To say that the situation was tense would be an understatement so gross, that it no longer had anything to do with the truth.
Sitting cross-legged right in front of what others perceived as a simple, freshly finished wall with a weird, metal frame sticking out of it, I continued to stare right into said wall with passion and intent one could see on a man's face only in the bedroom.
'Just what secrets do you hold?' I thought, gazing as deep into the fabric of the portal.
I was supposed to find a way to power it up... and here I was, unable to resist the desire to adore and analyze the infinitely complex logic weaved into the spell right before my eyes.
'Still, it's just a spell so it's aura it should need.'
This realization was pretty obvious. To a degree, the system said so itself with how it didn't introduce any new statistic I could use to measure how much I could charge the gate in one go.
"Let's start small," I whispered to myself, reaching out with my hand and gently pressing my fingers against the surface of the stable yet inactive portal.
My eyelids moved down, leaving only a narrow slit for me to see through as I focused... By calling upon the very same feeling I experienced whenever invoking my spells, I reached out for the copious amount of aura already ingrained into my soul.
At first, I just grasped its presence, growing more familiar and focusing on the slight feeling of omnipotence born out of holding the aura in its ephemeral state between being used and left alone.
As if having the battle on the other side or the shocking complexity of the portal's spell wasn't enough for me to think about, now that I reached out for this very thin, faint, dark aura I've grown to notice during my breakthrough... I was forced to realize a whole new world of the unknown that made me feel like dropping everything just to study its intricacy.
'Man, focus!'
Gritting my teeth and then using the pain caused by doing so to shake myself awake and refocus my attention, I took a shallow breath before pushing my aura from the core of my soul towards my palm, then the fingers, and then towards the gate.
Contrary to how my spells acted by taking each sliver of aura, turning it into a thread, and then weaving all sorts of causality out of it, I've fed the portal the purest form of my aura, leaving in the exact same form it existed within my soul.
For a second, I allowed the aura to just pass through my body. Just like a broken container with some liquid, the very moment I made an opening in it, my aura continued to pour all on its own, as if pulled by the flowing out of the aura from before.
'Now, let's see...'
[Charge it up to establish a temporary connection]
[Current charge: 0%] > [Current charge: 0.3%]
The corners of my eyes twitched while I resisted the desire to curse out loud.
Sure, I didn't pour all that much of my aura into the portal... but wasn't it a bit too... demanding?
'Well, nothing I can do about it,' I thought, before dropping all the facade of carefully prying the limits. This time, I placed the entire palm of my hand onto the purple surface of currents bending through the space twisted by the overly complex spell.
'Go!'
I simply willed for my aura to go forth and it surged ahead, following my simple desire.
A strange feeling coursed through my flesh as if something was draining... but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't put my finger on it.
'Come on!' I urged myself, ignoring the strain of manipulating much more aura than I ever did before, gritting my teeth as I pushed more and more of it toward the portal.
'Fuck, this is hard!'
By now, I couldn't care less about the pain. In fact, I couldn't care less about the battle on the other side of the portal or just how something so insanely complex fell into my hands.
In all honesty, I couldn't even care about the task of charging the gate anymore. With nothing but unbreakable commitment in my mind, I continued to pour more and more of this thin, dark aura into the portal, trying not to pay much mind to how little progress it brought.
[Current charge: 33.9%] > [Current charge: 46.2%]
For an effort several times greater than how I exerted myself when using the thicker aura, the results of using its dark cousin were less than dissatisfactory.
They were outright unacceptable. And not even because of the strain of pushing such insane quantities of it into the portal... But because it was taking too long. And at the current rate, I would long spend myself dry before getting anywhere to the full charge!
"This is fucking harder than I thought," I muttered angrily, only now realizing that thick drops of sweat continued to trickle down my face, while the hand I reached out and kept just an inch away from the wall was shaking as if I had a terminal stage of Parkinson's disease.
"Let me help."
In the world of nothing but the stress of the task, Fay's voice was as soothing as was her embrace when she wrapped her hands around my shoulders and pressed her head against the side of my neck.
A spark shot up between us... only for the sparks of Fay's aura to fill my vision as I sensed our union expands to a state we've experienced only twice before.
"Haaaa....."
Breathing out a sigh of great relief, I felt as if an entire mountain dropped from my shoulders.
All out of nowhere, the task of handling this thin, dark mana, grew to be even easier than handling its thicker version I long since used up. And looking at my system context's window, it wasn't just my personal feeling.
[Current charge: 46.2%] > [Current charge: 66.9%] > [Current Charge: 82.6%]
At no point in the process, did the task of charging up the gate become easy. But with Fay's support and the way in which our active bond somehow enhanced my ability to control and perceive aura, the insurmountable task from before reverted back to one that was hard but manageable.
"Get everyone ready," I spat out through my tightened lips as the charge started to near the full, one hundred percent.
"You've heard him, boys," Makary spoke out to the officers by his side, only for them to waste no time rushing to pass the order along.
[Current charge: 82.6%] > [Current charge: 93.1%] > [Current Charge: 99.9%]
Just a little bit more of this suddenly easily manageable, dark aura...
And something clicked. The surface of the portal changed as if the flows of purple within finally gained enough momentum to twist the fabric of space even further... all the way to the point of cutting through whatever barrier separated different worlds and finally opening a stable path.
[Stable Gate is now Active]
[Stable Gate charge: 3 days left]