When setting the base index for a unit of mana It was assumed that the container was made of pure mundane metal that ensured no mana is lost through conductivity but only the heat from the fire spell was transmitted. The experiment took place within a [Null Field] skill where no mana was lost within or without the field. There was also no mana flow to the magical spells from outside other than that which had already been supplied for the experiment- Supplementary Notes from Edel Lalilab’s Appendix in ‘Experiments: The Extraction and Storage of Essence from Monster Cores.

The tolling of the bell started it all but for all the somber mood in the air, it might as well have been a death knell .A mana storm was coming. That was a normal occurrence; mana storms were just an everyday weather phenomenon that Erytheans had learnt to live with.

It was the wyverns, harbingers of the storms that were the problem—which meant that every guard and every adventurer on hand had to leave to man the battlements. Golems too were deployed on the streets, signaling that non-combatants would do well to bar themselves in.

Perhaps it was a stroke of luck because it was the day that Arcis would make good her escape. The groundwork had been painstakingly laid down over the last couple of days and naturally, Nevine had been looped into it as well.

Her guard had been dropped to two people but that did not make anything easier for her. She was on a clock because the storm was only a prelude to the actual chaos that would follow and she was tracking its movement.

It shocked her greatly when she found out that she could sense the connections to other dungeons. It was eerie, because it made her question her existence, what if Arthur had never found her? Would she have been left to gather dust, as some forgotten project of the Antecessors?

While her memory matrices were initially degraded over time, she knew enough to know the shard heart that housed her spirit was made by them and it was growing, incorporating new things as dungeons were wont to.

She never questioned it before, but now that she had the presence of mind to, now that she was preparing for what was potentially a breakout she knew. She knew her spirit had somehow crossed over from the astral realm when the tellusphere’s initial awakening had connected into the void where it tapped into mana at the source before it pulled back.

The mana beyond the veil was the most potent, primal source that existed since the dawn of time itself and in between were sandwiched other realms that she didn’t know of. It was both a powerful and dangerous artifact in equal measure. Somewhere at the back of her memory matrices, there were yet uncleaned sections that she was afraid to touch because of what they would reveal. She sighed.

“ The bell went off,” Nevine pointed out. “That means the guards’ll be sparser around these parts.”

“ Right,” Arcis nodded. She was in deep contemplation, to use her logical and computational matrices, she had to concentrate like any human. [Host-Mind] was now like a background process that they had to sift through tabs to find. That was the price Arcis was paying for a unified consciousness.

“ It also means that I won’t be around here.” Nevine shrugged, watching the door worriedly.

“Nevine,” Arcis turned around to regard the boy, “ You only have one job to do.”

“What is that?” Nevine gulped. The sixteen year old’s eyes flitted to and from the girl and the door. Not like he could hear footsteps since the room was almost sealed in.

“ You have to get to the Sturmdrache mansion, tell Nora to find me in the sewers,”

“Wha…wait, are you crazy? You’d get lost in there.” The boy protested. “ How will you find your way?”

Arcis tapped the side of her head saying, “ even a blind man knows the way home.”

“Your grandpa tell you that?” Nevine snorted, shaking his head.

Arcis hesitated, was Volemhir a grandpa of sorts?

“ Haaah,” Nevine sighed. “ You do what you have to do, I’ll get your message to Mistress Nora; hope the mana storm won’t get me mana poisoned.”

“ Did you tell your mother?”

“ No,” Nevine bit his lip glumly. “ I’ll send a letter or something…”

No sooner had he said that, than the door to Arcis’ containment room groaned outwards. The two youngsters shared an unspoken look, before Nevine hoisted himself off the floor. Arcis surreptitiously hid the small pouch of mana cores beneath herself. She sat on a frayed rug, legs folded beneath her body.

“ Oi, sprig, time to haul it…move it,” a voice announced the end of Nevine’s visit.

As soon as the door closed with a sigh of air, the synth got to work. She took out the small pouch, nodded at the satisfying glass like clink of the cores and peeled back the rag where she’d burnt a lot of mana to hide others. Five mana core every visit. Four visits every week for two months… enough ordnance to level the room twice over, if one knew how to do it. And the synth did.

