Chương 224

The air shimmered, breaking the morning sunlight into a dozen identical shapes that darted effortlessly across the snow. Orion kept his back against the rocky outcropping, watching the movements with narrowed eyes. The corrupted Winter Fox was barely the size of a large hound, but its speed made it a very tricky target, and he'd lost it more than once, even with the advantage of his glasses. White fur stained with grey blurred as the beast circled their formation, leaving behind afterimages made of light mana.

Normally, Orion would have been very interested in figuring out how it was giving its illusions such details, but they'd been fighting this fox for over an hour, and he'd long since run out of patience.

"I got you now!" Dorian shouted, swinging his broadsword at one of the leaping foxes. Good, make it believe it's fooled us. The blade met no resistance, passing harmlessly through the illusion, which dissolved into a shower of snowflakes. A split second later, the real beast lunged from Dorian's blind spot, snapping its jaws shut on his armored forearm, just as they had planned.

The teeth couldn't pierce the steel through the reinforcement spells he'd layered, but the grey miasma coating the fox's fangs immediately began to corrode the magic, eating away at it fast. Dorian grunted, taking the opportunity to bash its head with the rim of his shield. The fox let go and tumbled through the snow, instantly splitting into six new copies that scattered in all directions.

"Goddess curse her."

"Not again!"

"It's using the reflection of the snow to mask its movements," Orion observed. He didn't bother throwing a gravity well yet, as the beast was too fast, and he'd wasted a good chance more than once by being hasty. The corruption had stripped the creature of its natural caution and replaced it with rabid aggression, but its innate instincts for misdirection remained perfectly intact.

This entire battle would end in a moment if they could just pin it down, but as they were gradually learning, that was no easy task, and Pauline didn't seem interested in helping, given how little damage the beast had caused so far. Orion could almost hear her say this was a valuable learning opportunity. The worst part was that she was right. He'd started the battle by unleashing his usual magic, but as it lasted much longer than expected, he'd been adjusting some parameters.

In fact, he'd developed something quite interesting.

"Alright, I think I got it. Selene, where is it going to be?" Selene hummed as she activated her Seer abilities. Her awareness expanded almost visibly as her eyes lost their luster, and she looked beyond the physical world to catch the subtle threads of cause and effect.

"From above," Selene called out, pointing her finger at what looked like an empty patch of snow on top of a large boulder.

"It's preparing to leap at you."

"Luna, flush it out. Wide dispersion, low heat," Orion commanded. It initially seemed like a good idea to simply unleash overwhelming firepower on their surroundings, but they quickly learned that the fox could make better use of the water vapor released than they could. Dispersing the mist accounted for about half of the battle. With some hesitation, considering how badly her previous attempt had gone, Luna stepped out from behind Dorian's bulk, and she swept her wand forward, casting a wave of rolling fire.

The flames swept over the area Selene had marked, melting the top layer of snow and instantly disturbing the air's temperature, but not enough to form the clouds they had worked so hard to disperse. The sudden heat wave disrupted the optical conditions necessary for the fox's illusions, causing five copies to flicker and vanish completely. The real fox, suddenly revealed, shrieked and dashed from its hiding spot, heading back to the hole in the mountain where it had ambushed them from the very beginning.

But Orion was already waiting. He extended his hand, pinpointing the creature's center of mass, and let the complex matrix he'd been working on come to life. Gravity magic was surprisingly versatile, as he had learned this over the past few weeks since developing [Gravity Cannon] and [Collapsing Wormhole], and with his vast knowledge, he could even combine it with light magic. If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

Basically, it was an improved version of [Noether's Lock], built on his recent progress in both fields to become a tier-two spell. He was confident it was close to tier three in complexity alone, if not in power. By constructing a gradient refractive index field n(r) that trapped energy in orbital paths around the target, he created a localized spacetime curvature around it, thereby forming a gravitational potential well.

This didn't just slow time, the γ factor, but also made the energetic cost of any action scale with the well's depth. The target would perceive normal subjective time but would find that even minor movements required exponentially more energy as they fought against the curved metric.

Base symmetry enforcement: δL/δq = 0 for all generalized coordinates q Gravitational time dilation factor: γ = 1/√(1 - 2GM/(rc²)) Photon trap depth: U_photon = ∫(n(r) - 1) × hν dr Total action cost multiplier: Λ = γ × (1 + U_photon/kT) × Σ(symmetry_violations) Mana drain rate = Λ × (attempted_action_magnitude)² Escape energy threshold = (base_lock_strength) × Λ³"[Relativistic Prison]," he murmured, channeling enough mana into the formula to give it life.

