As Ben laid out the simple plan in detail, it couldn't help but excite Thera. She was the star of it and it would be an act of pushing herself in a way she normally couldn't. It couldn't help but bring stars to her eyes as she anticipated challenging herself as an earth mage.

"Or we could do something that wouldn't end with all of us being collateral damage," Verbum begged at the end, being shot down by Ben.

"If you have a better idea then I'm all ears. For now though, this is the quickest and easiest way of dealing with them while avoiding a fight. At least, so long as you think you can handle it, Thera?"

"Absolutely. Just you watch."

She ignored further grumbling as she touched the ground, stretching out her senses as far as they would go and burning her mana without care to reach out her empathy and empower her earth sense with her magic, digging deeper and deeper than she ever had in the past in the hopes of finding whatever hid beneath the world.

At first, she couldn't help but wonder if Ben had made some sort of mistake. She kept reaching out but felt nothing unexpected. The land was dense and the most her empathy was picking up was a few stray bugs. The world seemed solid enough that she couldn't imagine how much farther down she would have to push to come across anything until she finally found it. A void in the earth filled with rage and barely suppressed violence.

She almost pulled back then and there as the feeling clashed against her, the sudden feeling hitting her like a rock but she refused to pull away, holding onto the location as she probed it with her mana.

I can't believe there's so much space all the way down there. How did they even find that?

The area was huge, a cavern big enough that any of the world’s subterranean races would have been comfortable in it hundreds of meters below ground, filled to the brim with demons. Its sheer depth made her question if she really would be able to do anything about it, doubt creeping into her mind at the same time her empathy picked up on something else. A feeling amongst the horde down below. A feeling of being noticed.

Something had detected her sensing them, bringing a shiver up her spine as the question of if she could do anything ceased to matter. She had to before the beasts below could act if they knew they were being watched. She needed to bring the world down around them.

She handed her staff off to Ben, not needing it for the time no matter how much help it would be. With how much mana she was planning on spending, there was no doubt in her mind that it would break despite the quality of it.

Instead she knelt down, placed her hands on the ground and pushed.

Mana rushed out of her in a torrent and flooded the earth around her, enough that both Ben and Verbum could feel it as they stuck close by while she tried to exert her force on the whole of the land, bending the environment to her will as she used more of her power at once than she ever had before, making the land quake under her unending pressure while thousands of mana were spent each second as minutes ticked by.

Aside from her father, by that point she had to be the most powerful earth magic user on the planet and in that moment she felt like it. Her high level of skill combined with her unnaturally large mana supply to warp the landscape around her as she saw fit, the very land sinking and compressing down, crushing the world around them and anything unfortunate enough to be below it, the demons hidden away not standing a chance, becoming nothing more than experience for her job to take advantage of.

Trees were coming down around them and Thera did her best to make sure they’d all fall away from where they were while also trying to keep the small bit of land where she and the others stood as still as it could be while the rest of it trembled.

She could hear Verbum screaming in the background but that was an afterthought amongst everything else. In two short minutes she’d spent over a hundred thousand points of mana, two more and she’d used up half her supply.

Have I ever burned through so much before?

She was sure the answer was no. She’d never come close to spending an amount like that in the past and could feel it being wrung out of her soul as she tried to squeeze out more and more to get as much force into her brutal attack as she could until finally she was done. Surveying the area, the forest was basically gone, each tree collapsed to the ground a mile around them and laying broken while the earth itself was tens of meters lower everywhere except for where she and the others stood, a single, lonely hill to look out across the chaos she’d created.

She let out a breath and released the feeling of tension that had been building up inside her, hearing a low whistle from behind and turning to see the reactions of her audience.

At some point, Verbum had passed out again, no real shock there, and Ben was left to hold him, looking impressed as he looked around himself.

“You know, I think if we don’t stick around till this guy wakes up to let him see all of this then he might get stuck having to investigate the area again. This is impressive, I’m pretty sure a small lake is going to end up forming here after enough rainfall. How are you feeling?”

“Tired,” She laughed, leaning back into the ground as she did before reaching into her pocket to check her card. “That cost me three hundred thousand points of mana, I’m not sure I’ll ever end up using this much again.”

“Never say never,” He told her as he looked around some more. “I feel like it wouldn’t be shocking if you were asked to personally handle an invasion point after word gets out about this.”

“Please, I’m not on the level of my dad yet.”

Though I might be getting close.

Her father could use his earth magic in ways she couldn’t imagine, able to bend the mana to his will and understanding the properties of what it controlled in a way she’d always thought she never would, but after doing that, she couldn’t help but feel like maybe she wasn’t as far off as she could have been. Her control with her earth magic had stopped being so bad ever since it had awakened and given that each level she gained let her grow in power, the gap between them was shrinking constantly. There was always the difference in how they’d see the world, her father being a pure spirit able to experience the affinity in ways she never could, but when it came down to a matter of knowledge, that was something that could be solved with time.

And I have one benefit that dad doesn’t. She couldn’t help but think, her smile growing just a little wider.

She was properly mortal. To many, that might not sound like a huge benefit, but to her it managed to be an incredible one, at least in regards to the power she could achieve. Unlike the other spirits, she could grow her mana pool. All she needed was time and practice and then the prospect of her growing beyond any of the great spirits wasn’t an unrealistic hope given enough years, but beyond that was an even bigger benefit. Unlike her father, her skill could grow.

I mean, I’d literally need to get to the third tier to get past him, but still, that doesn’t really feel as impossible as it once did.

When she was a child, that would have been something beyond her wildest dreams, but now? Now she was comfortable with her earth magic in a way she’d never been in the past, feeling it grow constantly to greater heights. So long as she had the time to practice, she could see herself reaching that pinnacle in a decade so long as she kept working at it, maybe bringing other magics with it. Ben had once brought up the prospect of her training multiple magics to the third tier given the long life she could expect, and while she hadn’t given it too much thought back then, now it felt like something she could put actual work towards and genuinely have a chance at.

She would have let those thoughts go on longer as she relaxed but she felt something to pull her from them. A feeling of movement in her earth sense where there should have been nothing. A sensation that could only be something digging through the dirt that she’d compressed to the point of being stone, making its way to the surface.