Arcis had studied the latticework inside the manacores; it was not so dissimilar from thousands of tiny ionic bonds storing energy. She knew she could not apply Earth science in its entirety because one monster core contained kilojoules worth of energy to power a car for a year, compressed into a tiny orb the size of a marble. Mana was truly cheating. It was in a sense, like the elusive dark matter. She shook her head at the analogy; no, dark matter was too volatile, mana was something else.

Her crystalline eyes glinted for one more time, as she examined the tens of glistening orbs that looked like fish roe as they were all of uniform lava oranges. Her eyes were made of crystals after all, that meant she could control how mana flowed through them forming some sort of pseudo mana sight to read the flow of mana in the monster cores.

Arcis got up and walked to the far wall, passing her bed, which had admittedly, one too many pillows, and other knicknacks a growing girl needed. She looked forlorny at the room one more time before she placed a palm to the wall and worked her magic—runecraft.

While spell-craft was locked out to her, she was adept at rune craft, perhaps even more so than her father. The interior made of svartanite rock negated spell-craft alright, but she knew how it worked when she breathed aer mana onto its surface.

Her eyes analyzed the interaction and she deduced that svartanite made unfettered mana to become very wonky; how that was, even she couldn’t tell. Maybe with time she could if she had all the time in the world to be a mageologist.

Thus, she crafted a rune array on the wall using the monsters cores, bound by clay which she'd requested under the excuse of wanting to do pottery. At least there was a pottery wheel too. With the clay, she stuck the monster cores onto the wall and under a par'quart it was ready.

She'd flipped privacy, containment and amplification runes to make the rune craft. It was a thing of beauty—a sonic mine.

Arcis went to the furthest corner of her containment room and crouched down, putting her head between her knees. Better safe than sorry. Then, she drew an aer augmented breath—

Arthur stood on the parapets watching the western sides, wind whipping around and snatching at his cloak. There was an unmistakable smell of rain in the air and danger too it seemed. The storm was rolling in, a brumous haze cloaking the sky, blotting out the sun.

He was looking at the treeline of a small forest where two wagon ruts disappeared towards Aldmoors’ former dungeon. Watching and waiting for the monsters to make their appearance.

Everyone was on tenterhooks, conversations muted to murmurs as they watched the skies adventurer and town guard alike. The bell was still tolling its alarm to warn the town residents of the oncoming danger.

Something weighed on his conscience somewhat. He still thought that maybe activating the tellusphere was somehow to blame for this quandary.

Orhill's reassurance that the dungeon would have awakened one way or another did little to assuage his worries. People were going to die; people whose names he didn't get to know because they had to fight on two fronts.

He would have wrestled with his doubt further were it not for a timely interruption; Danger Sense.

“Look alive people!” Grizzlythorn's voice split the air. There was lots of shuffling sounds, and ringing of metal dragging against the brick battlements.

Throwing spears and javelins were hoisted against the crenellations for those who would go first. Archers got their bows ready, as strings groaned and creaked under their draw. Mages prepared their spells. Then they came.

A flock of birds taking wings from the vicinity preluded the coming of the monsters. The forest was less than three hundred mesurs away from the wall, about a thousand or so feet. Yet throwers and archers were very much confident in their range; it was a magical world with skills to rival the best of athletes.

Then they were there, lopping across the landscape, crimson eyes glinting with bloodlust, barking snarls and spilling slobber from their rabid visage—dusk hunds.

Running alongside with crazed eyes way too small for their visages were herds of grizzly boars bearing down on the town walls with bulk, the size of horses. Taut muscles coiled and released with their charge beneath a motley of dusty gray and brown hides.

Then following behind them, stone trolls, dragging clubs—thick stone skin and hard to kill. And those were the highlight, around them, was a host of creatures that crawled, wriggled or scuttled along.

They were so many it seemed like the ground was a clicking carpet of brown. Arthur would've given anything for them to be swamp rats, but no, they had to be terra scorpion nymphs.

It really was a dungeon break, because there was absolutely no way teams of bronzes and silvers could hold up against that horde. They were all steel ranked and above; a new dungeon really had awoken.

“Kill them and burn them with fire!” a random adventurer bellowed. The people on the battlements didn't even wait for the signal before spells, steel and arrow were let loose. Bows sung in unison as a hail of arrows blotted out the sky," [ Seeker Shot: Barrage ]! A skill accompanied the release.

