Chương 176

Feeling his left toes curling inside his boot almost distracted him from noticing the signal to take off. It was such a mundane feeling—the leather was stiff, the fit snug—but to him, it was truly breathtaking. For weeks, that space had been filled with cold, unfeeling stone, a lifeless weight that needed constant mana regulation to function. Now, the feedback loop was completely subconscious. He shifted his weight on the broom, leaning heavily into a turn just to feel his ankle flex.

"Keep the pace and don't drift off," Pauline's voice came from his left, clearly having noticed that he seemed distracted.

"I'm getting used to my new foot," Orion grumbled, though his lips pulled into a grin he couldn't quite hide.

"Do you have any idea how much effort I was wasting just trying to walk? Now that the background process is gone, I feel so much better."

"Just don't fall off," she replied dryly. They had left Last Thaw with over three hundred witches. Between the battle at the Belt and the occupation force left behind in Stillport to liaise with the Collegium, their numbers had decreased to about two hundred and fifty. But their power was not diminished. The remaining witches were the tough, elite survivors. They flew in a loose hunting formation, their robes billowing in the high-altitude winds, surrounded by a haze of magic and protective wards.

It would be very difficult for any observer on the ground to see them, but if they did, he'd bet they looked quite intimidating. Below them stretched the Belt's last section, a wild, untamed delta where the river divided into many tributaries before reaching the sea. The vegetation here was far more aggressive, gradually turning into a chaos of emerald greens and toxic purples. Trees grew to impossible heights, their roots choking the waterways, while giant ferns unfurled like solar sails.

"Why is the mana density so high here?" Orion asked. [Hypotheticism] painted the landscape in a heat map of magical saturation, indicating that the Local Field was much closer than he's used to, away from special places like the Sanctum.

"The ambient levels are nearly double what they were in Last Thaw."

"We have entered the realm of the Adventurer's Guild," Pauline explained, scanning the horizon.

"They keep this area in a state of controlled chaos. Nature is allowed to run wild to produce stronger monsters, making it a farming ground for experience and materials." Orion raised an eyebrow.

"They farm monsters? That sounds remarkably inefficient and incredibly dangerous for the local populace."

"There is almost no local population," Pauline said.

"Only those willing to fight live here, which is also why every other faction allows the Guild to establish itself within their borders. Some estimates suggest this delta contains as many Tier Three creatures as the rest of the Cyril region combined. If you see movement down there, assume it will try to kill you." As if summoned by her words, the canopy below exploded. A boulder the size of a carriage shot into the sky, trailing vines and soil, hurtling toward them with deadly intent.

"Scatter!" a flight leader shouted ahead. The formation collapsed in less than a second, with witches diving and banking like a flock of starlings. The boulder reached the peak of its arc, missing a pair of acolytes by just feet, before gravity took over. Orion didn't panic. In the past, his first instinct would have been to deploy a kinetic shield and brace for impact, hoping his calculations held against the force, but he'd matured enough not to need to hide like that.

His eyes tracked the projectile's path, and his brain effortlessly calculated the intercept vector. Finally, his body—charged with the explosive energy of a Tier Four elixir and a permanent +5 boost—reacted instantly. He yanked his broom into a corkscrew dive, forcefully shifting his weight left. His core tightened, his legs gripping the handle, and he felt the wind rush past his ears as he dodged out of the danger zone as a second stone sailed past him.

My increased Body score allows for greater G-force tolerance during maneuvers. He noted this with more than a little pleasure.

"Treants!" someone yelled.

"Catapult-Treants!" Below, the forest floor seemed to be uprooting itself. Massive, gnarled trees moved, their branches intertwining into natural cups that hurled stones with terrifying speed.

"You shouldn't throw yourself at monsters that want to kill you," Pauline said dryly as she caught up, drawing a wand that seemed to absorb the light around it.

"And the younger witches need the experience."

"I'm technically a younger coven member," Orion argued, leveling his hand at the ground.

"And I need the experience too." A second barrage of stones flew up to meet them, accompanied by the screeching dive of Iron-Feathered Eagles plummeting from the clouds above. Soon, the sky became a chaotic melee of spellfire and monsters. Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. Orion was attacked by one of the eagles before he could get low enough to engage with the treants.

The beast was enormous, with a wingspan easily twenty feet across, and its feathers gleamed with a metallic sheen that indicated high physical resistance. It shrieked, folding its wings for a dive that would tear a normal human apart. Orion grinned. Let's test the new specs. The eagle closed the distance. Three hundred feet. Two hundred. One hundred. At fifty feet, the bird extended its talons, aiming for his head in what he was sure would have been a spectacularly gory display.

Orion kicked the tail of his broom, twisting his body in a quick snap-turn that would have dislocated his ankle a week ago. The broom spun around, and Orion swung underneath it, hanging upside down for a brief moment. The eagle's talons slashed through the empty air where his chest had been just a moment earlier. As the bird overshot, its sheer momentum carrying it past him, Orion pulled himself back up with a burst of core strength that felt effortless. I'm probably going to pay for it later.

Five points to my Body aren't enough to become a martial artist, so I must be using up the overflowing vitality leftover from the elixir. He leveled his right hand, which held a pebble, at the bird's retreating back and fired a [Gravity Cannon], targeting the left wing. A gravitationally accelerated pebble slammed into the limb, turning it into red mist. The bird squawked in pain and confusion, tumbling from the sky and crashing into the canopy below with a satisfying crunch of timber.

