Letting herself be the living heart of the sealing formation was perhaps the boldest move Mirayoung made in the four centuries of her life. She gathered her will as she thought about the complex enchantment needed. It was said the arcane language, once used by ancient sorcerers, had seen all practical spells translated into the currently used Elarian tongue. But this complex enchantment was incompletely translated, forcing her to revert partly to the arcane language to compensate.

Each word of power was pronounced carefully as it guided the raw magic from within her to connect with the formation. It seemed an eternity as she resisted the auditory hallucinations from the wraith's presence, while still being conscious of the peril Jerius was in and how skirtingly close the wraith was to escaping from the daggers of Anasr.

Midway through, she paused her incantation, an act that would be unthinkable to a lesser mage, to weave another spell into the daggers of Anasr. As the daggers were imbued with the spell, frozen light trailed behind the arcing daggers. Hardened light rays did not work alone but perhaps a combination of two elements would work. She would augment the properties of light with the hardness of ice, hoping to form a more robust trap to seal in the wraith long enough for her to complete the array.

The wraith's struggle toned down, seemingly giving in to its fate.

She thought the wraith was laughing hollowly, but she dismissed the human tendency to impose meaning to ambiguous visual or auditory patterns. A wraith may be intelligent, but it is driven by its instincts and hunger. How can it have the capacity to laugh?

She resumed the casting of the enchantment, intoning in increasing volume incantations that had not been uttered for a long, long time. She had always been proud of her photogenic memory and flawless enunciation that allowed her to shape her spells with incredible efficiency. She was truly putting them to the test speaking the arcane language to compensate.

Every stroke of the sigils that formed the array flared in response to the enchantment Mirayoung brought to light. The sealing array was originally supposed to be fueled by the Cabal Network but the incompleteness meant the array was cut off from any supply of magic. Once Mirayoung made contact with the sigils of the array, intoxicating them with the first taste of arcane, they grew an insatiable thirst for more power. She felt her arcane energy sucked out.

She reconnected with the arcane gems left on the ground when the mage-blacksmiths fled, originally meant to fuel the completeness of the array but now she could use them to stave off the initial arcane demand from the sigils.

She took a moment to breathe. Shaping the array around her on the first attempt without backfiring was incredibly hard and tricky work. In better days, she would be impressed with her own ingenuousness, and horrified with her boldness.

A single misstep would lead her tumbling down to her doom. The array had anti-spirit elements, which meant that she needed to cast an exceedingly draining spell to isolate her soul from touching the array, lest she risk irrefutable damage to herself.

Even intoning every word and morphing the magic to her thoughts with perfection, she knew she would not escape certain backlash later. But she cast that away, focusing on the wraith first. There was no need to worry about any backlash if the wraith emerged victorious in their struggle.

Her mind dizzied for a moment as she gritted her teeth, feeling her power coursing through the incomplete array and taking what felt like a piece of her to fill any gap the enchantment found.

And there were many gaps and crevices.

The array was also meant to cover the entire Dome, but since it barely filled the eastern columns and part of the ceiling, Mirayoung merely commanded them through the enchantment to become a smaller sphere centered around her, not tethered to any solid object.

After long, tense moments, it was completed.

Her eyes flickered over to where Jerius was as she made a conscious effort to exclude him from the completed array. The anti-spirit elements on the array would block out the wraith's influence on Jerius's mind, allowing him to recover.

As she condensed the sealing array around a small area between her and the Mind Wraith, she had a childlike glint on her face. As the array now moved with her at the heart, the wraith would be forced to stay within the array's space. She retained full maneuverability while permanently trapping the wraith within it.

Mirayoung stacked multiple spells on herself, calling upon them to enhance her speed, strengthen her bones and muscles, and sharpen her senses. She would need them to keep herself one step ahead of the wraith. The frozen light cage and daggers had been more effective than she thought as the wraith ceased any struggle.

She remembered Master Iras's words during the final year of the academy when she asked what made an archmagus stand out. And Iras, her most esteemed teacher, said in response. It's true an average archmagus has more arcane reserve, more spells at his disposal, more knowledge of the world, and more experience. But none truly represents the true power of an archmagus, which lies in his ability to adapt, to combine, to forge ahead newer and entirely different ways of conceiving a spell or even an entire spell category. If you ever intend to go for the Rites of the Archmagus, see that you are first confident with your versatility with magic like it is a part of you rather than a tool you use.

Her mind flirted with a new bold idea. Theoretically, nothing stopped her‒the heart of the array‒from connecting the array to her spells, just like how she blended ice with light in a moment's decision. This meant the spell she cast would be imbued with the anti-spirit elements of the array. It would be sufficient to destroy the Mind Wraith but she could progressively transfer the array from herself to the ice-light cage that solidified over the wraith, effectively sealing it.

