The sun hadn’t even bothered to grace the horizon with its presence yet, leaving the world in a gloom that felt personally insulting to Orion.
He wasn’t a morning person. He had never been one, much preferring to spend late nights in the lab.
I know the Sanctum doesn’t have labor laws, and even if it did, I doubt they’d apply to a military campaign, but I feel like this should be reported to someone.
“You’re dragging your feet, moonbeam,” Asteria’s voice floated back to him, infuriatingly chipper against the rushing wind.
“I’m not dragging anything,” Orion grumbled, hunkering lower on his broomstick to reduce his resistance coefficient and to hide his face from the biting chill of the pre-dawn mist.
He’d been told to avoid warming charms, as they could attract the local wildlife, but he was increasingly sure it was just sadism on his mother’s part. “We have an army moving out in less than four hours. Logically, we should be conserving energy, not burning it on a joyride through the—” he squinted at the landscape below, “through the aggressively lush wilderness.”
They were flying over the wild lands of northeastern Cyril, a region that had given birth to the Adventurer’s Guild, which was quite an achievement. The fog here was thick, clinging to the canopy of massive, ancient oaks like a shroud, hiding many dangers.
“We aren’t here without a good reason, you know?” Asteria called back, smoothly banking her broom in an elegant arc that Orion envied. His own flying style was practical, precise, and completely without grace. “I did some scrying last night while you were sleeping. The moons whispered of a particularly nasty bit of trouble nested in a ravine about five miles away. A whole family of trolls has taken residence there.”
Orion sighed, adjusting his grip on the broom. “Wonderful, and I’m sure the locals would be eternally thankful for our help, if there are any, but why do we care? They probably have a dozen adventurers chomping at the bit to take them on.”
Asteria slowed, allowing him to pull up beside her. The wind whipped her hair around her face, but her eyes were sharp, sparkling with a mix of maternal warmth and predatory intent. “Because, moonbeam, this breed of troll often cultivates a parasitic lichen in their lairs, and this specific one is even more special. It’s called Amber-Heart Mold.”
Orion stared at her blankly. “I’m not a botanist. You’ll have to elaborate.”
She smiled. “It’s a primary catalyst in high-tier regeneration potions. The kind potent enough to stimulate complex osteoblast and nerve regrowth.”
Orion froze. His gaze naturally dropped to his left leg, where it ended abruptly at the ankle, replaced by the stone prosthetic Eire had crafted. He had accepted losing his foot as the price of dealing with spatial anomalies, and he would have to wait until they returned to the Sanctum to have it replaced.
If there is a chance of getting it back much sooner, I have to take it.
He looked up, his grip on the broom tightening until his knuckles turned white. The fatigue disappeared, replaced by an electric hum of curiosity. “That means this mold provides a massive metabolic accelerant. We’d need someone of great skill to balance that out properly, but…”
“You’ll get your foot back, since I will brew it,” Asteria finished for him. “Now, are you awake?”
“I am,” Orion said, his internal voice shifting from sarcastic to calculating. “Lead the way.”
The ravine looked like a scar torn into the earth, overgrown with vegetation. Rot and wet fur rose to meet them as they descended, landing silently on a ridge overlooking a rough encampment.
Orion activated [Hypotheticism], and his mind expanded as streams of data began flowing in.
“Ugly brutes,” he whispered as he found the trolls.
There were eight of them. They were massive, hulking mountains of muscle and warts, with skin the color and texture of mossy boulders. They milled around a central fire pit, where what looked suspiciously like roasted goblin was turning, which was an unpleasant sight. Bones, some of which appeared unnervingly humanoid, littered the ground.
Orion focused, letting his glasses’ interface parse the mana signatures.
Let’s see what we’re dealing with. Standard deviations in mana density indicate a clear hierarchy, but I need to know more before I go in.
He focused on one of the smaller ones first, a creature dragging a tree trunk as if it were a twig.
[Moss-Hide Troll]
Class: [Brute] [C-rank]
Level: 68
Mind: 12
Attunement: 76
Body: 471
Traits: [Regenerative Photosynthesis] [C-rank], [Stone-Skin] [C-rank]
Standard fodder, Orion noted. Level sixty-eight was respectable for a wild monster, roughly equal to a seasoned adventurer, but nothing that would overcome his advantages, especially since almost all the monster’s stat points were in Body, which wouldn’t help fighting a flying enemy.
