Within an empty basement, just a few stone tables and chairs remained in what used to be a fully-equipped lab with materials. On the tables sat hundreds of pages with scrawled notes. Spaced bullet points summarised information on some notes, while other pages contained tightly-packed writing that even its writer struggled to read. A few notes even showed drawings of various equipment and figures.

“They have this sort of stealth then? No, not stealth. But such an impeccable hiding method! Why vanish outside the city though? Let’s see… they headed north all this time, so this had to be a goal. Then it must be the cathedral.” Nothing he’d seen the past couple weeks implied that they figured out him watching them.

With a priest in their party, and everyone evolving overtime, he accepted that the priest likely came to gather the required divinity for this evolution. But that didn’t explain why they only hid after leaving the city.

A flash of paranoia overcame him, but that calmed down as he knew that assumption was impossible. The next idea depended on that dragon and young girl holding immense identities, perhaps enough to receive revelations. Indeed, he wondered how they knew of Type-0’s arrival in advance. Great enough importance to receive a revelation obviously met those requirements.

In that case, an angel likely warned them once more of something dangerous. “What else is going after them? Indeed, a group like that can’t be normal, someone might have set their sights on them long before me. If they make a move soon… I’ll just give up, that dragon is frightening enough,” he shook his head at the sight of that lightning once more.

After sufficient research, the evidence suggested that the dragon actually evolved into a Bringer at some point in time. Only so many evolutions naturally summoned disasters with enough mana. To kill this opponent he just had to strike first, an easy victory. His plan came together by the day, but still he watched. If he moved earlier, this seemingly minor ability to hide may have taken him by surprise, who knew what powers the recently evolved adults obtained too?

“But how to find them? All I can do is search until they appear.” He rubbed his chin for a few minutes, but wrote down a simple line in conclusion to his analysis of this matter.

‘The dragon's power varies wildly, it is likely the most dangerous if given time, even disregarding its arrays. Evidence suggests its weakest is at a battle’s start, but unproven due to a lack of melee combat data.’

He needed to see the dragon fight!

* * *

As the group continued in Icy’s little bubble of warped space, they eventually found an agreeable spot and set up camp. Not using any light, they instead slept in the dark, on the cold ground, without any warped space to hide them from chimaeras. Exactly as planned…

Immediately next morning, a quick meal of rations filled their group up, but things diverted here. Jaren saw at least two new chimaeras nearby, all mithril tiers. At first, they worried that their creator brought out ones with special eyes, but that guess turned out wrong. Incredibly wrong.

Three chimaeras charged their group, and everyone rapidly equipped themselves while both spellcasters took a lead, Darak immediately placed a barrier to protect their warriors, at the same time a divine lightning bolt struck a seemingly fiendish chimaera. Divine power seeped into its body, some flesh and bones burnt to ash when in contact. A standard response to those intent on harming a priest.

Icy merged with his spirit and set his pocket watch to 15 seconds, along with the massive mana requirements, the dragon’s body immediately disappeared for everyone nearby. Even the chimaeras lost sight, but two seconds later found him… Right above their heads with five disks of light.

He leapt off the air, and slammed into a nearby chimaera. While very lightweight, an aura-infused foot gave quite a weighty attack. And then, he released the five disks of light, each of them spun at incredible speeds with fine edges. They cut through flesh with ease, but against such tough bones, did little to no damage.

Still, Icy never expected the Intermediate true spell to deal much damage. Homing Light Disk was really just a pushover spell to slaughter weak steel tiers en masse… What he wanted was to prepare hundreds of small wounds as tiny thorns rapidly coated his tongue and a viscous fluid built up in his throat.

One by one, thick mists of brown covered all three chimaeras. Thorns easily found their way deep inside every last monster, and in the process left minor burns alongside it. A combination of toxins and venoms, so numerous that even Icy no longer kept track of them, ravaged these things, their tough bodies naturally resisted such things that had lower mana density, but just halving the effects of these poisons amounted to very little. Skin blistered and rotted, organs stiffened or literally calcified, meanwhile, bones snapped like twigs, and muscles atrophied or tore from the slightest movements.

Thank god the neurotoxins failed against these things…

Raccelline cut one directly in half with a skill, and Korridan repeated this exact same feat, finally having enough strength to match her.

And finally, the last one already died as Mala stopped distracting the other chimaeras and instead pulled a spike of earth through its abdomen before ten purple blades separated the monster from itself.

The other two didn’t even get to act.

“Is he still testing to see if it’s worth going after us? We killed his behemoth, it’d be better for him to find some actual pushovers.” Mala spoke aloud, and at the same time, Jaren stared at a point in the forest. They copied him, but even Icy only caught sight of the chimaera far off with Elder eyes active.

With no more time to waste, Icy shook his head and covered the group as usual. The attack exceeded expectations, but with Mala’s comment, it very well appeared like they never expected chimaeras to follow them.