And Arthur saw for the first time, arrows go splitting into mini missiles, multiply by a figure of tens then streak towards their targets screaming fury. The effects were visible for all to see; arrows never missed their targets.

Most monsters were peppered full of the missiles until they looked like a porcupine version of themselves, the smaller ones were turned into a splatter of gore as several sought the same targets. That was for the smaller feral critters; the bigger bad waltzed through the hail unscathed.

Grizzly boars of course with their thick hides, dusk hunds had shadow stepping which was practically cheating with the amount of shadows brought by cloud cover, stone trolls, were well...walking armored tanks. And they did not take kindly to the stings.

Before the spells and javelins reached them, they retaliated with their own missiles—rocks. Arthur learnt to never underestimate a rock thrown from a distance with the heft of a troll's arm behind it. A cannon ball sized thing took the head clean off a mage clean with a spray of blood before they'd released their spell.

“[Shield Wall]!” the guard sergeant yelled. Guardsmen moved in unison, propping shields against the gaps in the crenelations.

Of course Arthur was not a sitting duck himself, as soon as the first rock had come sailing, he'd put up the [Wind Shield] with one hand and cast [Thunder Bolt] with the other, disintegrating a rock the size of his torso which burst into shrapnel that didn't reach the wall. Fellow mages looked at him funny.

“Where did you learn to dual cast boy? [ Lance of Aeris]!” the guild master was right beside him, lobbing magic of his own. White hot bolts cleanly lanced through the chest of a troll and it fell over, dead before it hit the ground.

‘Ah, two different affinities at the same time is peculiar’ Arthur wanted to laugh. He snorted instead, “ a secret of Sturmdrache I'm afraid.” He had no mind to spare for their goggling , because another barrage of rocks, and clubs was coming in hot.

Orhill guffawed as they released lightning magic in concert, decimating a pack of dusk hunds before they could blur to another location. Who ever heard of darkness being faster than light?

They were not the only notable mages though, because someone shouted“ [Sigh of Iskeiserinne]” the temperature dropped . Breaths misted. Arthur swore he could almost hear the air sigh as if in resignation.

A swathe of the monsters on one side was frozen over before they knew what hit them. Stone trolls broke their legs at the knees, grizzly boars too, went skidding across rimy ground before their cloven charge brought them low. The only ones lucky enough were the hunds blurring from place to place but even they suddenly hit a wall of subzero temperature and froze over.

The barrage following in its wake broke the ice sculptures into a thousand pieces. That was the power of an [Everfrost Cryomancer]; Destiny's Edge was in town. That said, people were counting down to contact with the town walls and there was yet another battle coming—from the skies to their back.

If you told a native Erythean that sound could produce heat, well, you'd be a laughingstock. It was true however, that you could produce heat through sound. Arcis proved that.

Her plan had been to cause a contained cascade explosion that would crack a hole large enough for her to pass through. but it seemed her sonic mine was too efficient. At a frequency that could crack granite, the explosion went off without a hitch.

Mana cores shattered powering the rune containment, amplification and privacy array, it came alive within a bubble of orange because of the already attuned mana. Sound vibrated the contained air inside the array, some of it caused the svartanite to comminutate raining detritus on the floor.

And in the blink of an eye, the heat had already grown to a threshold enough to ignite the pyr leaking from the monster cores. Before the containment runes could fail— several unidirectional explosions, almost silent blasted the wall into the sewers. The whole. damn. wall.

Arcis gawked as she stared into the yawning gloom of her escape and found herself cursing for the first time “Pa's Heart!”. If the containment had failed before the explosion happened—the kickback would have thrown her through the otherside.

A familiar ethereal tether teased at her awareness, even as she clambered onto her feet, bare of shoes; she'd grown up too fast for them. Padding close to the wall, Arcis was rewarded with the rank smell of the sewers, and the sounds of effluent sloshing through the drains and sewer rats screeching in alarm at the disturbance.

The wall's debris was strewn on the adjacent walkway. Some of it sat in the drain forming a haphazard skipping bridge. She eyed it skeptically before giving her habitations for the last two months and a half a look and jumping into the darkness.

Nevine wheezed as he ran across the streets; he was not made for such exertions and not with the pack weighing him down. They were deadly silent and windows were barred, doors were closed.

