Swearing repeatedly internally, Gilliam didn’t exactly know what to do. He needed to get off this rock and back to Lisica. However he had no knowledge about teleportation, portals or any kind of spatial voodoo. He might need to look into this when... if.. if he gets back.

The demons could clearly open portals, and teleported him from Lisica to this place, so there was someone with that skill here. The Gatekeeper also wanted a gate opened to the Heart. Whatever that meant it sounded like it went elsewhere at least.

For now there is more pressing matters, the explosions are getting closer, he needed some way to either attack, or a way to escape. Since they were tracking him it felt likely that hiding was not happening.

His mana Boundary as well as Mana Core had apparently made some progress as of late, he had been using the flight spell a lot lately, but he never really felt that it drained or affected him that much, in gaming terms it felt that his mana regen was more than the upkeep for it. And sure, anything that uses mana will make regeneration slower than if he didn’t have it running at all, but this fact was still very, very convenient for him.

But, it didn’t directly help him with the incoming danger, it did aid him with movement but... He had a few things he could do. Going up there and attacking, waiting for them to come down; but this could have them just drop something super explosive down and take out him and his shield. He could keep running but that became a war of attrition.

Trying to plan the perfect way out he remembered a quote; No plan survives first contact with the enemy. This doesn't mean you should just charge in blindly, but rather that you shouldn’t overplan and expect things to turn out that way.

His barrier was very, very strong. Based on when he was flung into the wall before it took almost no damage, though not at 100% after it was close enough for this comparison.

Digging straight up would normally be dangerous in case he hit a rock or something, but that just happened now without a problem. So he could just tunnel straight up and get some distance above them, that could let him escape however he wanted afterwards... right?

Or.. would they just use some homing magic and take him down? They did have a powerful mage, after all, digging down with explos*... Hold on, if they kept casting explosions like this, did they not have better spells to use?

Petal did explain that they could get powers from eating someone who had powers of their own, they weren’t born with too much save some physical boons. This could either work in his favour, or blow up in his face.

The fact that he wasn’t killed before, and since the Gatekeeper wanted a gate opened to the Heart, perhaps the Heart was some homebase and he planned to bring the human that took out the portals to his boss. That seemed likely given how their hierarchy worked, if he planned to eat Gilliam for himself, he wouldn’t start any portals before after?

This seemed plausible. And even if it didn’t, should he just keep being chased until he gets worn out? Endurance hunting was a thing, after all, and he refused to be the prey.

No, screw that. He wanted his life back, all this shit happening just because of some invaders wanting to eat them.

Strengthening his barrier by casting a second one outside of it, though there were now two layers of barriers around him, the second was cast a bit weaker to make sure that the bending of the glass-like apperance didn’t screw with sight. He then cast a simple earth move spell, ignoring the reconstruction of it this time, saving a bit of energy and also letting it work faster.

Aiming straight up he flew as fast as the tunnelling spell allowed, mentally preparing to wreak havoc when he got up he had some spells mentally prepared, he just needed to get up to see them.

The tremors stopped as he was on the way up, odds were that the mage sensed that something was happening, but even if they were prepared, Gilliam wanted to show them how underestimated he was.

Finally breaching the last bit of dirt, he now saw nothing but red and gore as he felt an impact on his shield. He had enough speed to literally break through the demon standing there as he tore the poor creature on his way into the air.

The shield seemed to let it all slide off like some hydrophobic demo-reel and he again had perfectly clean barriers in less than a second.

Having gotten some air he only had a moment to take in what was going on. There were a lot of demons around, at a glance it looked like 50+, all kinds but almost all of them were armed in some way, most of them humanoid but a few four legged abominations as well. There were a lot of imps fluttering around and everyone seemed to be revolving around a larger orc-like demon who was blinged up something fierce. He had a staff in one hand, made of bone and some more bone, looking almost like some weird creature’s head and spine made into a staff with a lot of dangly bits. He had several rings, a fancy robe mainly black colored but with some streaks of red and gold.

Well, that was without a doubt their mage.

Not wasting time he needed to use the few seconds where the element of surprise had any meaning. Aiming at the possible mage, Gilliam waved his hands as he created one of the spell circles he had envisioned on the way up. It was an Aether sphere, much like a fireball, the runes used were naturally Aether, Orb and Explosion, but he also added a multiply rune, a cone-shape rune as well as several variations of Power runes.

Charging the circle took a second, this allowed the mage to set up some protections, several of the warriors shot some arrows at Gilliam, some tried to throw things at him. The arrows bounced off his double-barrier and the few thrown objects that even reached up would barely have wounded him without the barriers.

