Chapter 56: A Refuge from Threats

Chapter 56: A Refuge from Threats

The first barrier Nathan found as he climbed towards the Academy was a detection net laid a hundred feet from the walls. It was clearly geared towards detecting flying mages and wasnt particularly sophisticated. It looked like it just sent some kind of [Message] to anybody who crossed it. It didnt pose a particular barrier to Nathan, and he easily teased apart the strands of the magic to pass through without a trace.

He moved slowly, was on the lookout for further defenses as he approached his chosen balcony. There was no way that a flimsy detection net was the only defense the Academy had. The spell was on the same level as a single sensor net laid around the Giantsrest army, and a half-dozen Adventuring teams had been able to sneak past a dozen layers like it.

When he was fifty feet out he picked up the next layer, which was both subtle and terrifying. A thin shell of intense wizardry sat about fifteen feet above the surface of the Academy, contouring to the shape of the building. It was distorting local space, but Nathan wasnt sure quite what was going on. He paused some distance away from the spell, feeling some weird air currents and a faint heat on his face.

Is it a zone of expanded space, like Baduds [Slow Shell]?

He was conscious of being visible from below, and his Stamina was still draining from standing in midair. But Nathan needed to understand the wizardry in front of him before his aura would be effective against it. He started spending Focus, delving into the magic before him with his magical senses. The wizardry wasnt too similar to what hed seen before, but he recognized a few different kinds of mana that were also involved. There was a lot of air and heat mana floating around, but the most heavily represented mana type was more esoteric. It felt familiar. Nathan had to reach back in his memory to identify it, remembering when Dalo and Kullal had helped him Develop [Magic Absorption].

Gravity. This spell has a lot of gravity mana in it. The wizardry is synergizing, boosting the effect beyond what the mana alone could accomplish.

Wizard Senses 5 achieved!

Nathan had an inkling of what was going on, and he let the smallest tendril of antimagic brush against the shell, yanking it back almost immediately when an intense jet of compressed air shot out in response, causing his robe to ripple.

Its a gravity shear. There are two narrow bands of intense gravity pointing inwards. Between them youve got a band of super-compressed air, where the pressure is high enough to counteract the gravity. Its strong. Like a few hundred gravities strong. Anything physical would get sucked in and ripped to shreds as soon as it touched that. I bet the other spell was to prevent idiots from flying into it.

Wizards Intuition 5 achieved!

Nathan examined the barrier in awe. It was an incredible piece of magic that served its purpose amazingly well. He wasnt even sure how he would get around it. The forces involved were strong enough to rip apart a metal bar, much less his body. If he disabled the gravity magic then the air inside would explode outward under the pressure. He could try to make a small hole and do a pressure-release, but air would be rushing in from all sides to equalize pressure. The spell was basically all or nothing. Either he took down the shield around the whole academy, or he didnt take it down at all.

Well, shit. Faline was right, the defenses on the Academy are no joke. Is it time to admit defeat and return to Halsmet?

Then Nathans brain caught up to the other things the spell was doing. At those pressures, the gas should be supercritical. It should be a super-dense layer of extremely compressed supercritical fluid without any surface tension. There would be so many molecules scattering light that even a thin layer should look like a opaque black curtain.

Is that what the air mana is doing? Keeping it gaseous? And the heat mana is keeping the temperature regulated? Using mana to modify the physical properties of a material is so cool, definitely going to save that Insight.

A new plan quickly formed in Nathans head. He wasnt sure if it would work, but he was losing Stamina by the second out here. It was worth a try. He started by using careful tendrils of antimagic to misalign the air portions of the spell, pulling them away from the thin shell of gravity-compressed atmosphere. The surface in front of him went opalescent as it shifted phase, gulping down air as it went supercritical and became more compressible. A sudden wind blew from behind Nathan, almost throwing him into the zone of intense gravity. He backpedaled to keep his distance, watching as more and more air was sucked in and compressed down. Radiant heat started to shine on his face.

I should have seen the wind coming. Supercritical fluid compresses better than gas, and now its heating up because its compressing down farther and farther.

Nathan had been careful to leave alone the heat-mana portions of the magic that controlled temperature, and they were working overtime to cool down the suddenly overheated section of the barrier.

Yes, yesss. All according to plan.

The zone he was targeting stopped shimmering and became blurry before darkening to a black shroud as it became denser and denser. The effect was less profound around the edges, and it looked like a two-dimensional stormcloud with a black center and shimmering edges.

Thats gotta be obvious from below. I need to work quickly.

Nathan gritted his teeth as he waited for the heat enchantment to finish cooling down the region. Then he manipulated yet more tendrils of aura to deactivate that part of the spell. Then he sent a third set of tendrils outwards to poke tiny, equally spaced holes into the gravity gradient near the edges of the cloud. It was an incredible level of mental gymnastics, and he was spending Focus like water to hold the necessary construct in his head. Without both [Battle Meditation] and [Aura Manipulation] it would be impossible.