Even the wailing of children was nowhere to be found. Archers stood on the rooftops, grim looks in their faces as they faced the eastern skies. The storm was there, brewing…imminent. The tension was so thick he felt it smother his resolve, weighing down his psyche.

His glasses fogged from the strained breathing while sweat beaded down his brow; he had not the luxury to get a kerchief to wipe them down. He swallowed thickly, as he wrested his gaze away from the murky skies pulling his hood low. He felt the tremors of the ground; not from golems but from a dungeon horde.

Even though he was far away from the fighting, he still felt on edge. He felt too exposed under the eaves, as he ducked his head low, skirting the streets where he thought golems would be.

The wall to the Founder’s Quarters never felt so near yet so far. Shimmying the weight of his backpack so it rested evenly, he tightened the straps before he resumed his run. Then the first drops of rain started to fall.

There was no lull in the battle; not with monsters—they just kept coming. There was no intelligent probing of defenses, no pull backs to reevaluate strategies and no formations. They just threw themselves at the walls as if driven mad—which they were. The frenzied creatures were clearly under the thrall of fear as if running from something.

The sky had darkened and the wind on their backs had picked up. It was really the thick of things. And though Arthur had paced himself to ensure that his mana did not scrape the bottom of his reserves, he’d never fought a drawn out battle. Not with monsters that kept coming at you as if you owed them a generational debt in blood.

While his position next to the guild master did raise a few eyebrows, it kept him relatively safe. Arthur would have been clipped by rocks ten times over if the dragonkin didn't have his back and he, his.

Also, he didn't want people seeing how much of an odd element he was after showing off his dual casting. An [Aeromancer] regenerating from their wounds was bound to send tongues wagging.

The sounds of people swearing and spells activation flaring were an ever constant presence. The mana in the air was roiling and turbid, constantly moved around with every large working. The battlefield was already littered with the carcasses of monsters, still the tide came, sparing scant any presence of mind to their slain kin.

On their side, the defenders were also not without casualties, bodies were carted away. Groans and cries of pain rent the air as healers tended to the wounded but their resolve never faltered. Death was an everyday occurence the people of this world had learnt to live with.

Arthur never let the wanton loss of human loss detract him; the situation was grim and he was juggling several things at one. He would stew over the loss later. One part of his mind thought of the next spell matrix he’d want to use to spare his already half full reserves from plunging even further, another was thinking about the Psiphone in his pockets. It was still silent

‘Where are you Arcis?’ he mulled, as he pulled the matrix for [Thunder Bolt] to the fore of his mind and released the spell. His throat was too raw from casting for too long; [Regeneration] could do nothing for sore muscles as Arthur had already found out. It was common courtesy to declare what skill one was using in group battles to avoid friendly fire but so far no one begrudged him for that.

“ Lad, you need to pull back!” Orhill called out to him. The dragonskin was still as spirited as if he’d not been mowing down monsters just a few pars before.

“ What?!” Arthur replied, disbelief coloring his expression.

“ Switch out, you’ve been fighting for a quart,” Orhill pointed out as he put up a barrier spell which deflected another volley of rocks. There was a stalemate in the battle, the monster's advance was effectively stymied around a skill zone tens of mesurs across. Arthur’s sense of time had been warped and he hadn’t even noticed.

The few that got through, like the tenacious dusk hounds were acquainted first hand with the defensive wards on the walls. Arthur had not realized it, but a couple of pars into the battle, the guard sergeant had gotten some scrolls from somewhere and was bellowing out the inscribed commands.

Magic flared bright before the scrolls disintegrated into motes of light before the walls crackled with energy, tendrils questing for any and all monster that dared come close to the walls.

They snapped like whips bisecting or zapping the yelp out of the canine monsters. If Arthur could've peered over the walls, he would've seen a seething mass of scorpion nymphs reduced to roast. He'd forgotten about the smaller monsters in the heat of battle.

“Why didn't he head with that?” Arthur rasped pulling back.

“Defensive wards take a long time to recharge, but it seems after that mana mishap, he's just now realized he can start using them early.” Orhill remarked calmly, keeping an eye out for any incoming volley. The trolls seemed to have run out of missiles to throw. But the defenders were not giving them any respite.