She considered how to even begin it, regretting why she had not thought about this earlier. Granted, the initial plan was a lot easier and safer, where with Jerius and the rest of the suppression team, she would lure the wraith to the white pool in the middle of the Dome before completing the secondary sealing array there to trap it within the frothing water.

As she continued to try within her head the likely permutations to merge the sealing array with the ice-light cage, she saw the wraith stretching one lanky arm shrouded in writhing shadows and flickers of sinister lightning...not towards her but towards the edge of the array where the anti-spirit sigils hummed with excitement at the near-contact.

Was it daring a move to break out of it? Is the sigils not sufficiently robust against a Mind Wraith? It was built for a Shadow Wraith after all. Mirayoung's mind went wild.

Then the fingers met the surface of the sealing array.

Mirayoung heard it scream. Not from before her, but within her. Within the confines of her mind. That startled her and then she realised, albeit a little late as her mind and the wraith's mind clashed like the violent opposing waves of a storm-tossed sea.

The right knowledge could mean surviving a life-or-death situation. There was so little about fighting a Mind Wraith that Mirayoung went in heads on without understanding what one could do. She chose to link herself to the array, completing it so she could seal it. Yet she did not see the implications that such a connection exposed herself to the wraith, if it so chose to use the array as the conduit for its mind-encroaching power. It had willingly subject itself to the damaging effect of the array if it could let it reach the caster, Mirayoung herself.

She could now hear everything the wraith was thinking.

And every bit from the beginning was true.

The wraith was laughing, demonstrating more sentience and malice than she ever prescribed to a wraith. Or even that of the collective hive of scholars within the Guild. It knew it would have the upperhand when Mirayoung chose to become the heart of the array.

Again, a lesser mage would have succumbed.

But an archmagus was no lesser mage.

She cast the quickest of incantations, letting her arcane continuously slip rapidly into the daggers of Anasr such that each strike came like the anvil of a powerful sorcerous blow. It would not have worked previously but the wraith's incorporeal body was frozen, battered by the daggers while taking continuous damage from the array. She was thankful now for Caqur's offensive wards even though she initially did not agree with it.

She wagered her life on wearing it down through the battle of attrition, while she pulled out the fundamentals of guarding against mental attacks with memories. Since before the Guild was founded, ancient sorcerers had figured out that memories‒which were a proxy of the person's past‒could buffer against a mental encroachment.

With the mightiest effort, she pulled out her memories from a long time ago. The first was an incident when she hid within the academy's library one late night with Lyvia and two other lady-mages, reading a research scroll on Challenging Magic through the Human Body with mirthful laughter. Orifices are the unsurprisingly good conduits of magic, the scroll read.

It came just in time as the wraith's presence in her mind struck against the buffeting memory, consuming it in lieu of her.

This reeks of desperation, human.

There was a catch to using memories...

The memories consumed would be lost forever.

Just like the other archmagus...Ludger, was that his name?

No. Mirayoung thought. That name forced memories of her once-love with Ludger, the sorrow she felt at his death and how they drifted apart at the tail-end of their relationship just like the ending of most magicians' love stories - the death of spark in a sea of mundaneness.

That too, was gone from her mind.

Mirayoung forgot what she lost, but she knew it was something important to her. She vowed to be more prudent with the memories she chose to feed the wraith, while grinding it down in real life. She had centuries of memories to weather through the Mind Wraith's attack, so long as she could keep them seamlessly formed one after another.

Give it up, human.

The voice dripped with animosity and ill will. There was no denying that the wraith was a reservoir of dark emotions.

She pulled snippets of her memories from the time at the academy. It was a long time ago but it would allow her to feed the wraith continuously. She kept her first assignment as a spellweaver as a backup, readying it if the memory chain were to break.

You think that will hold me off. The wraith howled with laughter as Mirayoung could feel the defences in her mind buckling as the memories began to blur. It almost happened in parallel to a strange ringing in her head that stifled her thinking.

Was this another ability of the Mind Wraith? Mirayoung was dreaded to find out. The onslaught from the Mind Wraith seemed inexhaustible as she grew careless in her memory selection, intending to layer as many memories as possible to close off even the tiniest gap from being exploited.

The wraith merely laughed, gloating over her attempts.

But again she was the archmagus.

You think you can wrestle with an archmagus and come out on top? Mirayoung's eyes flared with anger and renewed motivation. You are but a mere creature that refuses to die when the time has come for you. You who defy the natural order. I will put you in place.

Try then, human. The spiteful voice echoed in response.