I form my left arm into a three-foot-long javelin as I stand up from my seat, blood pouring down my face. To her credit, the woman in front of me quickly gets over her shock, and mana begins gathering on the surface of her skin. Some kind of defense based on what [Mana Sense] is telling me.
Loranor is still on the far side of the room, by the door. I don’t know his exact position because of his spatial sense, and because I’m actually blind, but his shriek of fear and the sound of a door slamming shut after opening is enough for me to know that he’s a flight and not fight kind of guy. I ignore him as soon as he leaves the room. I can deal with him later.
The woman and I stare each other down from opposite sides of the table while both of our mana gathers, and we ready ourselves to act. I continue to pour mana into the javelin until it turns a dark green, at which point I apply a spatial edge to the tip. [Gravity Shift] strains against its limits as I create a low gravity zone around myself and a high gravity zone directly on top of her. Her expression betrays her surprise, and I manage to act just before she does thanks to that.
She feeds mana into a large mana stone on her necklace as I lunge forward, a dagger of mana manifesting in my hand as I move to pierce her heart. She manages to leap out of the way in time, my dagger only leaving a shallow cut on her arm as a blast of mana tries to worm its way into my head through my skull, but I manage to block most of it with a quickly erected mana barrier.
Mana starts seeping out of her necklace and wrapping around her like a cocoon, much in the same way I do before I teleport. [Mana Sense] tells me that it is indeed spatial magic. I instantly attack the freshly forming teleport with [Space Control], unraveling it faster than it can form. She falls to the ground in her attempt to back away from me and starts scrambling to get up while forcing even more mana into her necklace. It doesn’t help her at all. Until her teleport stabilizes, it’s far too easy for me to stop it, especially if it’s just coming from an item.
“You’re not getting away from me that easily.” I teleport next to her, launching the javelin at her first to distract her.
She dodges the javelin by rolling to the side, right to my feet. I kick her with a mana-empowered leg, sending her tumbling another few feet, all while she still futilely attempts to escape via the item. I create several potential teleport exit points all around her, causing her to send more bursts of that mental attack skill at them in preparation. It’s ineffective, as I don’t even teleport. Instead, I grab my javelin from where it’s impaled in the floor.
I increase the amount of gravity weighing her down, and she starts struggling to get up off the ground. In response, she finally ceases her attempts to escape via the teleportation necklace once the gem cracks and threatens to go haywire from the damage and starts sending more mental attacks at me instead. Another barrier, this time wrapped around my head, stops most of it before it can reach me, [Concentration] letting me power through what little manages to get through.
I reform the javelin into a sword, the spatial edge expanding to cover the entire thing as I walk up to where she’s struggling to even lift her arms off the floor. Her physical stats must be pretty low, which makes sense from what I’ve seen so far. She must focus on mana like I do. As I approach, her mental attacks stop, and she starts forming a projectile in front of her with the help of multiple skills. It feels like some kind of hybrid physical and mental attack.
To her credit, she looks calm and collected at this point, probably by using mental magic on herself in the same way my [Concentration] works. I study the projectile she makes with [Mana Sense] as it forms, floating right over her right hand, which she barely manages to lift off the ground.
The projectile is an arrow-shaped mass of mana currently aimed right at my forehead, quietly humming with the amount of mana packed into it. I could stop her from forming it, but I choose not to. She clearly has experience in making these, and I’ll learn whatever I can from her before I decide to finish this fight. Then at least the negotiations won’t have been for nothing.
I study the way she moves mana into and throughout the projectile, how she forms the outside layer like a skin before slowly working inwards, until it finishes as a dark yellow arrow with small orange specks in it. She shifts slightly to adjust her aim and then launches the arrow at me.
I start creating a barrier the moment she starts creating her projectile, using all the small mana manipulation tips and tricks I learned throughout my time on Helot, and mostly that brief lesson from earlier, to create the strongest defense I can possibly muster. As soon as the projectile leaves her hand, a transparent, glass-like barrier pops into existence in front of me, and the projectile slams against it like a battering ram against an impenetrable castle gate, exploding into a wave of mana that slowly dissipates away. The barrier, which I created out of space and not raw mana, still stands strong, with faint spiderweb cracks now on the surface. It drains a large chunk of mana to keep space manifested physically like this, so I drop it just as a notification comes in.
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[You have learned a new active skill]
[Barrier] lvl 1
People from the party have now definitely noticed that something is going on in here, as several different skills start to peek into the room, sensory skills if I had to guess. I don’t try to stop or even hinder them. I let them see what I’m about to do and what happens if you attack me or my allies.
I teleport right next to the woman and stab her through the left shoulder with my sword, only letting go once the blade is deep in the ground, pinning her in place.
