Chương 261

Where the naked eye saw only the dark, undisturbed loam of the forest, Arcane Overlay revealed a distinct, if fading, trail of alchemical decay. It was a footprint of sorts, the lingering ghost of the enemy's passage, of fuel burning to propel armored bodies through the dense undergrowth.

"The trail goes east," Orion announced.

"They are moving fast, but their exhaust has a distinct half-life. I can track them." Asteria hummed, still eyeing the forest warily. That a Tier Four witch was so careful showed just how untamed the Field was here, or perhaps it was that only a few hours had passed since the all-out battle they'd just fought, and they'd barely had time to catch their breath. As he attempted to weave a simple negative gravity well beneath his boots to lighten his steps, the ambient life mana pushed back.

It flavored his spells, trying to inject organic chaos into his formulae, and it was only because he'd taken time to acclimatize that they didn't fall apart in his hands. Orion had known that the local composition of the Field could have severe effects on magic. But this was the first time it had almost fought him, as if it were sentient rather than merely passive. It wasn't, but it was still unsettling.

With some effort, he managed to isolate the new variables and keep them from affecting the rest of the spell, giving him enough speed to keep up with the others. It would have been much easier if we could have flown, but the forest is too dense for brooms, and soaring above the canopy would make it impossible to follow the trail.

He did take note that Jonatan, despite being younger and less trained than anyone else except him, seemed to have little trouble following along, and a quick redirection of some computational power his way unraveled some very interesting spells. The principle is the same as [Light Exoskeleton], though less showy. It also seems to work with Arcane mana… Perhaps something like this? Granting himself extra speed would have been easy, but that wasn't what his friend was doing.

In fact, the spell seemed remarkably similar to his gravity magic, in that it affected the fabric of spacetime, though it leaned more toward the latter than the former. It was also significantly weaker than his gravity spells, meaning it had a lower power threshold, something that would be very useful in this environment.

Rather than magically speeding up the caster, the spell he had in mind would exploit special relativity's time dilation by creating a localized reference frame discrepancy, essentially a thin shell of compressed spacetime around the caster that ran at a slightly different rate than the surrounding world, and using inertial compensation to prevent the biological consequences of rapid acceleration.

To achieve time dilation, he needed to determine τ_caster / τ_world, or, in other terms, √(1 - v²/c²) for the kinematic dilation, in which the caster's frame was given a slight artificial velocity relative to the world, making their time tick fractionally slower, and √(1 - 2GM/rc²)⁻¹ for the gravitational blueshift compensation, in which a thin ring of conjured gravitational mass at the shell boundary counteracted the kinematic slowdown selectively, applying only to the caster's perception of the outside world rather than to their own biology.

The two terms didn't cancel each other out, no matter how it might have looked; they were orthogonal. The kinematic term slowed the caster's biological time, so they aged less and reacted faster relative to the outside world. The gravitational term blueshifted incoming sensory information, allowing the caster to perceive and process the outside world in real time despite the frame gap. Secondly, he'd need to determine a subformula for inertial compensation.

Without it, rapid movement would liquefy the caster's organs. F_comp = -m × a_external × (1 - τ_ratio). This way, the spell would wrap inertial forces in a dampening tensor, redistributing sudden accelerations across the entire frame shell rather than the caster's body. Orion imagined this was why tier-two casters rarely achieved mastery of this kind of spell. There were simply too many elements to account for, and without his Knowledge, the risk of misfiring would be much greater.

That only confirmed that Jonatan was chosen as an Archmage's apprentice for a good reason. The final formula came together with only a couple of hiccups. S_eff = S_base / [√(1 - v²/c²) × √(1 - 2GM/rc²)⁻¹], with M_cost = (Δτ × c²)/η + κ(a - g)²m. All the sustain, compensation, and failure conditions were emergent consequences of these two expressions rather than separate calculations. If the available mana ever fell below M_cost, the frame would collapse naturally.

If a > g by too large a margin, κ would spike, making the cost unsustainable on its own. This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work. A skilled caster would only need to solve for v and M to determine their desired speed, plug them in, and the rest would follow automatically. As soon as the CC spun it to life, the world slowed, and this time it wasn't just his adrenaline spiking. His gait smoothed out, and he finally had time to breathe.

Others noticed that he stopped jumping around like a maniac and simply looked like he was taking a stroll, if at an extremely high speed. Pauline barely reacted; his mother's lips twitched, and Jonatan looked like he wanted to pull his hair out. The most affected, however, was Archmage Valentia, whose legendary composure was the only thing keeping his eyes from popping out.

He'd not done anything to keep his spell hidden, so it was no surprise they'd noticed as soon as he cast it, but it still amused him greatly that every faction seemed to think each other's magic was something completely unique. Everything worked on the same principles if one went deep enough. Unfortunately, his amusement was short-lived, as Arcane Overlay alerted him to the approach of several presences. The forest, after all, was not empty.

