A faint breeze passed through the area, dust particles being lifted off the ground and pushed around the area. Large stone pillars extended towards the sky, like hands trying to grab the stars. Atop one of those pillars a beast sat lumbering about, taking its time to groom the thicket of fur along it's body.

A few hundred kilometers away, Sear and L.L. had stopped to prepare before the fight. This would be Sear's first time fighting something at the Second Realm, so he wanted to make sure he would be able to win without getting to heavily injured. Not only that, but he couldn't disappoint L.L.. He was Sear's path to power after all.

He quickly came up with some combinations of runes that would normally overtax him and added even more to the mix, trying to make the strongest spell he could. If he could finish this thing off in a single move, then he would.

After some preparation, the spell was created. He didn't test it, as it would alert the beast, but he did make sure that there was a 99% chance of it working. The spell would create exactly 943,201 spears of mana. They would be split between different elements and focuses. Some would be made for armor penetration, some were made for raw kinetic force, some were made to explode into fragments and spray the enemy down.

This attack by itself would cost about half of his mana, so it should be more than strong enough to take down the monstrosity before him. And it truly was a monstrosity. A spider, with 12 tentacles for legs. Furry tentacles. It was a nightmare. Sear could barely understand how it managed to stay off the ground with tentacles for legs.

Looking at L.L., Sear nodded before taking off. He quickly got within 10 kilometers, where he set the runes off.

Above him in the sky, a massive halo of over 250 runes stitched together formed. Different colors lit up the halo in patterns, each part standing for a different element. The beast, noticing the runes, growled. A shock-wave of air blasted towards Sear but he put up a shield before it got close.

He held the spell for five seconds until he finally finished inputting all of the mana required. The halo flashed before disappearing, replaced by exactly 943,201 spears. Raising his hand into the air, one of the spears flew into it. Breathing in, he stepped forwards and launched the spear.

The land surrounding the spear's trajectory was vaporized. It flew with speeds that even L.L. found it impressive for a Second Realmer's attack.

The spear struct true, slamming into the monstrosities legs. it didn't even move from the blow, just simply looked at the spear now sticking out of it's legs. It seemed to be confused. It felt so much mana go into an attack and this was all it did?

At least that's what it did think, until the rest of the spears started moving. All together, the remaining 943,200 spears launched downwards towards the best, each going close to half the speed of the one Sear had thrown. Seeing this, the spider growled before a large ball of water encompassed it. The ball was over a kilometer in diameter, but quickly shrank down to barely covering the spider's body, but with much greater density.

The first spears arrived. They plunged into the ball and went right through, speeding into the the beast's side. The thick carapace of the spider was able to sustain the first few hundred spears, but as time continued to pass more and more spears were being sent into the beast.

Some of the spears hit the tentacles, and with their armor piercing capabilities were able to do much more damage to those.

After the armor piercing came the flak spears. Upon impact, they would break into small parts that would spray into the wounds caused by the other spears. These all had different elements attached to them, so some would burst into small blades of ice, while others would burst into hundreds of small fireballs.

The beast screeched as the water ball surrounding it exploded outwards, taking thousands of spears with it. It was bleeding badly, most of it's tentacles with holes and one large gash on its side that had been the main focus for all the flak spears. Two of it's four eyes were destroyed, adding more blind spots to it.

Sadly for it, the spears continued to rain down. Overall, the battle took 10 seconds. The only thing remaining now was a pile of flesh and blood on the floor.

Flying close to it, Sear summoned his mist and brought it over the beast, absorbing it's energy, along with its core.

"Well, that was something you don't see very often. Your attack took too long to charge, you would have died before being able to use it. A good shock-wave could have defeated all of your spears if it had enough range. You focus too much on summoning magic. You could have probably killed the beast with a slash of your weapon if you had used magic to help you. Overall, not bad for the 2nd Realm. But you still have a lot to learn."

Sear listened attentively. He didn't know how long L.L. had been alive for, but he was sure to have much more experience in fighting than him. He sat there thinking for a bit, trying to tinker with the glyphs in his mind to find a way to make the spell work better. While against one enemy it probably will never be his go-to attack, against large groups it would be deadly.

Opening his eyes, he saw that L.L. was gone. In front of him was a small silver disk with a arrow on it, sort of like a compass. Spinning it around, he saw that it was pushing him towards the direction of the city.

*This'll help me get back. But I think I'll take a quick vacation to go fight things. I need to get my Soul Purification to Stage 3 before I can purify my mana anymore. Time to go grind again.*

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Back at the city, L.L. had gone back to talk to Kren and Jar. After reviewing over Sear's runes and abilities, he had come up with ways that the power could be used.

*I want to have him by my side. With a power like that I could get someone near my strength. Kren and Jar still believe that I'm at the seventh realm. Please, the leader of the Kill-Joys is at the ninth realm. Do they really think I would attack them without being stronger? But either way, I should probably leave for a month before we attack. I'll need to be plenty far away when I break into the 15th realm so that they don't notice anything.*

*I think I'll also leave Sear out of the fight. I'd rather him not get caught up in it and have a chance at dieing. I'll probably just kill everyone at the fight before taking him and taking him into the Inner-World. He can quickly gain Soul-Purification while still mana-purifying while we are there. Since he's with me nobody should try anything. Less than 100 people there over the 10th realm anyways.*

*For now though, I just have to get rid of everyone here and take him with me.*

After making it back to the center, L.L. was joined by Kren and Jar.

Kren was the first to speak up. "So? How strong is he?"

"Strength wise, he can compete with someone maybe a stage or two higher than him. Pretty good considering how major the changed between the stages are in the first few realms. Skill-wise, he didn't use his soul-weapon, but his magic capabilities are something else. He uses runes to an efficiency I haven't seen before. Even I can't combine as many runes as he did. The only problem was how long it took him to actually cast the spell considering it used a majority of his mana. If his body gets better at mana manipulation he may be able to become a Higher Magician."

The two sat there thinking for a bit before Jar began to talk.

"If he can become a Higher Magician, shouldn't have one of the major groups already know of his location? I doubt it would take anymore longer than a week for an expert to travel across Exile."

"I don't know. I haven't asked him anything about where he came from or how many realmers were on his world, but I doubt it was much. If anything, he may be the only one. He doesn't have the experience nor the knowledge that most people from Realmed Planets have. That or the overseer's chose not to involve themselves in the world, which may also be true. Either way, if anybody was coming after him, they would have already been here. The only other possibility would be that they want him to improve on his own, but with his mana absorbing abilities and the possibility of becoming a Higher Magician I doubt they would wait. If anything they would break him and force him to become a member of the Upper Echelons."

This time it was Kren who spoke up. "You think we could get him to trust us and work for us? If anything we could take over his mind. His body is the one who has the ability not the other way around."

"No. If we take over his mind he won't lose the mana absorbing powers but he would lose the possibility of turning into a Higher Magician. for now, let's take it slow. We need to see how he improves for now. We're still not planning to attack for another 6 months and I doubt they would attack us back."

"Fine, but if something happens and he turns on us its your fault."

"Whatever you say Kren. Either way, I'll be leaving right before the next purification week. I'm going to be trying to speed up my training and don't want to take mana from others in the vicinity."

"With that. Meeting over."