Mid-tier Aura Manipulation 7 achieved!

The last set of antimagic tendrils bored into the shell of gravity, unleashing jets of wind strong enough to cut steel. Luckily hed had the foresight not to put any close enough to hurt him, but his robes and hair whipped crazily in the eye of the storm. It took constant Stamina expenditure to stay in place against the crazy winds, but the surface in front of him flashed from black to blurry as gas was blown away from the wall by the crazy pressure. Vapor condensed in the air around him, and soon Nathan was immersed in a low-lying cloud of freezing fog.

The temperature inside should be dropping faster than this. The heat was bled off when the gas compressed. Now that it's expanding...

Through the fog he spotted the first signs of success creeping across the barrier in front of him. Tendrils of creeping nitrogen ice spread across the shell as the expanding gas caused the temperature to drop dramatically inside the hyper-compressed shell. Most of the air that had been sucked in escaped through his boreholes, but what remained got colder and colder. He panned the release valves around, moving them until he had a ring of atmospheric ice twenty feet wide.

Good, Im damn freezing out here. But now Im not fighting against the entire volume of the shell, just the local region.

Nathan started draining the pressure from the area right in front of him, allowing the outrushing pressure to blow him backwards a few dozen feet as the central region also froze. His grip on his antimagic started to slip with the distance, but he was already accelerating as quickly as possible straight towards the center of the disk of ice.

Acceleration 4 achieved!

His aura stretched ahead of him in a solid column, spearing a hole through the wizard's barrier before him. Nathans momentum-based skills carried him through the remnants of the shield, and he shattered his way through the millimeter-thick layer of solid atmosphere.

Cold cold cold!

He hadnt been thinking about slowing down, and so slammed into the wall of the Academy with an oof - and the crunching of a broken nose. Nathan lay against the sheer stone wall for a second, exhausted from the efforts of the last minute and shivering with cold. He directed healing to stave off frostbite before his nose snapped back into place. His eyes opened to a level-up notification.

Magekiller has leveled to 145! Congratulations, you have bypassed the outer defenses of the Ascendant Academy! N0v3lTr0ve served as the original host for this chapter's release on N0v3l--B1n.

Airwalking 5 achieved!

Outer defenses. Great. It really might have been easier to go in the front door and take my chances with whatever the identification process is.

He shook himself and got moving. Hed made a bit of a show getting in, even if most of it had been under cloud cover. It was time to move, but Nathan turned to inspect the place hed busted through the barrier. The ice was melting back to a sludgy mix of hyper-compressed gas and supercritical fluid, and a strong wind blew on his face from the spot hed punched through.

Fortunately, the wizardry-directed gravity spell was working to repair the weak spot, repairing the gravity gradient as Nathan watched. The surrounding air and heat magic were also being guided back into place, a process that appeared possible because Nathan had just yanked the spells out of position instead of completely destroying them. His guess was that it would take another half-hour or so before the spell was back to full functionality.

Good. Id hoped the spell would have enough self-repairing capability so that I wouldnt leave a trace. But it might also have set off an alarm somewhere, so its time to skeddaddle.

The shield sat about fifteen feet away from the Academy, so Nathan was able to run sideways if he stayed close to the wall. He put several hundred feet of distance between him and the spot hed entered before turning to look for an entrance. He alighted on a randomly chosen balcony, glad to have a solid surface underneath his feet once more. Now he wouldnt fall out of the sky if he ran out of Stamina.

Nathan checked his resources. Hed used most of his Focus breaking through the barrier, but it was replenishing quickly. His Stamina was sitting around 2700, lower than it had been in a while. Itd replenish quickly if he drained a bunch of magic, but he didnt want to leave any more traces of his passage. A full meal and rest would also work, but that would be slower.

Permanent Talent 1: Aura of Antimagic 9

Permanent Talent 2: Perfected Body 10

Permanent Talent 3: Airwalking 5

Class: Void of Magic level309

Deepened Stamina: 924/9570

Void of Feeling

Antimagic Momentum

Raging Thrill

Implacable Inertia

Unarmored Resilience

Magic Anathema

Airborne Agility

Hand-to-hand Expertise

Voluminous Aura

Denial of Wizardry

Mana Severance

Class: Magekiller level 145

Regenerative Focus: 649/1550

Catastrophic Blows

Battle Stealth

Mage Infiltration

Forgettable

Unsuspecting Strike

Antimagic Stealth

Spell Redirection

Lethal Index

Utility skills:

Battle Meditation 10

Inspiration 1

Acceleration 4

Wizard Senses 5

Alertness 6

Wizards Intuition 5

Effortless Dodge 2

Mental Fortress 9

Tutoring 2

High-tier Tumbling 10

High-tier Noticeability 4

Mid-tier Disguise 4

Mid-tier Battle Cry 7

Mid-tier Aura Manipulation 7