Chapter 281 – An Overdue Realisation

Pod and Ivor are among the last members of the dungeon party to arrive, and Emily inspects each of the ships as she waits. She slips aboard and lets out a spatial marker bird into each, sending them off to find a secluded corner to wait in.

When her apprentices finally show up, walking on either side of a bulky chimaeric hound, she ushers them into the lead ship, sending Rotwire to board one of the others to spread their higher-level combat power. The squadron detaches from the habitat ring and glides out into open space, gaining some distance before their thrusters hypercharge, destabilising and ripping apart space before them.

The fiscushia soldiers feed their destination coordinates into the lead ship’s flight computer before Emily shows them to their quarters and leaves them to settle in. With them dealt with, she scans the ship’s occupants, confirming they’re all crewmates already aligned to Silvia, before Blinking to one of the other ships in the squad to do the same.

Only a few members of their squadron haven’t already had Mental Lock applied, so Emily and Mensacus pay each of them a visit. One of them objects, and they mysteriously vanish from the ship with a quick pulse of mana from Mensacus’ tattoos, but the rest fall in line without any pressure, accepting the moment Emily unseals her mana.

A couple of hours after leaving Orphin Q3, Emily meets back up with Ivor, Pod, and Silica in a room designated to her within the squad’s lead ship. She pulls them all into her Factory, dropping them into one of Elisime’s workshops, where Ivor shivers at the dense energies filling the air whilst the others settle in comfortably.

“Right,” Emily says, holding out a hand to her son in a silent request for the cloak he’s wearing. “We have a week until we arrive at the gathering point for the dungeon. I’ll provide you with a few of my backup weapons and a couple of squads of my soldiers in case things go south, and I plan on making both an emergency escape artefact and an observation focus so I can check in on how you’re doing. Anything else you want is on you, and I fully expect my added precautions to go unused.”

“Got it!” Pod and Ivor nod in agreement, the former immediately turns to a workbench covered in one of his half-finished projects to get started.

Emily gestures for Ivor to approach as she pulls several materials from her belt, handing a mix of shadow boa scales and powdered darkness crystals to Mensacus to imbue with his mana.

“I see your ascension was a success,” she says, glancing at him with a small smile curling the corners of her lips as she scans his presence, sensing three stable, mildly earth-tinted circles humming away in his chest. “Congratulations. I take it you completed your Earthbound Elixir then?”

“That I did,” he beams and signs back. “It’s amazing. All of my earth-based spells now flow a noticeable degree more smoothly than before.”

“Yes, it seems you’ve started the process of attributing your circles early. Well done.”

“Thank you. How was your trip? Pod said it wasn’t a false alarm like we were told, but he refused to elaborate.”

“It was good, we encountered a world-eater…”

***

A day before they’re due to arrive at the drop-off coordinates, Emily has yet to successfully achieve a manifestation of the mental element. She’s sitting cross-legged beneath Elisime’s thrumming Logic Core, which Harriet is currently controlling, deep in a meditative trance with her son before her, pressing two of his tendrils to either side of her brow.

“Damn,” she mutters, dropping from the trance the moment she feels The Clock tick to twenty-four hours till arrival. “I can feel it so close, but it’s just out of my reach.”

She draws the array-engraved time crystal Phyllie helped her create from her belt, activating it with a pulse of mana and setting it down on the floor beside her, sealing the room in and isolating them from the surrounding timestream.

“Would you like me to try the aggressive approach again?” Mensacus asks, calm in the face of her mild frustration.

“Go ahead.” Emily nods, shutting her eyes again and gritting her teeth.

Mensacus pushes his familiar mental mana into her head, slipping past her innate barrier without meeting any resistance. Emily takes a deep breath and forces her machina to still the moment she feels him in her head, before drawing her mana up and pushing against his. She feels pressure start to mount, as if he were applying more force to the tendrils on either side of her head in an attempt to burst it, and keeps going regardless.

Their energies clash like oil and water, her raw mana forming an unrefined, thick barrier. Every few seconds, Mensacus gathers his mental mana into the form of a jagged spear before lashing out and punching a hole in her defences. He tears through her thick barrier without much trouble, despite the difference between them in circles, forcing in and stealing an unwanted flash of memory with each strike.

Some of the holes are easy to react to and patch: those that pull Emily into old scenes of hours spent bent over her tools or delving into the Spellweave. Others nearly knock her from her trance in shock before she can hastily weave a binding net back into place over them: blood-soaked rags, Juliana’s corpse lying abandoned and alone in a dungeon, Anna’s empty gaze staring at her with hatred and reproach.

The delicate dance of attack and defence helps Emily feel out the properties of her son’s mana in excruciating detail, but she can’t quite convert the data flow to a concrete sense of connection or understanding, no matter how much her mind tells her this method should be showing results.

“Let’s try the gentle approach again,” she finally says with a disappointed sigh, nearly a full day later, letting her machina buzz with activity again and instantly forcing Mensacus out.

Harriet crackles and hisses over their heads, once again voicing her displeasure at being forced to sit back and watch as Emily lets her son mess with her head without them present to help.

“Hmmm,” Mensacus hums, glancing up at the familiar and nodding in understanding. “Maybe we are approaching this wrong.”

“How so?” Emily questions, willing to hear them out as the seconds tick by, quickly approaching twenty-four hours since she sealed the room.

“Overthinking/underthinking/others’ thinking,” Harriet replies, speaking through a series of crackling hisses, carefully calculating the frequencies needed to convey her message aloud.

“Others’ thinking?” Emily mutters, the term catching in her mind and casting a faint glow towards the answer she can tell is dancing at the edge of her awareness.

