A particularly loud thud filled the room. It sounded more like an actual rock striking the shutters than the gravel they'd heard for a while. Sophia really hoped the shutters were better than she thought they were; they looked like they were just wood, and ordinary wood wouldn't hold up to that much punishment for long.
Jax flinched at the noise of the mazestorm. "No. No two mazestorms are the same, but this one seems especially bad."
"Do you think we should move away from the windows?" Ci'an asked. She sounded nervous.
Sophia couldn't blame her. She felt nervous, too.
Dav stepped forward and manifested his sword as he moved. He sliced through an insubstantial rock .. no, that was a stone elemental, forming as Sophia watched, from mana that leaked through the window. A moment later, it swirled and reformed behind his blade. "That didn't work."
"It's smaller than it was," Sophia pointed out. "So it helped."
That was something they were going to get to find out, because the stone elemental wasn't alone. Other bits of mana were seeping through the window and door and turning into monsters. Sophia tried to slash each one as it formed, but quickly found out that Dav's experience was normal; they were weakened by it but couldn't be killed until they were fully in place. Disrupting them multiple times did help, though, and Sophia fairly quickly discovered that if he did it early enough, her feathers were enough to disrupt the forming monsters temporarily.
She was pretty sure it wasn't the act of physically penetrating them that reduced their size and power. Sophia's feathers worked fine, better than Ci'an's arrows. Dav and Jax were both able to achieve the same thing Sophia could, but they had to use their swords, while Xin'ri's offensive magic was too dangerous to use when the monsters didn't stop her spells. Her other spells seemed to work as well as the sword blows, however, and she could hit many more, especially the small ones that were harder for the others.
Sophia was fairly confident that the key was controlling the mana in the area. That would easily explain why Ci'an's arrows did very little; she had only one Ability that supported her archery in a way that would infuse the arrow with mana, and it was more about producing physical effects than actually controlling the mana in an area, while Xin'ri's less destructive spells allowed her continual control and had to be within her aura.
That was what an individual's aura was, after all, the area where they could sense and exert control of the mana around them and use their own personal mana the most easily. It was also the key to her Plumed Domain, which explained why her feathers worked even though they weren't a spell: they were part of her Domain, controlled by her aura. The men's swords were similar, since both were bonded to their user in some way.
It was also how a dungeon worked; they controlled mana within their area in a way both similar to a spellcaster and completely distinct at the same time; they couldn't exactly cast spells, but they could push the mana together as monsters and clean the remnant intent out of it. Technically, the monsters they created didn't have to have anything to do with that Intent, but they usually did. It was easier.
Sophia was just starting to think that she should, perhaps, have asked Cliff to help when an entire swarm of tiny motes of mana coalesced into monsters, despite the fact that they were in her Domain. Or perhaps it was because they were in her Domain? Was there a minimum size the motes could get before they became monsters?
Nah, that couldn't be it. It was probably a lot simpler than that. Sophia knew she'd seen a few motes simply wink out when they were struck after being forced to shrink to a tiny size, but a lot more were only beaten until they were so small they were difficult to hit. She'd ignored them in favor of the larger, more dangerous ones, and she was pretty sure everyone else had done the same. What she was looking at was probably the result of there being too many tiny bits of related magic in the same area, a resonant effect or something.
The fact that every single one of the tiny magical motes changed into small glowing brown dots with wings that looked like a fly's within seconds of each other definitely sounded like resonance.
A moment later, surprisingly quiet lightning flashed through the storm. The faux fireflies fell from the air, fried by the spell. Sophia glanced back and saw that Xin'ri had swapped to a partially burned staff; if she had to guess, it was probably lightning-struck wood. That would make some sense.
"Get back to it!" Xin'ri encouraged her. "That only works well if they're really small and just can't take it. I can't use anything stronger than that, not in here."
Sophia turned back to the window she'd been concentrating on. It was better than it had been, but there were a few new patches of stale mana as large as her hand. She sent her feathers slicing into them, then reached out to ask something she should have asked before all of this began. "Cliff? Can you do anything about the stale magic?"
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"Maybe. I will try." Those four words were all Cliff said. Sophia didn't push him; she knew that the dungeon core didn't really like talking. If he didn't say more, he didn't know more yet. He'd say more when he knew.
Or she'd find out when he started to deal with it without saying anything. That was also entirely likely. If he was successful, that was probably more likely than him saying anything, so she should probably hope he didn't speak up.