Arthur saw Ar’lerith the [Celestial Archer], Gold ranker unleash her skill [Celestial Rain], arrows of light strafed around the killing field, punching holes into her quarry before they disintegrated into motes of light, leaving bleeding holes in the wake.

‘This is early?! Arthur almost wanted to blurt out. ‘Look around you, there is carnage. People have died, ’ he left unsaid. Instead he nodded somberly and stepped back.

“Let your mana recover, there's another battle coming,” Orhill said, turning his face towards the east. Arthur followed his gaze. Wind-blown rain, like a curtain, hit them. Arthur welcomed the cooling drops as they hit his face, washing away the sweat of his exertions. He felt at home; was it because his affinities were inclined towards the elements.

“The [Guard Captain]?” Arthur asked, pulling the hood over his face; while he liked rain, lightning and water could make spell-work too tedious. He’d have to balance potentials to avoid shocking himself.

Orhill pointed towards the East wall. His eyes had to be sharp as a hawk’s if he could see the silhouette of the guard captain Larissa from that far out and in the rain no less. Arthur had to squint; and he thought his eyes were sharp.

“Weather makes for dreary fighting,” Arthur sighed. Rivulets of blood tainted rainwater followed between the seams in the brickwork. The din of spellcraft and skills had not yet abated, in fact, the defenders wanted to finish off the wave before they turned to the other side.

“ Are we really going to fight those?” Arthur inquired. He shifted his weight to his less dominant leg; all the standing was wearing on his calves.

“ Hmm; no…we had to call in some help.” Orhill hummed in his deep baritone. His gaze was turned towards Aldmoor’s main gate as if expecting a cavalry to come hurtling through any moment from then. “ Hopefully they’ll be here in time”

‘Who?’ Arthur wanted to ask. But guilt gnawed at his conscience . ‘Maybe I should tell him we’re leaving soon. Though I feel bad about stealing away in the middle of this chaos.’ Arthur frowned. He felt the outline of the Psiphone resting against his chest. Arcis had yet to hail. He hoped that wherever she’d reached was safe.

There was no hindrance to Arcis’ progress whatsoever, unless you counted the unmentionables that clung to the underside of her footwraps. There was barely any light in the sewers, so Arcis supposed, she was grateful for that. She was no longer an unfeeling synth, thank you very much.

It was [Scan] pulsing outwards from her in waves that guided her where she wanted to go. The telepsychic skill functioned like a radar of sorts, sending back anything that seemed to have an essence of mana in it, regardless of whether it was alive or not. She could, however, tell apart a sewer rat from magical jewelry that had found its way down the drain.

There was a pattern and a flavor to the mana of living and non-living things. The sewer gators and slimes were more of a nuisance more than anything; especially the reptiles. They didn't know when to give up even as she left several of their brethren incapacitated from blunt blows to the snout. It was the quickest way to dispatch the menace because she was on a clock and every par’quart counted towards their escape from this town.

Beneath, she only had the sound of things scuttling away fromher presence, the gurgling of sewer water as it joined the main system from other parts of the town and her splotching footsteps on the walkway.

After two months of intelligence gathering, she only had a snippet of information of who the mysterious parties putting them on their watchlist were. Kamen’teugier, she wanted to ask the old elf about them, but she was compartmentalizing so many things at once. Signals from moving mana signatures on [Scan], the direction of the tether, whether she could hail her adopted father or not.

“Papa” she murmured, coming to a halt. After the number of switchbacks and junctions she’d passed, she was very sure that pursuit would sooner get lost in the labyrinthine sewer before they found her.

She teased the connection of her telepsychic connection to the Psiphone. It was muffled by the thickness of several imperial standard weights of rock between her and the town above.

However, at the back of her synth mind, it was there like a switch she could just flip and she could be connected to him. She knew roughly which direction he was. But Arcis, for the first time, felt doubt. She was an accident and their relationship was one of convenience, yet she felt as if she was the one who knew him best.

‘No, that’s just the phone memories.’ Inside of her memory matrices, was a vault protected by the magical equivalent of a firewall against psychic attacks. She was squeamish against peeking at his memories, they were nothing but the moments captured of his life, moving pictures that eternalized everything he held dear.

