Supreme Magus novel Chapter 136

A little longer than two hours later, Lith was woken up by a clerk, prompting him to go back to the Headmaster’s office. The sleep hadn’t been much, but enough to take some of the edge off his mind and partially reset Invigoration’s effectiveness.

Velagros welcomed him, giving Lith a copy of their agreement and keeping the other for himself, before Warping out the office.

They materialized on a grassland, in the middle of nowhere. Lith looked around, instinctively searching for familiar landmarks, finding none. The only structure in sight was a circle, formed by rectangular wooden rods, from which they had emerged from.

The rods were about 2 meters (6.5 feet) high and 3 centimetres (1.8 inches) thick.

Each of the four sides was engraved with bright red runes, pulsing with power, that went opaque as soon as the portal closed behind them. Waiting for them there was a group of three women and two men, all dressed like Velagros, and with various weapons dangling from their belts or backs.

They immediately started to disassemble the circle, storing the rods in dimensional amulets.

"Is it your first time seeing a temporary waypoint?" Lith nodded in response.

"Crossing hundreds of kilometres at once would be impossible without such a device. By knowing its frequency, I can use it to lock into these coordinates, while the others pumped their own mana in it, allowing for us to get here with minimum mana consumption on my side."

- "Solus, how strong are these guys?"

"Each one of them has a blue mana core, so in theory they are stronger mages than you. Also, everything they have is heavily enchanted. Compared to their clothes, your uniform is like a firefly besides a torch. Invisible." –

They were all of different ages and builds, the youngest one seemed to be barely over twenty years old while the oldest seemed to be nearing the fifties.

"Our destination is in that direction." Velagros pointed towards south-southeast.

"It shouldn’t take much by flight. Half an hour, tops."

At his command, everyone cast his personal flight spell, advancing with a wedge formation with Lith as its center. He used that opportunity to activate Life Vision, discovering that despite they had superior cores, their magical forces weren’t much stronger than his own.

On the contrary, Lith’s physical prowess outclassed everyone else’s, even without using fusion magic.

After a few minutes, though, their spells disappeared abruptly, sending them into a free fall to the ground. Luckily, they were flying low, around 5 meters (16’) high, to avoid being visible from a distance, so they ended up tumbling on the ground instead of splattering.

The corps’ protective vests absorbed much of the impact, but Lith wasn’t wearing one, and his uniform’s weak point was offering no protection against blunt impacts. He made the earth under him soft and elastic, bouncing and rolling to disperse the momentum.

"Ambush!" Captain Velagros roared, while he and his men assumed a defensive position.

Lith and Solus activated Life Vision and mana sense respectively, discovering that they had stepped into a very complex array.

- "This is clearly a high-level Warden formation." Solus observed. "Besides disrupting air magic, making flight impossible, somehow it also compresses space. I can’t access to our dimensional pocket, and I bet that even Blinking or using Warp Steps is impossible." –

Cursing his bad luck, Lith alerted Velagros of Solus’ discovery, while readying both fake and true spells. He would do everything to keep his secret, but dying for it was not an option.

"Cr*p! The kid is right." Velagros had just tried to Warp them away, but to no avail. "Fall back, we are sitting ducks here!"

Velagros had no idea how Lith had assessed the situation so fast, but that wasn’t the time for questions. With no movement spells, escaping the encirclement would be difficult, and with their dimensional amulets sealed, their resources had been dramatically reduced.

"How deep are we into the array?" He asked noticing how Lith’s eyes were burning with mana.

"Very. They probably waited for us to be in the middle before activating it."