Chapter 4006: Unforeseen Variable (Part 1)

"Is lunch ready, Dyta?" Orion asked Jirni’s cousin, who acted as a maid and also as Jirni’s body double against the enemies of the Ernas household who couldn’t detect energy signatures.

"Yes, My Lord." She nodded. "The table has been set according to your instructions."

"Excellent." Orion dismissed her with a gesture. "We’ll be there in a minute. Just give us the time to freshen ourselves a bit."

Dyta gave them a perfect curtsy and initiated one last deep scan of the Ernas mansion for intruders, listening devices, and anything out of place. At her silent signal, all the members of the house staff who belonged to the Myrok Household conducted their share of the grid search with zealous duty.

Orion checked his clock and hastened his pace, leading Tista to her quarters and from there into a secret passage in the wall. Its mechanical nature made it invisible to magical means of detection, and the mastery of the craftsmen who had built it left no visible crevice in the wall nor created any draft.

Tista followed Orion through a warren of corridors that led them to the very center of the Ernas mansion. The last door required a magical rune and a drop of blood from a living Ernas to grant access.

Orion had to cut his palm and let the enchantments sealing the door recognize not only his descent from Juria but also the pulse of his life force and mana core.

This way, storing blood in a dimensional amulet meant nothing, and so did stealing an artifact that carried his imprint.

Only a healthy Ernas could open the lock, but contact with the door also allowed them to raise the alarm and unleash the mansion’s deadly defensive measures against anyone who might have taken them hostage.

The door opened to a cylindrical room with a massive white mana crystal at its center. The walls, floor, and high ceiling were filled with so many lines and words of power that only a few patches of the grey stone beneath were visible

"Is this the energy core of the defensive array system?" Tista gasped.

She had never seen a white crystal of that size, let alone one so perfectly cut. Half of the crystal disappeared below the ground level, but what emerged was still thrice as tall as Orion.

On top of that, the density of world energy inside the room was so great that not only were the magical formations visible to the naked eye, but also the runes on Tista’s equipment lit up due to the sudden surge in the output of its power cores.

"Yes." Orion checked his pocket watch to time the process to the second. "I’m depowering the arrays, in 3, 2, 1, now!"

He pressed his bleeding palm against the colossal white crystal, and the countless arrays in the room disappeared, leaving only the torches hung to the wall as a source of illumination.

"I’ve left you a blank slate. Everything is up to you, now." Orion stepped away, leaving his place to Tista.

She shapeshifted into her Hekate form while maintaining her human size, revealing that her second set of wings had no feathers left and was no different from a Dragon’s.

She took a deep breath, taking in the violent flow of world energy from the mana crystal in front of her and channeling it into the feathers she had placed along the mansion via her Prismatic Wind bloodline ability.

In turn, the magical runes stored in the feathers connected to the white crystal walls that surrounded the mansion, closing the circuit. Tista felt an endless stream of world energy flowing into her body, and she used it to weave arrays whose power and complexity far exceeded her natural abilities.

The white crystal within the mansion and the crystal walls without already formed a perfect magic circle that only lacked purpose. Tista’s role was to harness the energy coursing through the Ernas Household and shape it according to the blueprints Orion had provided her and that she had stored inside the Mouth of Menadion.

The process came at no cost for her mana core, but her body still suffered the stress that came with channeling a power of that magnitude. Under normal circumstances, it would have taken a team of at least twenty Wardens to perform such a task so quickly.

Yet involving that many people made any secret much harder to keep, and the slip of the tongue of any of them would have been enough to ruin Jirni’s plan. A single Warden, instead, would have required too long and too many breaks.

There was only so much mana a human could bear before needing rest, yet that also meant leaving the Ernas mansion defenseless until the task was complete. Even worse, without the cover of the Ernas’ Parade, the enemy might notice the alteration in the arrays and discover the trap before it was even set.

Tista was no human, and despite her current stature, her body was that of an over 25 meters (83’) tall Divine Beast.

On top of that, by placing one feather in the exact spot where the focal points of the magical formations were supposed to form and her link with them via Prismatic Wind, she needed little focus to infuse the right amount of mana in the right place with surgical precision.

Last, but not least, as soon as she felt weariness compromising her performance, she needed but a few breaths of Invigoration to return to her peak condition.

Tista used the Mouth of Menadion, true and fake magic, and body casting to weave several arrays every second while also ensuring that their runes never overlapped nor their effects interfered with each other.

She was akin to a giant spider sitting on a giant spool of already-spun web that only needed to be woven into any snare she could devise. Yet the spool was heavy and needed to be handled with care.

If Tista’s hold over the giant crystal wavered even for one second, a wild surge of world energy would overload the incomplete network of magical formations and destroy everything she had built so far.

Tista gave everything she had and more, using the overabundant world energy to spark Vital Storm and bring her mana core temporarily to the bright violet.

"Whatever you are doing, you need to stop in 3, 2, 1, now!" Orion said the moment Mogar changed its position to the sun and the Ernas Parade slowly faded away.

"Thank the gods!" Tista’s knees gave out, and she slowly slipped down against the giant crystal’s surface.

She panted heavily, her body shivering in exhaustion. Orion let Tista sit on the ground for a while and waited for her to catch her breath before asking her about the results of her work.

"Everything went fine." She gasped. "I successfully set up every array you requested."

"And you have my eternal gratitude for that." Orion sighed in relief. "Yet you never got so tired when we practiced for this in the Blood Desert. I expected the mana crystal and the crystal wall to make your job easier, not harder."

"Oh, they did." Tista nodded. "They are even better than what you told me. This place is amazing. Are you sure that Ripha played no role in building the Ernas mansion?"

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