He shifted his gaze toward the center of the camp. Three trolls sat there, noticeably larger than the others. They wore rough armor fashioned from scrap metal and animal scales. One of them, the biggest, was sharpening a huge cleaver on a rock.
[Moss-Hide Patriarch]
Class: [Warlord] [B-rank]
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Level: 135
Mind: 78
Attunement: 336
Body: 1,171
Traits: [Greater Regeneration][B-rank], [Impact Dampening][C-rank], [Berserker’s Rage][C-rank], [Stone-Skin][C-rank], [Internal Mana Manipulation][C-rank]
Orion whistled silently. Now that guy is beyond me. His regeneration alone is probably more than I can handle, not to mention all the other traits, and that monstrous Body stat. He can probably throw boulders at me and snipe me from the ground.
“What did you find?” Asteria whispered, scanning the perimeter.
“Eight trolls,” Orion murmured, his mind already running simulations. “Five are Tier Two, ranging between levels sixty and eighty, with high physical stats and very low Mind and Attunement. The other three are Tier Three. The big one in the middle is level one-thirty-five, and they have damage mitigation traits.”
Asteria hummed. “The three leaders are a bit much for you to handle all at once, especially with that regeneration factor. You’d run out of mana before you burned through their biomass.”
“I could come up with a strategy,” Orion argued, though he knew she was right. My output is high, but my ability to draw from the Field isn’t infinite. They’d outlast me.
“I’m sure you could,” she said, stepping off the ridge. “But we’re on a schedule.”
She simply raised a hand, and the morning mist coalesced into two spears of pure, blinding moonlight.
With a flick of her wrist, the silver bolts shot out. There was no explosion, only the wet thwack of impact.
The Patriarch and the second-largest troll didn’t have a chance to realize they were under attack. The light spears pierced their center of mass, causing their bodies to vanish instantly. Asteria’s attack had such a high mana density that it bypassed thermal damage and directly caused molecular disintegration.
Tier Four magic is unfair, Orion thought, a mixture of jealousy and awe twisting in his gut. He couldn’t wait until that was him.
The remaining six trolls froze, staring at the smoking craters where their leaders had been. Then, slowly, six pairs of beady, hate-filled eyes turned toward the ridge.
“That leaves one Tier Three and five Tier Twos,” Asteria said, dusting off her hands. She sat down on a nearby boulder and crossed her legs. “Good luck, moonbeam. Don’t destroy the camp; the mold is growing on the refuse pile behind them.”
Orion stared at her. “You’re joking. That one,” he pointed at the surviving Tier Three, who was currently bellowing a war cry that shook the leaves off the trees, “is Level one-hundred and five.”
“You’re a big boy,” she teased. “I’m sure you can come up with something.”
The trolls charged, and Orion was forced to leap from the ridge, using gravity magic to catch him and turn his fall into a controlled glide. He landed in the clearing, the mud squelching beneath his boots.
The Tier Three troll growled something that could have been a curse and reached him first, swinging a club made from a petrified branch.
“Too slow,” Orion muttered.
His high mind stat enabled him to analyze the club's trajectory, the air's friction, and the tensile strength of the troll’s muscle fibers.
He didn’t even try to block. With his Body stat, he would have broken every bone in his arm, even with the most efficient kinetic redistribution possible, and there was a reason why he baited this specific one by coming in close range.
“[Gravity Cannon]. [Gravity Cannon]. [Gravity Cannon]. [Gravity Cannon].”
Three of the smaller trolls were smashed face-first into the mud, with the sound of snapping bones echoing through the ravine. The air shimmered as light bent around the sudden gravity well.
But the Tier Three troll didn’t go down. It roared, its muscles bulging as it struggled to back stand, even as a chunk of its leg disappeared. [Greater Regeneration] activated, seen as green steam rising from its skin, rapidly stitching together the tears in its muscles and flesh to look like writhing worms.
It took a step. Then another.
Orion backpedaled, annoyed that his gambit had failed.
A rock the size of a microwave shot past his head, missing by inches. One of the Tier Twos had flanked him.
“Oh, please,” Orion sneered, snapping his fingers after calculating the fulcrum point of the troll’s center of mass. A pulse of kinetic energy tripped the creature, sending it tumbling.