As the spell was charged the magic circle collapsed into a bright yellow sphere in his hand, which erupted into a cone of smaller spheres that carpet bombed the area beneath him with enough force to change the topology of the area. The spheres had dug deep into the ground and exploded with the force of a small bomb. This had caused the whole area to become rubble and craters. A good chunk of the demon force had been torn apart by the wall of explosive orbs, many had taken severe damage or simply died from the underground explosions themselves or the shrapnel they created. Many more had taken damage from the sudden uneven terrain or secondary effects. Except the mage there was no undamaged demon.

The mage seemed to have cast his own barrier, but he looked weak, worn and exhausted. This had probably eaten up a lot of his mana, this was very good for Gilliam.

Not waiting for the mage to retaliate, Gilliam made a single gesture and his Aether arrow magic circle blinked into existence and faded just as fast once it had gotten the energy it needed, collapsing into the dart it shot out at blinding speed towards the mage. It penetrated the barrier around the mage, shattering a small hole in the sphere around him before it blasted through his right lower arm. This had enough force to dismember him completely, even through the shield. His staff fell to the ground with the hand holding onto it following limply. The mage let out a roar of pain and seemed to do his best to heal, Gilliam knew from experience that healing yourself when wounded is hard, given the situation the mage didn’t seem to be in the best of mental states either. Though it did seem that he managed to halt the bleeding if nothing else.

Gilliam realised that not only was he underestimated, but he overestimated them. Ghaos was a much bigger threat than these people were.

Floating down to the lot he got the reaction he expected, the survivors of the bombardment did their best to get out of his way, scampering behind rocks and just out of his immediate area. There were no more attacks against him as he came down as the naked angel of death he was becoming, only wearing four manacles.

The mage aimed his remaining arm against Gilliam, he used two solid seconds to charge the spell up, this gave Gilliam enough time to decipher the runes. A Fire rune as well as an Orb and explosion rune. This was the simplest of newbie fireballs. It had no power enhancers of anything fancy. Ignoring the spell completely he let the mage cast it to the glee and large smile of the demon mage.

The spell formed into the fireball as expected and it was physically thrown as a ball at Gilliam. As it impacted his barrier it exploded into a fiery inferno. Had it not been for his barriers the fire would be hot enough to have easily severely damaged him, it scorched some of the corpses around him as well as further wounding some of the already wounded.

As the fire faded and the mage saw Gilliam unchanged, the barrier had barely lost any integrity at all. Gilliam briefly realised that being trained like he was by Ghaos, he had ended up with a very skewed view on what a normal mage was. Ghaos was a professional battlemage at the top of his game, part of Gilliam mentally expected this to be the norm, but no; he just had raised the bar too high.

It is good to never underestimate your enemy, but this was a bit weird.

The mage’s smile faded as he saw the lack of effect of his fireball, based on the damage around him it was clear that the spell worked as it should but the floating human was unaffected.

This had the mage recoil, trying to get some distance between them but tripped over the shattered terrain he ended up on his ass, pleading instead.

“No, stop, don’t.”

Gilliam wondered what he should do at this point, he wanted to just kill him but at the same time this was an excellent chance to question someone local.

Gilliam smirked as he had already kind of decided what to do next.

“What’s in it for me if I stop?” He replied, knowing that his languagething would handle him talking in the correct language.

The demonic mage’s eyes widened a bit, seemingly not only because his pleas worked but also because this human was speaking the demonic language.

He couldn’t reply either, taken back that this seemingly worked it seemed like he ended up in a variant of that he didn’t expect this to work.

Gilliam didn’t feel like waiting and giving the demons around him a chance to react properly, he wanted to grab the mage and fly up but he absolutely didn’t feel strong enough for this. Though only a mage, the demonic caster was still large and buff, Gilliam hadn’t figured out body enhancement yet so... Down it was.

Using a variant of the tunnelling spell he used before he aimed it underneath the mage causing him to just fall down, it didn’t go fast enough to send him into freefall but it was enough to make it problematic to stand. Gilliam made sure to ‘repair’ the ground above him as he followed the mage into the tunnel he was making. The area of effect was large enough that the mage’s staff and hand came along with them, as well as a corpse or two, and due to how it closed after them it would seem like the earth just ate them up.

He created some light orbs to follow them down the hole, mainly to make sure the mage didn’t try anything. After having gone down a bit, he angled to the side and moved them away from this specific area until they got far enough down that Gilliam felt relatively safe. At this point he made a room for them and fixed the air right away.

The demon mage became more and more terrified, seemingly knowing he has no chance and now being captured this far underground. Gilliam theorised that if he had to use explosions to dig down, he was not used to moving earth and this was probably very claustrophobic for him.