A pack of Iron-hide Stalkers—wolf-like predators with fur that possessed the tensile strength of steel wire—had caught their scent. The beasts caught up in only a couple of minutes, and when they did, they dropped on them from the high canopy, howling. The sound was terribly grating, and Orion was tempted to give them a piece of his mind, even as his data showed they were all at the peak of tier two, but he was preempted.

"Do not slow down!" Valentia ordered, his staff humming. Lightning crackled all around them, flashing between the trees with unnatural precision, even burrowing into the earth when one of the monsters thought itself clever enough to ground the strike. Nothing they tried worked, and within a few seconds, the monsters were gone, batted away as if they were errant flies. Orion didn't bother looking back, though he would have liked to analyze the spell.

His role was not to fight the wildlife but to ensure they didn't lose the trail, and by all that was holy, he wouldn't fail. They pushed deeper, leaving the slaughtered predators behind. But less than half an hour later, an erratic spike in the data streams caught his attention. The trail suddenly branched out, seeping into the surrounding flora. As he looked more closely, the alchemical half-life skyrocketed, transforming from a simple exhaust signature into a complex, highly reactive compound.

"Halt!" Orion shouted, sliding to a stop on the damp earth and dismissing his enhancement so his voice wouldn't come out garbled.

"What is it?" Asteria asked. The others also looked at him.

"The residue has changed," Orion said, his eyes darting across the numbers on his HUD.

"The decay is gone, replaced by a spike in acidity. They must have seeded the path, thinking someone might follow." It was disquieting to see how far ahead their enemies had seen, but in the end, there was nothing they could do but prepare and spring the trap. They didn't have to wait long. Only a few hundred feet from where Orion had stopped, the dense canopy above them shuddered. The Field suddenly shifted, becoming chaotic and losing much of its vibrancy.

Whatever the Iron State elites had done had resulted in an extreme reaction, and it seemed the forest thought they were the cause. Vines as thick as a man's torso slithered out of the shadows. They were no longer green and brown but a nasty yellow, dripping with a liquid that hissed as it hit a stone. One of the mutated vines whipped toward a witch, who cast a shield of light, but the moment the vine struck, the acid ate through the shield, burning deep into her forearm.

The woman grunted in pain, dropping to one knee as the corrosion spread. Fortunately, her battle sisters covered her, allowing her to cast healing magic to prevent further damage, but that even such a glancing blow had been so damaging didn't bode well.

"Somehow, I doubt the forest will listen if we try to explain it wasn't our fault," Orion muttered, pulled back by Pauline as a cluster of roots erupted beneath their feet, their tips splitting open like snapping jaws.

"Such crude defilement," Valentia sneered as he swung his staff. The temperature in the immediate vicinity plummeted. The damp air condensed, freezing into a subzero gale that swept outward, not touching any of them but doing considerable damage to their surroundings. The sudden drop in temperature devastated the corrupted flora. The acid coating the vines froze solid, turning the whipping tendrils into brittle crystals.

Asteria followed, drawing her hands together and pulling them apart, weaving a net of razor-thin spatial cuts that spread outward. The invisible blades sheared through the frozen roots and vines, shattering them into thousands of harmless, icy fragments. The entire skirmish lasted less than a minute, but if they hadn't been aware of it beforehand, the cost would have been high. As it was, it still took them several minutes to attend to the poor witch who'd been struck.

"This wasn't meant to stop us," Orion said, narrowing his eyes. The enemy had been fighting the Alliance for too long not to know their powerhouses.

"Any delay, we can ill afford," Asteria said, looking at the shattered remains.

"Is the trail still viable?" Orion recalibrated his glasses, filtering out the lingering mutagenic data to isolate the original exhaust signature.

"It's fainter, but yes. They continued heading southeast." They resumed the hunt, moving with heightened caution. The terrain grew increasingly treacherous as they climbed a steep incline that led away from the dense undergrowth toward a natural elevation. When they crested the mound, the deep woods abruptly gave way, revealing a sprawling chasm.

"The Whispering Gorge," Valentia muttered, stepping to the edge of the sheer drop. Orion looked across the expanse. It was a very deep ravine, but that was not what held his attention. Spanning the entire width of the gorge, rising from the unseen depths and reaching the canopy, was a barrier of pure emerald light, and just before it stood what looked like a settlement of tree houses.

What little he could glean told him the barrier was a druidic ward of significant complexity, primarily meant to shroud whatever lay within it, even shifting it away from the local plane of reality, if the data he was getting was any indication. A look at his mother showed she was barely containing her fury. She'd personally led several assaults from this position, beating back the enemy at great cost, until the Barrage doctrine finally proved its worth.

That the druids had been hiding just behind it while the witches fought and bled for them was not something that could be ignored. In truth, Orion had to admit it was a brilliant defensive strategy. Any invading force relying on conventional navigation or standard magical tracking would be able to take the settlement, but after exploring it, they would deem it irrelevant and wander through the eastern woods for months in search of the Heartwood, believing their objective had to be elsewhere.

Unfortunately, they were still found out since the trail led directly to the barrier.