They created this plan with a fair bit of depth, one which lured and diverted that wizard’s attention. To that end, for this first day, the group headed west. A camp in darkness appeared as though they hid from something, but in fact, intentionally exposed themselves to chimaeras. The day after, from daybreak, everyone immediately rushed east back to their original path to reach Saevana.

While a small hitch occurred, the fact that only three slightly-strong mithril tiers arrived also gave them a lot of wiggle room.

No one knew if such an old wizard would fall for such bait, in fact, a good chance that he saw through this mediocre ploy always existed. However, Mala and Darak argued a very good case for why this wouldn’t happen. It happened not too long ago, in fact, just after Darak’s evolution.

“He wants to be in complete control, even the most insane wizards focus on that. Still, there’s no logical reason for us to suspect he’d send another master tier. You’d never use a behemoth over a normal-sized beast, if possible.”

“Also, we can use the cathedral as a cover for that. While no god can find him, to tell us that danger approaches is more than doable.”

From there, the believability of the act came down only to their group. They got around the issue of chimaeras by forcibly journeying day and night between villages, the drain on Icy’s mental stamina clearly affected him most, as even halfway to an Adept Mind palace, he slept far longer than average in the towns and villages they crossed.

Besides that, he spent every single spare moment fraught over a small, carefree statue.

Korridan asked the question once more, “Still no luck?”

“It’s impossible for me. Every last test shows I need like a hundred times my current mana… And then my mind actually has to support that monstrosity. I can force myself to use one word of Draconis… But fifty?” Along with Mala, the tests he performed over the last couple weeks only worsened his mood.

Firstly, just the act of learning a mere single word took him two days. How to describe the sheer difficulty of a great language left him confused, let alone the act of doing so.

But then, just this single word sapped 80% of his MP to activate, on top of blasting his Mind palace with a massive knockback force which almost toppled all his buildings. Neither mind nor body could possibly support such ridiculous requirements.

“But mana isn’t actually an issue, we went over this already.” Jaren butted in with another point, one made several days ago in reference to his Palace Experimentalist bloodline. The tanks of stored mana technically allowed him to activate ten words at once.

And then, Mala pointed out that condensed mana might be his only option due to storage limits, to which he almost coated himself in flames. Condensed mana generally required a dragon to be at master tier, let alone humans who often only met these requirements as Sages. Rare exceptions existed, like if your max MP is simply outrageous.

“Did you ever find out why your aura behaves like this too?” Korridan threw out another question, and if possible, Icy may have coughed up blood.

“Nope, and Nexus authority is too low.”

“Why is it called aura, too?” Unexpectedly, Raccelline asked a question for once. After listening in, she always found it strange that this thing called ‘aura’ very much did things beyond a literal aura. But as she found out immediately, no one knew why either. Simple naming convention led to them keeping this name.

It gave Icy an idea, “Nexus, what is this power called in the wider universe?” Several times he asked about ‘the true nature’ or ‘how it works’, but never a name. Just a name cleared up so many misunderstandings.

[Information exceeds current Authority, however, self-governed research indicates guarantee of self-discovery. Aura is a colloquial term, the Nexus gives it the name Origin Force]

“Origin Force. Yes, that name does fit better. But doesn’t that mean it’s a sort of primordial power?” He half-expected another response about classified information, but the name completely swept away any attempts at surprise.

[Name was selected on basis of how Origin Force is created, not its source or effect]

“I see… Why were you allowed to tell me this?”

[You lack Authority to normally access this information, but because we observed your progress, it felt best to simply allow access to low-priority information on Origin Force]

Because it felt best?

The Nexus could just do that? So many rules and requirements… And that’s just allowed?

As much as he wanted to go on about it, everyone knew that an argument against the Nexus went nowhere. At least this information gave him a key insight about ‘Aura’, in that the source of this power and its method of creation actually differed.

Origin almost definitely referred to the fact that every element produced some under certain conditions. How this mattered, he still didn’t know. But it did suddenly point out that aura effectively generated from nothing in multiple cases, which simply made no sense. Indeed, he got ahead of himself by assuming that flexing muscles was a source of it.

This also introduced a new factor, as he wanted to let go of so many assumptions regarding his all.

Previously, he thought that the runes of a great language only imprinted on aura when cast by a person, even in cases like the statue he realised that someone used an array to forcibly keep a bunch of Magicus runes within. These runes likely came from Raccelline’s uncle, which built upon his mistake.

“Mala, how much cobalt stardust do we have?”

“Three tonnes, though it’s not much because, you know.” She rolled her eyes at the figure, given that a little thimble of the stardust weighed a whole ton.

One idea finally came to Icy, one outright stupid and expensive method to merge together a great language and aura at his level. Would it work? He refused to answer such a question under any circumstances, but it’d better work…

Because the storm, previously stagnant for weeks, began to move just last night. And while slow at first, it only grew faster by the hour.

Who’d win the race?