side, another section thickened and fed into the first, until the entire barrier became a constantly shifting system rather than the solid wall he had assumed it was.

Jaxir’s eyes narrowed as the pattern finally made sense.

’There.’

Jaxir released both Casts at once, and the beams vanished along with the pressure forcing the barrier into view. Rovan’s spear remained raised as the light cleared, but the branch Jaxir had been standing on was empty.

He was gone.

The bear lifted its head instead of moving immediately, its ears twitching once as the Twinkle Mana around its body settled back into place. Then its nostrils flared, and it tilted its nose toward the sky before taking a long, deep sniff of the air.