The Runic Alchemist

Damian had full control of the spell; he could sense clearly what was going on, even if his eyes couldn’t see it.

The beam of light was going higher and higher with no restraint on its power. This was just a trial for Damian to check how much mana flow created how powerful a laser beam. With a good idea of the mana-flow speed coming through the meter-wide mana thread, Damian deactivated the spell.

The blinding white light dispersed in a moment; once again, they could see.

Damian had already deciphered a little about he glowing purple spell. A section of it, though it was kept changing, had to do with repelling force once the force was applied. Before, he had no idea what force it was connected to. But after the wave of energy pushing his own mana out, Damian understood its full function.

Meaning, the spell will resist with equal strength that a person applies to break the chains. Whether there was a timer as to how long a foreign force could attack before this resistance shows up was something Damian could not figure out.

All of this depended on that single hunch that he could somehow trick that part of the spell. Like a battle of wits between a computer program running on a set algorithm and simple human intelligence. That small time gap between the force applied and the resistance showing up can be used against itself.

He could do this only and only because of his outstanding control over spells. He was a craftsman class pathfinder. Land-breaker himself had said, Damian’s true strength did not lie in his powerful physique or unique jobs and skills. He was powerful because of his versatile spell control and ridiculously high level of mana control.

He was a transcendent. But with thousand mana threads and tons of liquid mana, facing even ten transcendents at once would feel like a warm-up. His mana thread control limits were so high, normal transcendents couldn’t even distinguish how many he was creating and managing once he crossed 300 mana threads.

For the strongest transcendents, that number was around 500 mana threads. Damian could push his limits and go over a thousand. Only Land-breaker and probably Sea-Snake could accurately distinguish between that many mana threads. Normal transcendents simply did not have a mana sense sharp enough.

Before Sea Snake, Damian had never done that, so the guy had no idea of his realistic limits. Land-breaker knew him better. Land-breaker had even admitted that he could only go as far as to control 700, a hundred more if he pushed past his limits. And that was after centuries of using mana sense.

Damian turned the sacrium disk around with his big man hands while not letting the spell activate itself. He made small changes in the runic spell activated by the sacrium disk to adjust it with the flow of mana.

Then, created another runic spell to the side, which would create a layer of solid dirt covering the laser beam. It alone would not be able to handle the temperature, so Damian had coated the inside with a layer of thick seven-element combined mana.

Seven-element mana was the strongest defense he had. Compared to his aura, this was far more durable.

Before activating the spell, Damian looked at the dwarf god. The man was observing all his actions, trying not to miss a single thing.

“Ready?”

“If you are,” Steelweaver replied.

Damian turned to the side with a lingering smile on his lips.

“Sam, manage the flow, don’t waste it, but neither should it fall short.”

“I would do that if I could see a damn thing,” Sam replied.

“I will cover it this time,” Damian murmured as he breathed in.

With a nod from the Steelweaver, Damian activated the spell. The laser beam, covered in a layer of mana and solid dirt, landed on the surface of the black chains. The point where the laser and metal interacted was bright yellow and orange. But all the colors of the spell seemed to disappear in the abyssal darkness of the black chains. The sparks of red and orange were flying all around them.

Damian created a small protective mana shield that was placed between the chains and Steelweaver’s body. That should spare him from any injury from the impact heat released.

Damian started slowly to check the resistance. Barely 15 seconds into his laser intrusion, the wave of energy started pushing it back from the inside.

Just as Damian’s laser beam was about to get pushed back from the wave of energy, he increased the flow of mana, resulting in a dramatic increase in the laser’s penetration power. The wave of energy was pushed back.

But through his mana threads accompanying the laser beam, Damian could sense the river of energy charging up to send an even more powerful wave to match the increase in the laser’s power. If his calculations were right, this too would take 15-30 seconds before hitting the laser beam.

And the worst part, some function of the spell had suddenly activated, and the river of energy was actively gathering equal environment mana as it was using for pushing Damian’s laser back.

Despite having lower capabilities than an emperor rank monster core, the prime spell didn’t have any fleshly restrictions of the monster either. The pieces of core worked with five times the efficiently than a normal emperor rank monster core would. The amount of mana it could generate in a second was not small at all.

Still, it was a race.

The second the river was about to release its intense wave of resistant energy, Damian increased the flow of mana from his end. Making the spell do recalculations of the energy needed while it released the gathered energy as a wave.

Damian had to keep attacking the weakest nodes of the spell while continuously changing the flow of mana. But he had to increase the flow each time. Meaning each energy wave the spell released got more and more powerful with time.

Damian had to create circular wormholes covering the whole runic chain to keep the wave of energy from hitting him or the sacrium disk. The spell kept failing under the disastrous mana fluctuations near the chain, but Damian could recreate it again and again every time it failed.

He tried using the invisible box spell to block out the mana, but the spell kept failing, and the chain’s mana suction did not stop despite having the invisible box for some reason. Damian didn’t have time to figure out why that was happening, so he just kept focusing on the laser beam attacking the mana nodes.