"Yes!" Silas cried out, looking at the boxes for his new Skills.

Unfortunately the distraction weakened his Skill-assisted mental grip on Mana Magnet's aura, causing it to snap back out to its normal radius.

"Dang it," he muttered.

"Problems?" asked Eve, pausing his meditative soundtrack.

"Aura Control isn't passive. Mana Manipulation let me leave mana behind as the aura retracts, but that takes focus too—the Will attribute, probably. Not sure I can manage either while walking, much less twenty four seven."

"It's thirty, five," she reminded him.

He sighed. "You know what I meant."

"Mmm. Just keep practicing. Most things get easier with practice. At worst it sounds like the practice could increase your Will, as if you aren't already stubborn enough." His soothing soundscape resumed.

Silas turned off his distracting notifications before focusing, again trying to rein in Mana Magnet's aura. He tugged at the edge, willing it to shrink, splitting part of his focus for Mana Manipulation, so the aura would leak a trickle of mana as it contracted.

A banging on the door shook him from his meditation. Eve, again, paused his personal spa music.

"Who is it?" he called, annoyed at being disturbed.

"Trouble from the coast!" the wolfman guard yelled through the door.

Silas considered warping away with Lucky. "And?"

"And you're the Hero! Tripping do something about it!"

"'Something,' he says," Silas muttered. Louder he asked, "Details?"

"Slim! Inky, many legged octopoid things with sharp teeth and white eye clusters of various sizes ranging from at least one tower sized monstrosity to lots of smaller ones, with more appearing the smaller they get. Biggun is still in the water, but smaller ones are swarming this way over the wetlands."

Now seemed like a good time to explore the dungeon, or maybe see about just heading east to live in a Teudsindian tree house.

"Oi," the guard called, "you can't just—"

Apparently he wasn't talking to Silas, but the old mage who considered closed doors a mere suggestion.

Ainsley, the Academy headmaster, stepped through the shimmering puddle of Silas's door, which solidified back once he was clear. "Time to pay your Academy dues, boy," he said without a greeting aside from clasping Silas's shoulder in a firm grip.

In a blink they were elsewhere, a room of bubbling beakers and scattered notebooks, posters lining the walls, each containing runic symbols written along paths which when taken as a whole formed distinct geometric shapes.

"Don't touch anything," snapped the old man, who scrambled over to a workbench where a glowing sphere floated within a number of intricately etched metal rings each slowly rotating on a different axis, somewhat like a gyroscope only with extra layers of rings.

"What—" began Silas.

"You said we had until the next quarter," the old man accused as he sat down and put on a monocle to study the orb before poking at it with fine instruments. "That's five days away! What changed?"

Silas pulled up the dubious Skill in question. The first time it claimed everyone was going to die, Karen had solved the problem without much of a fuss. It made worrying about the Skill's dire warnings difficult.

Countdown to the End

Unless you take action, you and every other person in 500 leagues are fated to die next quarter, during the traversal of Ymh'ourr'dhrix the Ocnaiorvexr.

Shatter the chains of fate, Hero.

"Nothing changed. It just says we'll all die next quarter, much like it said we'd all die before when the dragons escaped the dungeon because no one had cleared it in however long."

The old man looked confused, pausing in his work to give Silas a confused look. "What says? A voice?"

How could Silas concisely explain the concept of System windows? "It's text only I can see, due to a facet of my Bond."

The wizard's eyes narrowed. "Read me the text."

Silas cleared his throat. The text was a bit embarrassing. "Remember, uh, last time the problem sorted itself out, thanks to Karen and not anything I myself did, so it's not entirely reliable. It's, uh, still a tier zero ability."

The man gestured for Silas to continue, so in the end he read the entire prompt, boldly butchering the Lovecraftian horror's name as 'Yumourdrix the Oceano Vrex.'

With a scowl the headmaster shook his head. "Never heard of it, but that's hardly surprising. Traversal? So it's just passing by?"

Silas shrugged. "That's what it says. Karen can probably just beat it up, though. She seemed good at that sort of thing."

The old man smirked. "Indeed. Yet, you can contribute as well. Or rather, I can, assuming you keep up your extraordinary mana output. Apparently the city can hold out for a few days against these initial waves, so I have a bit more time, if your prophecy is to be trusted. Oracular Bonds are rare, and never as straightforward as your text."

Silas coughed. So much for keeping Mana Magnet secret. He should probably set the record straight, in that case. "I'm not so much creating mana as I am attracting the nearby atmospheric mana to myself, so my regeneration has more to work with and thus doesn't suck."

"I see," the mage narrowed his eyes. "I did wonder if you had somehow caused the unusual phenomenas reported yesterday. Your passing damaged quite a few projects, I'm told—not to mention you managed to shut down production across several blocks within a trade district for a few hours."

The two of them looked around the headmaster's laboratory, with all its magical happenings.

"I, uh, figured out how to stop leaving nothing behind, I think."

"You think?" The man's nostrils flared. His eyes took in his lab as if he searched for an empty cage to shove Silas inside.

"I had just figured it out, back in my room. Takes focus to rein in the Skill's aura while manipulating mana to trickle out of the area of influence so as to not leave the area dry as the aura shrinks."

This seemed to interest the headmaster, but he just shook his head. "I wish you'd come by yesterday."

"I wish you'd explained what the 'flex hour' was in your note," Silas shot back.

As if he couldn't conceive of a timekeeping method where the clock's noon and solar noon didn't coincide, the old man frowned. "Well, you're here now. Unless you have some hidden method to take out creatures the size of my tower, some matching beast you can call forth, sit down and focus on that aura of yours. Try to expand it further, pulling in more mana, then holding that mana within my lab, within range of me and my sphere, if possible."