“Why did you attack me?” I ask, already knowing the answer, but maybe I can get a few extra details out, especially if she likes to gloat.
“Fuck you. You know why.” She tries to spit at me, but the high gravity just causes it to fall onto her instead.
“All this trouble because I killed your ratfuck little brother?”
She glares at me, hate and anger evident based on her expression. I can’t help but let out a smile at seeing her in a similar position to her brother in his last moments, weak and pathetic, struggling helplessly on the ground.
“Tell me why Loranor was a part of this, and I’ll make your death painless.”
“Fuck you. You’ll die soon anyway. Outworlder piece of—”
With a small flex of [Space Control] and [Mana Shaping], the blade on my sword expands, severing her left arm at the shoulder. I kick the arm away and pull my sword out and pierce her other shoulder, all as she screams and struggles on the floor.
“You tried to wipe my mind, bitch. You think I’ll take it easy on you? Now, why was Loranor trying to mind control me?”
“Why do you think, dumbfuck? He wanted you to work for the Spacers.” She says through gritted teeth.
“That’s a half-truth, maybe. You said I’d work just as well as a mindless husk, which means there’s something about my body that he’s after. What is it?” I wiggle the sword around a bit, expediting the answering process.
She screams, glares at me, but eventually answers. “He wants to use you as a living mana battery for one of the Spacers Guild’s projects on Last Rest. The plan was for me to get you to sign that contract so you’d follow us back to the Spacers Guildhall. Then Loranor would ship you off to Last Rest over the next couple of weeks. There, some master mind mage would either fully wipe you, or maybe they’d just kill you and get a necromancer to puppet your corpse. Who knows? All he told me was that there’s some big Spacer project that needs a person with a deep connection to the space affinity.”
Fuck, that’s way worse than I was expecting. What could the project be? And why don’t they use one of their space mages? Well, if Loranor is anything to go off of, I’m definitely a more powerful space mage than he is. Now I’m curious if my space affinity is something I was born with, or something that the [System] just gave to me on a random chance.
“Why tell me this? Isn’t Loranor your friend? Why sell him out?”
“A friend? Loranor? Don’t make me laugh. If I’m going out because he decided to flee, you best bet I’m taking him with me.” She says with a smile, blood covering her teeth and pooling in her mouth.
The door to the room explodes as someone kicks it and steps into the room. Morah stands in the doorway, her void skill active in her hands, noticeable only because my [Mana Sense] detects absolutely nothing, not even the ambient mana in that area. It even eats up, or deletes, or erases my spatial perception field.
“Ray? What happened? Who is that?” She asks as she sees the state of the two of us.
I look down at the woman, who is looking up at me, and create a spatial edge, sending it at her neck and decapitating her. I’m a man of my word. She spilled the beans. She gets a clean death. Once dead, her face starts shifting, morphing into a face that resembles her little brother. Some kind of disguise skill or something?
[You have slain a creature]
[Level 41 Mind Manipulator]
She had a way to hide her class too? I need to look into that.
“Just tying up a loose end.” I respond to Morah. “This is that one guy’s sister, Helton, or Hilton, or something like that. She and Loranor plotted to enslave me for the Spacers Guild. She tried to take over my mind, Loranor fled, and I killed her. Now I’m going to kill Loranor.” I say as I reabsorb the mana from my sword and pull the necklace off of her body. The chain has been ruined by my spatial edge, but the actual enchanted part was thankfully unaffected.
“You can’t just kill anyone who pisses you off, Ray! This was self-defense, If what you say is true. Hunting Loranor down would be murder. Do you have evidence that he plotted against you?”
“Are you going to stop me, Morah?” I say calmly, my mind still recovering from the brief but intense mental battle, still under the effects of [Concentration].
“There are rules and procedures for this, Ray. File a blood feud, or wait for him to leave the city limits, or anything else.” She says with increasing sternness. “It will be all-out war with the Spacers Guild if you march in there and kill him.”
I narrow my eyes at her, coming to a decision in my head. “Can you stop Loranor from leaving the city through the portals in the Spacers Guildhall?”
She brings her wrist up to her mouth and speaks into a bracelet. “Deploy the city siege barrier. Full lockdown. No one in or out of the city until I say so.” She drops her arm and looks at me. “That will stop any and all space magic from getting in or out.”
“Good. Now how do I go about filing a blood feud?”
“We can do that back at my house after you get healed. You have a lot of blood on your face, and I can tell that you’re blind.”
“Yeah, I had to sever my optic nerves to stop the skill she was using on me. She was somehow able to form some kind of mental connection through eye contact. It was very interesting.”
She lets out a small sigh. “Of course you did.”