“So, I have some questions for you.” Gilliam calmly stated as he kept the room illuminated, his flight spell active and the barriers up. The barriers were active until deactivated or ran out of energy, there was no active upkeep as they had been given a static amount of mana on creation, so there was really no need to do anything with them.

The demon nodded terrified and didn’t seem to want to put up any fight.

“Good, now. First, how did you find me?” Though he had some ideas he wanted to make sure.

The mage replied instantly without hesitation. “I could sense your magic.”

He seemed scared enough that this would probably be a rather easy interrogation.

This was pretty much what Gilliam expected. “Are there others as good at magic as you?”

He didn’t make this sound concedendig, it was more of a metric to have a point of comparison.

“N... No... I mean... Yes.. but not out here on the fingers.” He seemed to be honest enough that he even corrected himself, this was good.

The interrogation continued for quite some time. Originally Gilliam only wanted to know what he was against and how to get off this rock, but many answers spurred followup questions. And this mage was actually quite forthcoming and replied to everything he asked, adding any relevant details. It really seemed that he wanted to come out of this alive.

Gilliam learned a lot. The floating island they were on now was one of many. The network of islands that made up their world was the remnants of their old shattered world. Petal didn’t know this as she was just a servant on this landmass so she had never known any other place. The shattered world was named just that, the Fractured World. Each landmass of any substantial size was named after a body part or organ, seeming that the larger chunks were closer to the center and they got smaller the further out you got. The innermost and largest landmass, their capitol of sorts, was named the Heart.

From there it spread out with lungs, chest, ribs, arms... and so on. The outskirts were the Fingers and more outskirts were the nails. They were currently on one such finger.

The invasion was done from the fingers in case of reverse invasion from wherever they were invading, or if some massive weapon managed to come back through the portal only a finger was lost and it didn’t damage their capital, for example.

The demon he was speaking to, who identified himself as Sirzan, kept answering and explained that to get off this floating island they needed to teleport or use the landmass's static gate. Flying would not work as eventually you would just fall to exhaustion, and nobody that went far enough down ever came back, but in theory if you had enough mana you could fly between the landmasses, but it would take literal days, and that’s if you know where they are. Aimlessly going in a random direction might work but...

Due to the sandy mist between them, looking into the distance and seeing another landmass will only work if it’s very, very close.

Their invasion to other places are two-fold, first to find and eat to gain power, second to get resources if not just move into a new world. This had happened several times before, though this Fractured world is their home base now it originally wasn’t. They took over a world and through how their race consumes energy and don’t take care of their world in the slightest; it destabilised and shattered. Somehow still ending up breathable and liveable. None of the demons have the magical knowledge to even begin to understand why, since their powers are ‘inherited’ they don’t actually know how things work. Sometimes they capture mages or people with magical gear, this is how they end up with magical gear as nobody has learned how to make them yet.

In short, for Gilliam to get back, as expected he would need a gate back to the world... This was a problem. According to Sirzan, to make a gate they needed a group of people to cast the spell together, as it needed too much energy for a single person. It was also tied into some simple scrying magic to be able to know where to land it, their scrying works better towards places of high magical concentration, which also explained why they landed at the academy.

“So, you can’t teach me the gate spell, can you?” Gilliam hoped. If what was told to him in Lisica he had an absurd amount of mana, so he might be able to get something working. Alternatively with enough prepared mana crystals he could perhaps make something working.

“No. Only the Gatekeeper and the Openers know the ritual.” Sirzan looked a bit sad about that, not because he was sad for Gilliam’s sake, but more that he was most likely under the belief that him having information was the only reason he was alive.

“So. I need to get hold of the Gatekeeper, who hates me, or one of these Openers.” He expected this to be the case but it was still a bit disheartening finding out this was indeed the case.

“Wait, how did the teleport thing that brought me here work? There was this runed dagger I was stabbed with.” Gilliam was a bit distressed and confused at this part.

His captive pondered for a moment. “I think that was a teleport beacon, it is something that our Warlocks can have weak minded targets create and use. Once activated the Openers can call on the thing, or victim, this is stabbed in.”

He didn’t seem to like calling Gilliam a victim, but since it was the truth it was hard to avoid.

“So, that cannot send me back.” Gilliam stated more than asked. “So the best bet I have is getting someone to open a portal back, and enter that... But to make sure it’s not somewhere random I need to make sure... Ok...”

Gilliam was thinking of ideas, the best idea started to sound more and more like this being the only way.

“There... I mean... I might have a way but...” Sirzan started carefully, clearly wanting to barter for this information.

“If there is a proper way for me to get back, I’ll let you live, if that’s what you mean.” Gilliam preemptively blurted it out, he didn't exactly want to kill them, but he had figured out that he had absolutely no reservations doing it if needed.