Silas looked at the orb. "What's it do?"

"Nothing, yet."

The old man turned his attention back to the fantastical gyroscope and got to work.

Silas looked around, and failing to find a second chair for himself summoned one with his good old Gaming Necessities skill, plopping his recliner off to the side of the artificer's workbench. If the magic orb was going to explode, whether he sat a few feet away or on the other side of the lab wasn't likely to make much difference.

Considering how mere minutes ago he'd been shouted at by a frantic guard wanting him to 'do something' about a horde of tentacled horrors, Silas didn't mind being a human mana condenser, for the time being. It gave him a chance to better practice his new skills while not feeling entirely useless. It wasn't his job to save anyone, yet he didn't like the idea of standing by and doing nothing when he could do something to help.

Eve did her part by starting up a tonal relaxation track, and he closed his eyes to meditate.

He found the boundary of Mana Magnet's aura and pushed, reaching for more. The Skill gave, slightly, and he gave another push. He repeated this until he began to wonder if perhaps he wasn't stealing mana from other nearby mages and his Skill snapped back to its usual radius again, pulling all the new mana he reached with it.

He voiced his concern. "I'm not going to drain anyone else's lab doing this, am I?"

Ainsley scoffed. "Where do you think you are, boy? We're in my… Ah. Yes. My tower is the tallest one on campus. By tradition no other tower is within the tower's radius, due to a fear of one knocking over another in an accident, or one being made to knock another over on purpose. We build our towers to be less impactful today, warding to ensure a tower will crumble to dust rather than shatter and scatter, but it's still considered a good safety rule. Stronger mages get taller towers, so their experiments happen further away from the ground."

Silas could picture the tallest tower, practically a needle piercing the sky in the center of the Academy. Just thinking about it he began to feel the tower drift from side to side in the wind. Maybe. None of the liquid in the flasks sloshed about, so perhaps the movement came from his imaginative mind.

"Besides, anyone of note should be at the walls by now, the rest are hiding under their beds, else looting while the guards are distracted. Don't concern yourself with collateral damage today, my boy, for there is no work more important on this campus than mine. Take it all, if you can." He bent back down and resumed his work.

A bit egotistical, but perhaps the guy with the biggest tower, the guy in charge of the entire Academy, was more than a sneaky old man.

Silas closed his eyes and practiced expanding and shrinking the range of Mana Magnet's aura, grabbing all the mana in a sphere around the wizard's tower and focusing it within the lab. Each time he expanded the aura back out, tendrils of mana floating through the previous void got caught up in the aura.

He didn't know if it was true, but he suspected mana acted much like any other fluid or gas, in that it abhorred a vacuum. No matter how often he emptied out the same zone of mana, there was always something waiting for him to grab next time, even if it wasn't much. After a point the mana cloud seemed like it didn't want to condense further, so rather than trying to force it he worked on expanding his range further out.

If he could expand the aura out before snapping it in around himself, wouldn't that cut off another mage's mana supply? What about the mana they held in their bodies? Could he suck that out too?

The distraction pulled him from his meditation, but the thought remained. Could he weaponize this Skill?

He returned to his work but kept the new image in his mind as he continued, ripping mana from his imaginary foes each time he yanked his aura back in.

Karen had looked out over the creeping mass of tentacle creatures making their way towards the city and noped right out of there. She knew what those creatures wanted, and she wanted no part of it. Her best self was going to remain tentacle-free, thank you very much. No way could she fend off all those little things without getting swarmed.

Nope! No way, no how!

She'd done enough for that city, from what that nice guard had told her. Jimmy? Jimby? Jimbo, or whoever he was, Mister Wolf In The Sack, said if she hadn't come along the dungeon would have exploded or something just a few days later. Time for this city to look after itself, it sounded like to her. There was that other Hero, too. Salads. Solace? Nerd boy, with his laptop. They didn't need her help. Kid could handle it all just fine. He'd summon up King Kong or a great big dragon or a giant robot or some other nonsense to do the fighting for himself and save the day without lifting a finger, in all likelihood.

The prince who summoned her, that nice boy, had shown her his personal airship the other day. Quite the expense, he'd been proud to inform her and anyone else who cared to listen. Too bad he didn't pay for guards who could put up a decent fight.

Supposedly the folks living in treehouses way off east had access to a number of dungeons, and the forests between The Depths and there were said to be 'impassable' due to the number of dangerous beasts and monsters roaming about. She wasn't clear on the distinction between the two, only that both kinds would go down if she hit them hard enough.

These forests sounded like just what she needed to further improve herself.

She couldn't wait to visit.

Too bad about The Depths. She made a mental note to try to convince the tree people to start up a charity to help out any survivors.

Status Silas Aegis

11y 3s 20d 10h

L13 (441/455 XP) H: 31.0/31 (31/day rest)

S: 31.0/31 (31/min rest)

M: 20.0/20 (-1) (22% eff.) 1 AP

STR: 30 (+11)

AGI: 30 (+11)

END: 31 (+11)

VIT: 31 (+11)

PER: 30 (+11)

WIL: 22

WIT: 20

SPI: 21

AFF: 22

CHA: 12 1 SP

Eve 29

Gaming 29

Mana Sense 29

Obscurity 29

Pain Resistance 29

Programming 29

Sight Reading 29

Interface 26

Mana Magnet 22

Gaming Necessities 20

Bargaining 19

Pestilence Resistance 19

Piano 19

Poison Resistance 19

Sleep Resistance 19

Help 15

Language: Artean 15

Aura Control 12

Chemistry 9

Mana Manipulation 9

Summon Character 9

Countdown to the End 6