Music he loved, a little of which she felt guilty of humming when no one was watching, conversations from messages to people he knew. Top of the list was his sister, or if she thought about it, her Auntie—That is, if she stayed.

Where was her place in all that? A glorified walking vault of someone’s memories? But she copied everything into that Psiphone, what would he even need her for? So many questions. She wanted to crouch down and cradle her head in her hands and cry. Being more human was more than worth its fair share of its trouble.

Arcis almost wished she was back to the same two different entities in one body but that was far too gone. The unity had to happen else her [Spirit-Body] would have withered away despite being anchored to the shard-heart. A heart that did not beat, yet she felt a twinge of pain from even thinking of leaving Arthur.

There were other people around him, they kept a respectful distance from her. Would they accept her for what she was? Nonetheless, there was already something riding on her presence; after that plan they made only she could get the aership out. Without her the Stormbreaker would never see the light of day.

Resolved more than ever, the synth resumed her meander in the underbelly of the city streets as she followed the tether. However, a sudden spike in water levels hitting her feet made her yelp. She couldn’t see in the darkness.

Facepalming, she brought mana through her eyes to bear, the darkness ahead of her seemed to glitch and bend. Black became gray, the walls of the sewer tunnel became a subdued hue of browns and amethysts, the sewer water, an aqua that had too much brown in it.

“ No, no…” the synth mumbled. She hadn’t learnt to swim with and she didn't want to test how effective her Aer Augmentation would fare against her weight. Would she float or sink like a rock? For someone who didn't need to breathe, she feared drowning. And so she ran, mana wisps wobbling in her pseudo mana sight as she sought a path that would not put her in the path of storm drainage.

As her feet ate the distance, the presence of the tellusphere became a palpable presence but she reached an obstruction. If she guessed correctly, this was the wall that separated the Founders Quarter, which held Founders Street. She was very close and by guesstimate she’d walked for close to three quarts.

The only path forward was through a tunnel she’d have to crawl through on her knees. She could easily transmute the grate that was more rust than metal at that point. She eyed the circular aperture thoughtfully. Deadfall and other refuse clogged it, trying and failing to hold against the rise in water pressure; the rain had yet to pick up.

Yet if she found blockage, she would be stuck in there unless she transmuted all the rock around her but she barely had enough reserves as it was. The null containment room made gathering mana much harder and only the monster cores from Nevine had topped her up.

‘Nevine, did he reach the mansion in time?’ She checked her internal clock again.

‘Mmh,’ she mulled gazing at the wall, a finger on her lower lip. “Bleugh!” She spat realizing where her hands had been and scowled.

‘Maybe I should call Papa and let him know where I am.’ She hesitated again. But the critical part of her mind shot down that thought. ‘No, he might be in the middle of a battle with people around him.’

Her mind went through several other possibilities, all of them came up short. As with the tunnel ahead of her, the other path that would place her directly at the lab was beneath the sewer system. Without the tellusphere, she was again, short on mana to move through the rock

She flared [Scan] again just to be sure again. ‘No dice, just bedrock all the way.’ She turned her gaze towards the ceiling. She could transmute the handholds, find an opening or a manhole or something. And that too was unviable. ‘ I can’t go above ground either. Too risky.’ she looked around in dismay.

Arcis would have to backtrack to find another way out—As she was thinking about that however, shadows coalesced in her magical vision. Dark motes seemed to exude and bleed from reality itself before forming the outline of a humanoid silhouette. In less than a blink, they’d taken form.

“ Ah! Is that you Arcis?!” Nora called out, Arcis relaxed. “ Auntie Nora!” She cried out going in for a hug

“Uh Uh uh, you stink!” she held her back using her index finger. Arcis pouted as her arms met air.

“Haha, easy…here [Purge]!” Nora intonated and the stinky and gunky feeling fell away from her clothes and body. Her deadened human senses returned somewhat, she’d barely noticed the funk on her own body from slogging through the sewers.

“You came,” She hugged the dhampir. Nora tenderly patted her hair, murmuring. “Yes I did. I knew I’d find you here. We need to g—”. The world rocked around them and the two stumbled. Nora’s danger sense went off more acutely than she’d ever felt it. Her crimson eyes went wide in alarm as did Arcis’. Nora grabbed her and ported them out; to the lab.