A second [Gravity Cannon], precisely calibrated with the CC, was enough to end it. SYSTEM NOTIFICATION + 21, 200 Exp Orion took a moment to look around and saw that eagles were being taken care of quickly, since they were foolish enough to attack the older witches, but the Treants were still firing.

"Let's try something different," he muttered, narrowing his eyes behind his glasses. Focusing on a particularly large Treant winding up for another shot, he raised his hand, channeling mana through the CC and accessing its full capabilities. He pulled up the schematic for [Infinite Laser]. It was a reliable spell, but after manipulating the fabric of space with [Collapsing Wormhole], simple thermal energy felt quaint.

His hypothesis was that if light could be manipulated through information, then matter could also be altered in the same way. If I apply [Falsifiability Criterion] to the photon stream, can I affect the target's ability to absorb energy? Or possibly affect the target itself? It was a risky line of thinking. Combining trait-logic with spell-geometry was how he lost a limb, but Orion felt confident after recent wins, and he had learned his lesson not to cast experimental spells when his life was at stake.

Tweaking the formula didn't require much effort; instead of simply amplifying the light, he threaded a part of his trait into the matrix, allowing it to express itself differently, adding a few details from [Null Light] when the whole thing felt too clunky. I'll call this [Null-Laser (Prototype)]. A beam of light shot from his palm once he felt the structure was stable enough and wouldn't explode on him, but instead of the usual bright white, it was a sickly, flickering gray, seeming dull against the daylight.

It struck the Treant's raised limb, and for a moment, nothing happened. Then the wood turned to grey dust that floated on the wind. The cellulose's structural bonds had been broken. The Treant's arm collapsed, dropping the boulder onto its own head. SYSTEM NOTIFICATION + 12, 500 Exp Orion looked at his hand with a frown as he sensed the tingling spreading. The concept was a success, but also terribly inefficient.

The mana cost was three times higher than a standard [Infinite Laser], and the effect was limited to a small area. That needs a lot of work. I doubt the treant even had magical resistance, and I couldn't control the output until the wood broke. I didn't even get a single attribute point!

"Stop playing with your food," Pauline called out, blasting a pair of eagles out of the sky with bolts of shadow that swallowed the birds alive. Orion banked hard, rejoining the main column as the rear guard finished off the remaining monsters.

"I'm trying something new," Orion justified himself, breathless but still too energetic to settle down.

"I think it might have potential. Did you see it?"

"I saw you almost get done in by an eagle," Pauline said, though she didn't sound truly annoyed. She slowed her broom slightly, allowing the gap between them and the vanguard to widen during the lull.

"You need to focus, Orion. We are approaching the Tower, and the dangers there will not be mindless beasts you can out-fly." Orion straightened his coat as the adrenaline from the fight faded, and he forcefully reined in his excitement. The older witches were done with the eagles anyway, and the treants were stuck in place, so there were no more easy targets.

"I guess this isn't the right time to try anything. What's the biggest threat we could encounter at the Tower?"

"The Grandmaster of the Guild, for one," Pauline said, sounding serious.

"Mages and witches rule Cyril, Orion, but there are individuals who exist outside our hierarchy simply because they are too dangerous to ignore. The Grandmaster is one of them."

"I know he's powerful; I remember the old dragonkin at the Guild in Valderun talking about it, but is he really that dangerous?" Orion asked skeptically.

"He is," Pauline nodded.

"He has hunted dragons, behemoths, and horrors from the Deep Seas. They say his skin can ignore tier four spells, and his lance can cut through wards like butter."

"Sounds like a brute," Orion mused, though he was mentally assessing where that would place the man on the scale he'd been developing.

"He is the most powerful of brutes," Pauline said.

"But he is politically neutral, which is the only reason we are even trying to seek him out. The Guild stands apart from Cyril's politics, but the recent chaos might be testing its neutrality. We're going there to demand answers, and if the Grandmaster decides we are a threat… Two hundred fifty witches might not be enough." Orion looked ahead, the gravity of her words settling in. He had been so focused on his own upgrades and the immediate threats that he had forgotten the larger chessboard.

For several more hours, they fought off occasional attacks until finally, as the sun started to set, they saw it. The coast first appeared as a jagged line of white cliffs dropping into a turbulent, gray sea. The delta flowed into the ocean here, with its water turning murky and rough as it collided with the larger body. Standing on a black rock promontory, overlooking the waves, was the Tower of Ambition. Orion gasped as his traits tried and failed to lock onto the structure.

"That… What is that?" Orion whispered. The Tower was a helix of obsidian and grey-stone, twisting with such precise lines that suggested it wasn't built by hands. But it was that very geometry that made Orion's head hurt. From this distance, the top appeared wider than the base, flaring out like a funnel, yet it remained perfectly stable. As they moved closer, the perspective shifted, and the tower seemed to invert, appearing infinitely thin, a single line against the sky.

Orion tried to expand [Hypotheticism]'s scope, trading clarity for breadth. A buzzing static filled his mind, like white noise turned up to maximum volume. There were no mana streams flowing around it, yet the mana was flowing into it, spiraling down the helix like water down a drain. It was a singularity. A wound in the world that had been capped with stone.

"It's resisting any kind of study," Orion muttered, rubbing his temples.

"Really, it is actively hostile to observation." Unlike the Floating Bridge, which was a marvel of magical engineering, or the Collegium's citadels, which were monuments to arcane powers, this was an unnatural construct. It felt like something that should not have existed.

"It is one of the great mysteries of Cyril," Pauline said softly, her usual composure cracking just enough to reveal a hint of awe.

"The Guild built in it, but the Tower itself is much, much older."