The demon calmed down considerably, he had apparently been wondering about his chances for a while now.

“On the Hand, the next landmass inwards, there is an artefact that can let you open a gate once. It’s an emergency item, we don’t have many of them but... if you get there and activate that you can go anywhere you know of.”

Gilliam’s eyes widened, this was his ticket!

“So, if I use the static gate to the hand, I can get this item and go back?”

Though he toned this as a question it was more like a loaded statement.

“Yes.” Sirzan finally looked a bit interested, perhaps now with his life not about to end he was finally able to relax and see the light at the end. “Since it is an emergency item, it is guarded but not hard to get. You need to go to the Blue Tower, at the top there you can find a crystal sphere. Shatter it while you think of where you want to go and that’s it. The portal opens instantly but only lasts for a few moments.”

He finally got to his feet now that his life was not in direct danger.

“To open the static gate you just need to channel energy into it, it only goes to one place. Or you can just wait, they open it to check that everything is fine every now and then.”

“That is very informative. Thank you Sirzan” Gilliam smiled, if a bit evilly as he started hovering upwards towards the ceiling.

“... so... Master Human, when... when.. Will you take me to the surface?”

There was a very, very hesitant tone in his voice as he realised this was never a part of the agreement. The agreement was his life and he hoped that Gilliam didn’t intend to be that literal about it.

“Oh, why would I do that? Unless you have something more of interest for me?” Gilliam made sure to use the coldest tone he could. He did intend to bring him back to the surface anyway, this was just an attempt to squeeze some more good info out of him, in case he was trying to hide something.

“No, er.. I mean.. I told you everything... I.. Oh. Oh!” He proceeded to take his ring off by putting his finger in his mouth and biting the ring, pulling it off.

It was a wide ring made of three strands, two silver and one gold, that was braided together into a flat braid going around. On the top was a tiny glass cylinder instead of a gem, it was oriented the same way that the finger would go through it. The braids ended up touching, actually holding the cylinder in place, so all three bands started and ended against the cylinder. The center band, seen from the cylinder, was the gold.

Inside the cylinder there appeared to be a slightly glowing purple disk, there seemed to be room for a total of 10 disks based on the slightly silver rings inside the cylinder seemingly acting as spacers.

“What... is this ring?” Gilliam asked, not about to take anything possible cursed. Although it seemed very unlikely that he would curse him as he could clearly not dig out of here. Especially not with one arm.

“I... Don’t know. A human brought back from another world had it. He had a magic sword with him that disappeared when he activated the ring. I don’t know how he did that but... Perhaps you can figure it out? I will trade it for you to bring me, unharmed, back up.”

Gilliam smiled widely, not only because he was amused at the extra detail to be brought up, but also because his bluff actually worked!

He was given a neat magic ring, by the sound of it, based on his knowledge of games and modern world fantasy, this sounded like either a spell storing ring or some holding space ring.

Taking it he put it on, based on the description that the sword just disappeared did explain a bit more that this was a storage ring. Wanting to test this he was a bit uncertain how magic items actually worked.

How do you activate them? Games often had code-words, if so that’s gonna be a problem. But what if it’s just channelling some energy into it to sort of trigger it? From how he had learned magic in Lisica it seemed to be more based on mental imagery and mana.

Having a slight educated gamble he connected to the ring and funnelled it a tiny bit of mana. Instantly his mind got a return answer!

It was almost like a list formed, he ‘asked’ the ring what was stored there, and the ring ‘answered’ with a list, in this case the list only contained one item; a sword.

Ok, this was definitely a worthwhile ‘gift’ from Sirzan.

Without properly considering, Gilliam mentally requested to take out the sword, as the link had already been established the ring seemed to comply, and in a blink he now held a sword in his hand!

The sword was broken, the dual-edged blade not more than 30cm or so (~a foot), it was clearly broken based on how it ended in an uneven and jagged end. The center of the blade bore a lot of runes.

Likewise the crossguard was broken, both sides of it seemed to miss the actual crossguard, and all that was left was a vaguely bow tie shape of metal, it still extended a bit past the metal blade so it was functional, although not properly. The handle was like a rectangular cylinder that was wider on the center than the sides, not too unlike a square’ish oval. The pommel looked like a flattened out droplet shape with the thicker side connected to the handle.

The blade was not the only surface with runes, the crossguard had two large runes on either side, and the pommel was covered in them. He could read the runes as they were the same ones he used in Structured magic. Though they weren’t properly connected in circles or forms, they just looked almost randomly placed around the surfaces.

Just holding the handle of this sword had two things happening. First his demonic friend’s eyes widened, he looked both interested and annoyed. Potentially from Gilliam figuring out the ring instantly.

The second was a bit more ominous, the runes started lighting up.