Space warped in the fox's path, far too late for it to avoid it despite its unnatural agility. The moment a single paw crossed into the field, its momentum sealed its fate, and it quickly became enveloped within it. A second flash signaled Luna's revenge, and soon after, the fox was dead, allowing Orion to lift the spell. System Notification +2 Attunement +91, 200 Exp"That might have been overkill," he muttered, but he couldn't stop the small grin from forming on his lips.

That damn fox had made them waste so much more time than he'd expected, and if it took coming up with [Relativistic Prison], then that was what was needed. He didn't get a level up from that fight, but earning two whole stat points at his current stage of progress was very rare and usually only happened after an epiphany achieved through weeks, if not months, of hard work. But then again, I've been working on this for quite a while. It just came together naturally.

Walking over to the small cavern the fox had been defending, he quickly found the canister half-buried in the frozen dirt and lifted it with a gentle manipulation of gravity, maneuvering it into his void-silk bag and pulling the drawstrings tight.

"That's one down," Dorian sighed, using the snow to wipe a layer of grey drool from his forearm where the fox had bitten him.

"If the little ones are getting this aggressive, the higher we go, the worse it's going to be."

"We only have one more target on the docket for today," Orion said, checking the coordinates Theresa had provided.

"It's about two miles further west, situated in a deep crevice near the base of the peak. If we move now, we might be able to get back with daylight." That was enough of a push to convince the others to keep their break quick, since they all remembered all too well how annoying it was to fly in the dark, when every mountain looked the same, and using too much light magic to find the right path was a good way to attract the more powerful beasts to them.

They drank some water, ate some jerky, and soon enough, they were back in the air, heading toward the interior of their sector. The biting wind eased up, blocked by the towering walls of rock that flanked their path, but in return, the air became noticeably heavier. Orion felt a familiar pressure building around his senses, reminding him of the prayer rooms within the Sanctum. The ambient mana here was thick, almost viscous, pressing against his skin like a physical weight, forcing them to slow down.

There was nothing specifically requiring them to do so, but everyone became cautious anyway, as some primal instinct was triggered.

"It feels very different here," Luna murmured, rubbing her arms despite her warming charms.

"It's giving me a headache, like there's too much mana trying to fit into a small space." Pauline emerged from behind the shadow of a large rock, flying alongside Orion without a broom. I can probably do that too, at this speed, but it would tire me out for no reason. It must be nice to be at tier three, huh?

"You are sensing a pooling effect," she explained.

"Mana is drawn from the Mother's Embrace more strongly in some areas, naturally flowing through the physical world like water. But the world has its own secrets. There are places where the barrier between the dimensions is naturally thinner, causing the raw mana to pool and stagnate, growing very dense even without gathering arrays." Orion considered the matter and decided it wasn't too unusual for a place like this to be here, near the heart of the mountain range.

"It must influence the local flora and fauna."

"It does," Pauline agreed.

"Under normal circumstances, a mana pool of this density would be fiercely contested, since it will often give birth to a natural treasure. A territory like this should be the hunting ground of an apex predator, a Tier Three beast attracted to the power it provides freely." Dorian floated to the front, glancing suspiciously at the walls around them.

"Should we be expecting company soon, then?"

"That is the troubling part," Pauline replied.

"There are no tracks and no territorial markings. The area is completely abandoned. Whatever is down there has driven away everything else from what should have been prime real estate." Soon, they reached the edge of the crevice and looked down into a wide gorge that split the mountain rock, discovering exactly why nothing had decided to nest here.

A great deal of snow had melted into a toxic grey slush that formed a pool, and above it the air rippled with intense visual distortions, blurring the edges of the rocks as if viewed through warped glass. Just being that close to such a concentration of Silence made their brooms stutter, so they quickly floated down to the first outcropping that was wide enough and continued the way down on foot.

They moved cautiously, observing the strange environment for any corrupted monsters they might have missed, which was the only reason they made it through what happened next. The ground shook, sending snow flying, and they moved back from the edge of the path. A hissing sound echoed through the crevice as it made contact with the pool, followed immediately by a violent eruption of grey fluid and gas bursting from a fissure in the rock floor.

Dorian, who was leading and closest to the edge, took the full force of the shockwave. The eruption pushed him backward into the rocky wall, knocking the breath out of him and covering his front with a layer of sludge.

"Aaaargh!" he shouted as the substance started hissing, overpowering his passive enchantments and seeping through the gaps in his armor to reach his skin. Pauline instantly sent a wave of shadows at him, swallowing him whole and pulling him from the other side of the path, leaving a puddle of smoking liquid behind. Even with that quick intervention, though, Dorian still wasn't rising, and whimpers of pain shook his body.

As Luna and Selene moved toward him, releasing waves of healing magic to try and detach the steel from his melted skin, Orion slowly turned back to the pool, feeling a strange trepidation as he looked over the edge. There, amidst the sludge, was a metallic glint.