But they were closing in. The Tier Three raised its club again, finally recovered, and Orion decided that discretion was the better part of valor and hopped on his broom, putting some distance between himself and them.
I can’t use [Gamma Ray]. A focused beam of ionizing radiation would cook the troll, yes, but the thermal bloom would sterilize the entire clearing. Goodbye, Amber-Heart Mold. Goodbye, foot, at least for weeks, possibly months.
He dodged a thrown stone, its wake ruffling his hair, and pushed himself backward with a burst of kinetic energy, avoiding another.
“Use your head, Orion!” Asteria called out cheerfully from the sidelines.
“I am!” he shouted back, ducking under a flying tree branch. “The problem is they have heads too, and they keep healing them!”
He struck the Tier Three with another [Gravity Cannon], this time aiming horizontally like a battering ram. The troll was pushed backward, smashing into two of its subordinates, knocking them down in a tangle of limbs, but within seconds, they were getting up again, and the wounds from the impact were already healing.
Kinetic energy wasn’t causing enough damage at once, not with the pressure he was under. If he could stop and gather himself, he might be able to figure something out, but the trolls didn’t seem willing to let him.
“Make some space!” Asteria suggested.
Orion grunted and looked at the space where his foot had been.
The memory of the accident that had maimed him had dislocated his foot and prevented his body from accepting healing magic, hit him, the cold sensation of space folding inward.
Regeneration requires biomass to be present. It needs a path for the cells to knit together.
A grin spread across Orion’s face. It was the manic, slightly unhinged grin of a scientist who had just realized the safety protocols he’d been following didn’t apply in this very specific situation.
Event Horizon. Schwarzschild radius. I don't need a stable wormhole this time. I need a collapsing one. A spatial shear.
The trolls regrouped, collecting more large objects to throw, knowing he wouldn’t always be lucky. The sheer mass of the trees that the tier three was ripping out of the ground alone would break through any of his shields, or at least send him tumbling enough for the others to get to him.
Orion raised his hand as the CC flashed rapidly, first entering the formula manually in his mind, then allowing it to smooth out. He wasn’t aiming for perfection at this moment anyway.
I just need to account for the quantum-geometric field representing local space curvature ψ(r,?t), the gravitational potential generated by M_eff Φ_g?, the equivalent mass density of the warped region ρ_m, and add a collapsing constant.
Ψ_wh(r,?t) = [???(r ? r??e^{?βt})2 ∕ (2?σ?2?e^{?2βt})?] × [???i?(Φ_g(r) + Φ_k(t))?∕???] was the final combined wavefunction of the wormhole itself, which would suffice, given that he didn’t need to sustain it for long.
“Let’s test this thing out,” Orion whispered. “[Collapsing Wormhole]”
A unique sound filled the clearing, as a two-dimensional disk of pure blackness manifested at neck-height along the line of charging trolls.
The trolls moved into it. Or rather, their bodies kept moving forward, but their heads didn’t, as momentum failed to translate.
The wormhole only existed for a fraction of a second, displacing the space where their necks had been, then quickly closed.
Snick.
The tear collapsed in on itself, and reality snapped back into place with a thunderous burst of displaced air that pushed his broom back.
Silence fell over the ravine.
Five headless troll bodies took two more stumbling steps, mere physics carrying them forward, before collapsing like marionettes with their strings cut. Fountains of dark blood sprayed into the misty air, but no regeneration followed.
SYSTEM NOTIFICATION
+2 Mind
+1 Attunement
+83,400 Exp
Level up!
Orion slowly flew back down, staring at the mess he’d made. His head pounded from the complex spatial calculus, but he felt oddly refreshed thanks to his level up.
Slow clapping echoed from the ridge.
“A bit messy,” Asteria said, floating down to land beside him. She looked at the decapitated corpses. “But undeniably effective.”
“Did you save the mold?” he asked, wiping sweat from his brow.
Asteria pointed to a patch of glowing-orange mold atop the trash pile. “You never even got close to it.”
Lowering himself to the ground, Orion winced as his prosthetic adjusted to the uneven ground.
“Can you grab it?” He asked, adjusting his glasses. “I don’t want to ruin it now after all this effort.”
Asteria smiled, plucking the fungus with a delicate telekinetic grip. “Good job, moonbeam.”
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