More and more magic seemed to seep through the openings, especially the windows. They split up to cover them more closely instead of waiting until the mana reached the middle of the room. They needed the space, anyway. Dav and Sophia each managed a window while Jax took the door. Xin'ri was left trying to conserve her mana, since she was the most controlled area specialist they had, and Ci'an stood back to assist Xin'ri. Ci'an wasn't much use against the unformed mana, but she'd be very helpful if it took on a more solid form than the swarm of earthflies.
The next monster to coalesce was a creature made of gravel. It tried to batter Jax, and even managed to seep part of the way around his shield, before Ci'an made it collapse momentarily to be caught in Xin'ri's lightning.
The next several monsters were equally simple; a mud golem at Dav's window was followed by a sandy tornado at Jax's door and then a pile of earthworms literally made of dirt, shifting into and through each other as they tried to envelop Jas's feet. Sophia was glad Xin'tir's lightning worked on that one; it would not be any fun to fight at all.
Weirdly, the next thing that manifested wasn't a monster at all. The air around Dav darkened and seemed to turn red. Xin'ri tried to shock it before Dav became impossible to see and avoid, but the magic just slowed down as it tried to pass through the space. It emerged on the other side without hitting anything, but far later than it should have.
The area was being slowed down. It looked like that little glimpse of Time magic was not a figment of Sophia's imagination after all. It could easily be Time-adjacent, some sort of stillness or slowness mana instead that was somehow associated with the rock of the mana storm, but it was a wild magical effect rather than a monster.
That meant Dav was not in immediate danger; anything trying to attack him would be slowed down the same way he was. It also meant he was out of the fight until the magic dissipated. Fortunately, the affected area included the window he was protecting.
Sophia didn't like it at all. Maybe she could help? It would mean losing concentration on the area around her, but if that got Dav back into the fight, it was worth it. Wasn't it?
"Mine!" The sudden exclamation from Cliff surprised Sophia enough that she stopped moving her feathers. The mana around her seemed to turn into rocks as it condensed into a swarm of colorful crystals. Some of the larger ones looked like they had an actual shape, but most of them seemed amorphous or even half-melted.
Sophia stared at the translucent rocks for a moment, then repeated what Cliff said about them. "Mine?"
Had Cliff just taken the stale mana around them and turned it into what was effectively a summoned monster made of colorful stones? Normally, summoning a monster took Sophia's mana, but it seemed like he'd gotten around that using the stale mana, just like she asked him to. She hadn't really expected it to work, but clearly it had.
The stones zoomed over to where Jaz was trying to fight off a collection of stone spiders. They didn't seem to be able to do much to him; they couldn't fly or even climb him, though they could very easily run along the walls and ceiling. Each of Xin'ri's lightning sprays took out several spiders, but unlike the earlier swarms, she couldn't easily kill them all and they didn't fall when others were destroyed.
The floating crystals weren't terribly effective either, but they were at least as useful as Jax was and let him return to breaking up the larger stale mana bubbles.
Sophia glanced back at Dav. "Cliff, can you do that again? Do you need me to break them up small first?"
She hoped he didn't. If she could go help Dav, she would. He was probably fine, but it felt like she was abandoning him if she simply stayed where she was.
"Larger is slower," Cliff answered surprisingly clearly. "Too large, too slow. No ley line here, must feed through you."
Sophia wasn't certain if she understood the answer correctly. "Are you saying that you're giving me mana as you clean up the stale mana?"
"Yes." Cliff didn't seem to see a reason to say more.
Sophia wasn't sure what she should ask. She knew that wasn't how it worked at home; at home, you'd only encounter stale mana if you went to a place that was too far from a ley line or the dungeons in the area had all been destroyed. Returning stale mana back to something usable that filled the ley lines was a natural cycle managed by dungeons and overseen by the World Core that helped to increase the natural background magic of a planet.
That definitely didn't apply here. Challenges were like dungeons, but they weren't the same thing, and the mazestorm was evidence that the cycle wasn't properly managed.
Other things were more important right now. If Cliff could manage the mana temporarily, she could help Dav. A little, at least. "Do what you can."
Sophia pushed her aura outwards. It became weaker the wider she spread it, but Cliff wouldn't be able to affect the stale mana if it was outside her aura any more than she could affect the wild magic around Dav without covering it with her aura. When her aura touched the magic around Dav, it became clear what it was: it wasn't time magic at all. Instead, it was magic that made it hard for things to move. It slowed them down or even stopped them, not in time but with resistance.
That couldn't possibly be good for Dav. He was in a lot more trouble than she'd assumed.
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