The soldiers were terrified. Without their weapons and equipment, they felt as if they were naked, but the worst thing was acknowledging the fact that they were completely helpless. Even if they were still fully armed, there was nothing they could do.
Once freed, they had run away out of survival instinct, but now they realized that it had been a pointless action. There was no way out of the underground facility nor a place where they could hide.
The Assistants didn’t stop thinking, they just kept running toward any door they could see, to get as far away as they could from that nightmare.
Quylla was getting weaker by the second, but since she seemed to know what she was doing, Morok gave her a bit of his life force and carried her in his arms up the staircase.
The door was unlocked, leading inside a room even bigger than the Reactor itself. The walls were covered in dimensional runes, which made Morok’s heart flutter, at least until he remembered that he had no idea what was written on them.
“You have a Forgemaster wand, correct? We can escape if you activate one of those runes.” He said.
“No can do. First, I’m not leaving my sister and my friend behind. Second, they took my wand. So unless you want to retrieve it, we’re stuck.” Quylla stared at the Reactor’s upper part that stuck up through the room’s floor and tried to make a sense of the picture in the book she held.
“Damn my rotten… Wait! You said they. They who?” He asked.
“The blue guy and Gaakhu, she has sold us to the enemy. That bitch speaks the Odi language, so she must have cut herself a deal.” Since the situation still made no sense, Quylla used her Forgemaster spells on the Reactor, to understand how it worked.
The moment her first spell was completed, her eyes rolled back, showing only the white and she started to puke uncontrollably, crying her eyes out.
“What the fuck is going on?” He blurted out while trying to stop Quylla’s seizure from harming her.
The Reactor’s insulation was lighter on its upper part, so she had experienced something even worse than what Lith had felt while using Invigoration. The term Mana Reactor was just a fancy word to hide its real purpose.
In order for the device to work, countless lives had been thrown into the mana geyser below Kulah. The life force of the Odi’s victims had been modified, so that they could absorb the world energy and filter it with their bodies, turning it into mana.
The metal and mana crystal structure only had the function to store and contain the energy while the Reactor purified the mana produced from its energy signature to allow the Odi to use it freely.
Yet because of its nature, it wasn’t just the energy that the Reactor had stored. Every single living being that had been thrown inside the device was still in there. The world energy would invade their bodies and mana cores, making them explode due to the failed Awakening process.
Yet thanks to the modifications they had sustained and the Reactor splitting the world energy into its six components, the light element would heal them the moment they were damaged, keeping the living fuel in an eternal cycle of death and rebirth.
Some of them had even turned into Abominations, but they were trapped as well. They had no advantage over their peers, quite the contrary. Their black cores were the perfect filters, so the amount of energy they endured was much greater and so was their suffering.
The Mana Reactor was akin to a cauldron where world energy, flesh, and souls were constantly burned to provide the Odi with unlimited power. Quylla’s spells had made her feel just a spark of the suffering those trapped inside its bowels perceived every single second, yet it was enough to drive her insane.
***
When Jiira snapped out of his stupor, all of his prisoners had escaped. He considered it just a minor inconvenience since he could always capture them again later. What worried him was the odd creature in front of him.
Jiira had no idea how Lith could still be alive.
< Surrender now, or she dies.> Since the human had come that far to rescue them, Jiira assumed they were important to him. A condensed sphere of light was now pointing at Phloria’s head, burning her hair.
“Do it and I’ll destroy your precious machine.” Lith pointed his hand at what looked like a console installed in the wall, to which most cables were linked. The bolt of lightning on his hand was strong enough to turn it into scraps.
Neither of the men could understand the other’s words, but their actions spoke volumes. Jiira realized that his earlier assumption was wrong. Even while he was making the female on the table scream in pain, the male was unfazed, still charging his lightning.
Lith was actually furious. Each one of Phloria’s cries of agony, every single drop of blood she shed, was enough to make him lose his mind. The scene reminded him of his father, Ezio, beating his brother Carl while he could only stand and watch.
Yet Lith managed to control his rage, turning it into fuel to his power rather than fire burning his mind. In a hostage situation, giving in to demands was idiotic. The hostage only had value as a shield. If Lith surrendered, she was as good as dead.
Lith released his spell, making Jiira gasp in surprise for more than one reason. The console was inside the God’s Will array, so instead of giving the thunderbolt a straight trajectory, Lith moved it along the array’s borders, so that it entered the magical formation from the nearest point to the terminal.
Also, Lith hadn’t wasted his time charging it with mana, but with his own will. Between the strong imprint he had left and the lightning’s natural speed, Jiira was forced to commit his entire focus to stop the spell before it destroyed his life’s work.
Lith charged forward, his hands turning into Orichalcum covered claws, one aimed at Jiira’s brain and the other at the sphere embedded in his body that allowed him to use the green array.
Lith moved so fast that Jiira was forced to let some of the energy go and unleash a barrage of small energy beams so that Lith wouldn’t have any space to dodge. Much to his surprise, the human didn’t dodge, but deflected the beams with his arm and legs.
Cracking sounds could be heard once more, but this time Lith only slid back a few meters. The enemy attack didn’t even have the strength to make him fly away anymore.
Jiira was shocked, throwing the lightning back against Lith only to discover that it was nothing more than a light show. While the Odi was starting to panic, Invigoration fixed Lith’s limbs.
<"What's wrong? Why doesn't our array work anymore?"> Jiira said.
<"Calm down, you idiot. Just look at its runes."> Veiga pointed out.
It was only then that Jiira noticed that even though the magical formation was still standing, several of its power nodes had been destroyed. Lith hadn’t blindly charged in, but had followed a methodical plan.
His attacks had always been just a distraction, to force the Odi to reveal his cards and making him fail to notice that Lith was using his spells to strike at the power nodes of the God’s Will’s array, just like Vastor had taught him.