“You are trying to analyse and replicate my connection with the element,” Mensacus points out. “Though I am your creation, are you certain our base understandings of the element align?”

“I’m not trying to replicate your connection exactly; I’m just trying to replicate the feeling. Like with my fire manifestation. My other affinities and initial understanding upon manifestation influenced it, giving it a mild metallic leaning, but it’s still a burning flame. I may not view minds or mental magic exactly the same as you, but I should still be able to connect with the core principle behind the element: it’s not as if…”

Realisation hits like a crack of thunder, bringing with it both faint satisfaction and disappointment.

My cortex is practically a different organ when compared to a normal mage’s brain, and I already have an affinity dedicated to it.

Emily shuts her eyes, turning her focus inwards. She feels out the dense machina filling her cortex to the brim, taking hold of the entire ocean of crackling charge at once. Without moving it, she pushes for change, following the now-second-nature process of converting it into mana.

However, halfway between states, when the cold, sharp edges of her machina have melted into the smooth flow of mana, she stops the process. The twisted mana charged with newfound electrical properties stills for a moment, as if unsure whether to unravel or not, before settling and joining her body’s flow of mana. It feels almost as if she’s drawn on her lightning connection, but despite sparking and crackling when she lets it pour from her hand, the new blend of mana is a familiar milky-white.

“Better!” Harriet chirps, flowing down from the Logic Core above to melt back into Emily’s body through the energy stream, happily letting the mana wash over her surface thoughts: ‘See? Easy/congratulations/finally.’

Emily activates The Clock, sending her and the smug familiar back through time.

“Would you like me to try-” Mensacus starts, cutting off when Harriet flows down from above to rejoin their host. “Oh, have you had success?”

“Yes.” Emily nods, holding up a hand and letting out a small electric stream of mental mana. “Thanks to your assistance and Harriet’s… pointed insight.”

“Congratulations.”

“There’s no need for that.” Emily dismisses the energy in her palm and reaches down to deactivate the time crystal sealing the room. “I was being a fool and should have achieved this manifestation years ago. Now, show me the formula of your Mental Lock: we’ll need to remove the inbuilt link to your eye and bind it to a new catalyst if I’m to cast it…”

***

Emily sends out a squadron-wide message asking all members of the dungeon party to gather at their ships’ airlocks as she heads to the bridge to watch their arrival. She separates from her children on the way and walks up a set of steps into a room wrapped in an angular, reinforced glass canopy that gives a clear view of everywhere but below the ship without the need for a single camera. The bridge is only large enough to hold a few people standing shoulder-to-shoulder, with two control chairs bolted in the centre taking up most of the room.

The pilot sitting in the secondary seat turns to give Emily a nod of acknowledgement as she pauses at their shoulder, but her gaze remains focused on the horizon ahead. Filling the vacuum before them is the single largest force Emily has ever seen.

There are thousands of individual ships wearing the FAF’s signature blue and green scattered throughout the darkness, with well over a hundred that match or outdo The Mothership in scale. They’re accompanied by eight colossal constructs of stone and metal, artificial planet stations nearly as large as Ulea and loaded to the teeth with enough weaponry to shatter the planet. They’re all positioned in a carefully calculated net of chaos, orbiting a single point in three dimensions with enough mass to block sight of the far side of their encirclement.

Emily can see several gaping, volcano-sized plasma-focusing channels protruding from the surfaces of the combat stations and feels chills run down her spine as the urge to get a closer look clashes with the sheer threat of the inactive weapons.

The FAF guides aboard the ship enter the bridge as the ship approaches the dense blockade.

“One of our carrier vessels will come collect your entrants,” one of the fiscushia says, pointing towards one of the largest gathered ships that’s turned to close the distance between them. “Please halt here and do not give our forces a reason to engage.”

The pilots both look to Emily for confirmation, so she nods and gestures for them to comply.

“Should we start setting course to take you back, or are you leaving us here?” Emily questions the soldiers, not believing for a second they’d have the audacity to ask her to take them back without a superior who can match her present.

“We shall continue to escort your entrants.”

The soldiers leave without another word, heading to the gathering by the airlock.

When the large ship approaching them finally stops a short distance away, they receive a message through the ship’s main data relay asking them to drop their shields. The pilots once again turn to her, waiting for her signal to follow the instruction.

The moment they do, a port on the opposing ship opens, and a torrent of mana rushes out. It splits into several streams, each one reaching for an external airlock on the ships under Emily’s command, before solidifying into a tunnel of artificial atmosphere.

“Open the airlocks,” Emily says before another request can come through, watching as their crewmates file out of the ships to head towards their ride.

Mensacus and Rotwire are at the head of the group, the former once again wrapped in a dark cloak that’s now layered with enchantments to cover his presence, nothing but shadow showing beneath his hood. Emily watches her children vanish into the FAF ship, and the magical bridge disperses as the port shuts.

“Get us out of here,” Emily tells the pilots, forwarding them the first set of coordinates Lethia has provided and leaving the bridge.

She quickly returns to her room and casts Temporal Shield, burning a large chunk of her mana, before taking over control of the ship and halting it with a burst of machina. The moment they’re stationary, she begins weaving a complex spatial spell, sending out a few pulses of spatial mana to lock in on her target exit point beside one of the artificial planets. However, before she can activate her spell and warp herself over to steal another blueprint, a powerful burst of spatial mana erupts from one of the FAF ships, smothering her scan and quickly tracing back to her at the source.

The presence that locks onto her is sixth circle at least, and Emily’s instincts scream danger the moment she has their full attention, so she makes a snap decision and activates The Clock, giving up on gaining a new blueprint for now.