Chapter 92: Fun

Jaxir only needed one more glance over his shoulder to understand the problem.

There was no way he was outrunning the expanding wall of Twinkle Mana. Sparkle Route kept changing the path in front of him as trees collapsed across the forest, but even the best path didn’t matter when the wall itself was gaining faster than he could.

He couldn’t beat the force, so the only option left was to use it.

Jaxir stopped resisting the pressure behind him and instead shaped his Twinkle Mana around it, allowing the edge of the expanding wave to catch against his back without swallowing him. The moment the forces connected, his body shot forward so violently that the forest blurred into streaks of green and brown.

"Fuck."

The first tree came at him before Sparkle Reflex had finished warning him about the second one behind it, and Jaxir dumped Mana into a repulsive pulse to throw himself off course. He missed the trunk by less than a meter, only for another one to fill his vision almost immediately afterward.

Another burst of Mana knocked him sideways, then a third sent him back the other direction as the wave continued driving him through the forest. The method worked, but every correction cost far more than simply running, and Jaxir could feel his MP dropping in chunks while he bounced himself through gaps he barely had enough time to notice.

By the time the pressure behind him finally began weakening, the problem had already changed.

The wall stopped pushing him, but his momentum didn’t disappear with it. Jaxir was still flying forward far faster than his own movement could control, which meant slowing down had become every bit as dangerous as escaping had been.

He twisted around another trunk with Sparkle Alignment keeping his body from folding the wrong way, then used a final repulsive burst when a thick tree appeared directly ahead. The correction wasn’t enough to clear it normally, so Jaxir kicked off the air and burned his double jump to sail over the upper branches.

Relief lasted about half a second.

The forest vanished beneath him.

Jaxir’s expression went blank as open air replaced the ground, and he recognized the wide valley below just before gravity caught hold of him. His forward momentum turned into a tumbling fall, carrying him farther from the cliff while the ground rushed up much faster than he wanted to think about.

"Oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me."

The good news? He had already genocided all the twinkle twinkle foxes in this familiar valley and they clearly hadn’t respawned yet. The bad news? Well...

He twisted in the air and searched for anything close enough to use as an anchor, but the cliff face had already fallen too far behind him and there were no trees growing out from the open valley beneath. Worse, the one thing that might have saved him without burning half his remaining Mana had already been used to clear the last tree. He didn’t have another use of double jump.

"This is such a shitty way to die."

After everything he’d survived, falling off a cliff because he jumped too far felt offensive on a personal level. Jaxir could already tell from the speed of the descent that his remaining HP didn’t matter; if he hit the ground like this, Divinity was going to turn him into a very expensive stain.

A roar rolled across the valley behind him, and Jaxir looked up just in time to see Auren reach the edge of the cliff.

The Village Head barely slowed before throwing himself after him, the oversized chest plate leading his fall while his massive body dropped through the air with all the grace of a boulder.

That would have been comforting if Auren wasn’t a literal tank with tens of thousands of HP still left. The fall damage might hurt him a small bit, but it was definitely going to kill Jaxir.

The ground grew closer, but somewhere beneath the panic, more of his original self was waking up, a self that only looked for solutions where there were none. And that was when it drilled into his mind like a bullet.

He had spent this entire battle thinking about what Sparkle Mana did through the effects of its Vestigem Cards, but the more he thought about those effects, the less sense their apparent theme made.

Sparkle Thread sensed movement. Reflex sharpened processing. Alignment improved awareness of his own body, and Route interpreted the world around him well enough to find the best path through it.

Every Card focused on perception in one form or another.

But why?

Twinkle and Glimmer came from the same root, and neither one was gentle about how it expressed itself. Twinkle pulled and repelled, while Glimmer preserved momentum and carried movement through changes that should have bled it away.

Sparkle Mana shouldn’t have somehow wandered off into becoming better eyesight. Unless it hadn’t.

Jaxir’s thoughts snapped back to the old physics classes he had mostly forgotten until now. Anything with mass exerted gravity, and while the force between ordinary objects was too small for a person to ever care about, it still existed.

Drop a stone toward Earth and the stone fell downward, but technically Earth moved toward the stone too. The difference was so impossibly small that nobody would ever notice it, but that didn’t mean the pull wasn’t there.

Jaxir’s eyes widened.

Everything had mass. Everything had its own pull. That was what Sparkle Mana was sensing.

It wasn’t perception separated from gravity. It was perception through gravity, reading the tiny pushes and pulls created by everything around it until those microscopic forces became information.

A pebble resting along the cliff had its own pull. So did the trees above it, the valley floor beneath him, Auren falling behind him, and Jaxir himself.

Every object had its own rhythm. Every object tugged on everything else.

Jaxir’s staff spun once through his hand before he tightened his grip around it, his grin returning despite the fact that the ground was now much too close. Two Cards flashed through his thoughts, neither useful for avoiding becoming meat paste, and yet he triggered their last uses nonetheless.

Sparkle Route. Sparkle Alignment.

For an instant, the valley remained exactly what it had been: empty air, distant stone and a very unpleasant amount of ground coming toward him. Then the two effects layered across one another, and Jaxir’s entire awareness changed.

He felt the valley.

Not in the same vague way Sparkle Thread had let him sense another person moving, but as countless tiny pulls surrounding him from every direction. The cliff face, loose stones, trees, exposed roots and even Auren’s enormous body each formed another faint point pressing against his awareness.

All of them were too weak to matter alone. But together...

Sparkle Route searched through the web of forces for a usable direction while Sparkle Alignment turned his awareness inward, showing him exactly how those tiny pulls interacted with his own body. Jaxir followed both effects at once and began nudging his Mana through the same lines, gathering hundreds of meaningless influences until they stopped pulling against one another and started pulling together.

A pebble on the ledge... a tree rooted higher up.... the cliff wall itself.

Auren.

Jaxir snapped his focus into a single direction.

Something pulled taut around his body.

His fall slowed so suddenly that his robes snapped upward around him, but Jaxir held the alignment and kept dragging those countless tiny forces into agreement. His downward speed bled away until, several dozen meters above the valley floor, it disappeared entirely.

Jaxir suddenly stopped falling.

The Village Head hurtled past him with his eyes widening in naked shock, twisting his head around while Jaxir remained suspended in empty air. Jaxir looked down at him, then at the staff in his hand, and the grin stretching across his face became almost vicious.

BOOM.

Auren slammed heavily into the ground below, losing thousands of HP in a single go.

"This is gonna be fun."

The first Cast slammed into Auren’s chest before he could respond, and the second curved into his shoulder while Wither, Fracture and Drain continued stacking between each attack.

There were no trees to block Jaxir’s firing lanes anymore and no ground for Auren to charge across. He could only roar from below, constantly jumping at the hovering Jaxir, but just as constantly unable to close in the distance enough for it to matter. been.

Jaxir simply kept firing.

By the time the first spectators reached the valley rim, several of them stopped so abruptly that the players behind nearly ran into them.

A regional boss was tumbling and roaring beneath Jaxir while Jaxir hovered above him, peppering him with attacks as though the Village Head had somehow become the one trapped inside a dungeon.

Auren’s HP continued dropping until the final Cast struck him through the chest.

His body broke apart into motes of light before he ever reached the ground, and a familiar notification appeared in front of Jaxir.

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[Divine Quest Progress Updated]

[Village Heads Defeated: 2/3]

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[+20,000 Exp]