Chương 118: Book 2 Chapter 70 - Fixing The Enchantments

Victor made his way down the stadium steps toward the arena wall. Everyone else was in their seat, intently focused on the fight unravelling down below. The bottom of the steps opened up to a wide walkway that allowed heavy foot traffic in either direction around the oval arena, but the walkway was roped off near the arena wall for safety reasons. City guards were stationed every fifty feet or so, facing the crowd, rather than the arena floor.

The guard at the bottom of the steps Victor descended watched him as he came down, and held out a hand as he approached the rope.

"You can't go past this point, sir, it can be dangerous near the arena wall. Please either return to your seat, or move toward the exit." Victor realized he should have gone invisible before approaching. It was too late now, since the guard was watching him so closely. If he went invisible now, it would raise suspicion.

Not that the guards could do anything about it, but it would be easier to do his work if the guards weren't all rushing around looking for him, and he was certain Lady Yountal would frown on the idea of him simply incapacitating them all. His magic sense gave him a clear picture of everything happening in the entire arena, the stands included. He knew which guards were more distracted, and might let him slip by more easily, but he honestly needed to get close to every section of the wall, including this one.

Some of the enchantments needed a bit of a recharge, while some others could use a slight tweak to make them more effective. He watched as a stray spell smashed into the protective barrier above him that the arena wall supported. The barrier flared to life, absorbing the impact. A dozen feet to the right and a little bit higher, and the spell might have slipped through a weak point. Kane was going all out in there. Victor nodded to the guard, acknowledging his directive, then gently reached out to the man's mind.

He didn't want to scramble his thoughts, he just needed to tweak a few things. The guard had no mental defenses to speak of, and Victor was able to immediately begin observing the thoughts flowing through the man's mind. The guard was thinking about the fight happening behind him, wishing he could see it. He was cursing out his buddy in the city guard, who'd talked him into switching shifts for the day, preventing him from seeing the first public duel in Easton in years.

His left booty cheek was itchy, but he was trying to avoid scratching it in front of so many spectators. All of those thoughts were peripheral, though. His main focus was Victor. Thoughts like: Who is this man in front of me, why did he approach me, and how can I get him to return to his seat? Victor turned and began walking away, and the guard's thoughts instantly turned to relief.

The guard was glad nothing had escalated, it was always uncomfortable trying to talk down an angry citizen or get them to do what you wanted them to. Victor pulled on that thread, amplifying it ever so slightly, pulling the guard's attention away from himself in the real world. He also pulsed out with his domain ever so slightly, warping the light passing toward him to curve around him instead. Anyone looking in his direction would instead feel like they were glancing just to the side of him, rather than at him.

At the same moment, he activated his invisibility, then paused for a moment to see if anyone had noticed. Nobody gasped or screamed, and no one seemed to be looking in his direction. The guard he had originally approached glanced up toward him, then scanned the seats nearby, trying to spot him. After a moment of searching, the guard shrugged to himself and took up a relaxed posture. Victor made his way back to the rope, then slipped underneath it, just a few feet from where the guard was standing.

A second later, his hand was on the arena wall, tracing the runes etched into it. He saw a few places where an unsteady hand had gone ever so slightly off course in the rune etching, something that was normally quite acceptable and unfixable. At tier 5, he would have simply accepted it as a fact of life, something to be worked with or worked around, rather than something that could be fixed. He had a very different mindset, now. You might be reading a pirated copy.

Look for the official release to support the author. He reached out with his domain, sensing the very fabric of reality making up the nearby wall, along with the grooves carved into it. He could sense the infused mana powering the wall's enchantments, but was unable to grasp it or control it himself. He could, however, sense the channels that it flowed through in the runes. He created a temporary channel made purely of his will and intent, then tied it into the rune.

While he couldn't control the enchantments' infused mana itself, it readily accepted the new channel he had formed, allowing it to bypass the section of the engraving that he wanted to fix. He knew intuitively that if he had tried to siphon the mana away from the enchantment, it would have resisted flowing through the channel that he had made, short of him dismantling the runic enchantment altogether.

As it was, though, it seemed to sense that his temporary channel was a viable path to where it needed to go, and it didn't resist him at all. Once the mana was traveling around the slightly misshapen rune, he pushed and pulled ever so slightly on the wall with his intent, nudging the wood around the rune until the rune was perfectly aligned. Once the offending rune was shaped properly, he allowed a small portion of the infused mana to flow back through that portion of the rune, testing its integrity.

It flowed eagerly through the reformed runic inscription, and he dismantled his temporary channel, returning the full flow of mana to the original runic channels instead. That done, he assessed the efficiency of the runes on the wall, and found his fix to be worthwhile, even though it was a micro-optimization.

The entire process was so intuitive, it only took him a fraction of a second to complete, and already the infused mana flowing through this section of the wall felt more stable, less likely to fracture at a stress point. He repeated the process on many small imperfections in that section of the wall over the course of the next few seconds. Some of the fixes released bottlenecks in the mana-flow, completely erasing weak points.

Other tweaks improved the ability of the rune to shape the mana into its desired effect, strengthening or improving the existing enchantments. He noticed that each section of the wall was powered by two large mana crystals acting as batteries, one serving as backup to the first. When either one drained, that section of the wall would visibly change color, alerting the maintenance crew that it was time to get the mana crystal recharged. It was a smart design, allowing the battery to be taken offsite for recharging.

Neither crystal seemed low enough to be of any concern in this section, so Victor moved on to the next section. The arena wall was made up of twelve sections in total, and he repeated the process at each one. One of the sections had a malfunction in the runes that governed the use of the mana crystal batteries, and it had been draining them simultaneously, instead of one after the other.

Both crystals were dangerously low without anyone having noticed, so after Victor fixed the enchantment to have it pull from one crystal first, he pumped some of his own mana into the backup crystal to recharge it. After fixing each section of the wall, he did a second circuit around the arena, checking the joints where each section lined up with the next.

Every section was responsible for extending its field of protection slightly past where the wall ended, so as long as the sections of the wall were touching or even just near each other, the overlap of their protective fields was actually the strongest point in the entire structure. Or at least it should be, in theory. Victor checked for any holes in the barrier at the joints, making sure that the overlap was sufficient on each one.

Everything seemed to be in order, so he returned to his seat to watch the rest of the duel. He had been keeping tabs on it via his domain sense, but was interested to see the rest of it from his seat, now that the barrier was shored up. So far, Shian was taking it easy on Kane, and hadn't even launched any spells of her own. Her defense was impeccable, and he watched as Kane's spells either dissolved on contact with her, or shattered into tiny bits without doing any real damage.

Having experience now with his own personal domain, Victor realized that it was an ingenious application of her own domain, dismantling the spells as they reached her, without deploying any kind of mana shield to block them. Some of the spells looked particularly dangerous, and were backed up by Kane's powerful aura. Kane wasn't weak for a tier 4, in fact he was near the peak of what a tier 4 could achieve.

Victor had to admit that even at tier 6 he wouldn't have had the guts to cut this fight as close as Shian was. He would have deployed mana shields out of habit, and put way more effort into dodging some of Kane's nastier spells. Shian, on the other hand, wasn't even flinching as they hit her, she just took them head on. Some of them, she took quite literally head on, right in the face. The fact that Shian didn't even bother dodging or shielding herself from them was the most ludicrous flex Victor had ever seen.