"Right this way, I'll point out the ship and you can tell me if you can hit it," Thanric said as he lead Kai off towards the back of the deck, just above the Child of Adventures dock.

Coming to the spot next to Thanric, Kai flooded his arcane eyes with mana and looked to where The Sage pointed out into the night.

His eyes almost burning with power, Kai saw it clear as day.

"Six, no… Seven ships. One large one up front, escorted by another five about the size of that pirate one I took out… there's one in the back, but it's kind of hard to make out."

"The fact you can even see the Child of Adventure shouldn't surprise me, but yes, the one that is distorted in the back should be our gold team coming in to close our counter ambush."

"Ambush?"

"Yes, the Kingdom ships picked up speed a few hours ago. They are closing in for the attack. The hope is they believe we're foolishly entertaining someone and they think they can catch us unaware. Fortunately, they were detected a few days ago and their every move has been relayed through secure crystal channels."

Kai watched a good number of the crew, and the ranked adventurers start to move from their stationed positions.

"You used us as bait to spring a trap?" Kai said as he mentally put the pieces together. "This is why Arnella returned to her normal duties and you stopped the lessons."

Thanric shrugged, "Yes that may have had something to do with it… so, can you make the shot?"

"The big leading ship?" Kai peered back out above the sea of trees trailing behind them.

The ships were much closer than the last one he had shot. He could easily make the same shot, but was that the best option?

Deciding to feel the situation out a bit more, he asked, "What's the plan? How much time do we have?"

Thanric sighed, "At the moment, the Shattered Kingdoms' ships should be conserving their mana stores for the actual attack. So, assuming they think they have us unaware, they should have their barriers down. The hope is you can cause critical damage and we can get a decent opening salvo off from the front and behind. We have maybe five minutes… why, what are you thinking?"

"I am thinking we can do much better than one attack from me… How long will it take for them to activate the barriers?"

"No more than thirty seconds… though that is our best guess. Shattered ships aren't always built to a predictable standard. You should know your attack will be a signal for triggering our trap. Once you are done, the plan is to have you immediately escorted from the ship. That way, we can safely switch the passive barrier systems to a more active defence mode. From there, the common war doctrine dictates it will become a battle of attrition as we try to damage each other's ship system, board their ship or drain their mana reserves."

Kai looked down each side of the horseshoe shaped deck, seeing the ranged specialist gather in groups to prepare their wands, bows and other ranged equipment.

He turned to Alicia. "Wake Gift. He'll be pissed if he doesn't get a chance to show off."

"Illusion?" she asked, her cream dress vanishing to reveal her combat leathers as she roused Gift, who then turned into his arcane compound bow form.

"Fight?" a set of extra stings Gift had added to the bows frame vibrated, giving this form a true voice.

"Yes, fight," Kai said as he turned to Syl, "Are they close enough to mark?"

She looked out, her eyes flaring a bright cyan as she shifted her clothing to a set of combat gear similar to Alicia's.

Marks started popping up in Kai's peripheral vision.

"It's too far for individuals, but I am using my mana sense to help mark anything that is over a certain mana threshold."

Kai grinned, "Again, you have to teach me how you have such good mana sense. Do you think you can put an extra special mark on any of the ships' cores?"

"Kai, we're supposed to specialise," Syl sighed. "Done… That should be everything you need. Want me to take a step back so you can use all the mana you need?"

"Ooh, lots of targets. What's the plan?" Gift thrummed.

"Time delayed simultaneous barrage."

"Sounds cool."

"I know. Now Gift, Alicia will need your help to make an illusion of the ship."

"Hmm, ship's too big," Gift hummed. "Mother won't have enough mana to shoot me if we do that, change plan... please."

"What about just the top deck?" Kai offered.

"Hmmm…"

Knowing Gift could also experience the world through Alicia when he was a bow, Kai shared his vision with them and pointed to the people gathering on one side of the ship and then to the people on the other.

"It just needs to cover us and them from the direction of all the targets Syl marked for us."

"That will work. Mother, you take the lead. I will provide my aspect as needed."

Stolen novel; please report.

Alicia and Gift got to work and in just a moment, the air between them and the trailing ships took on a slight shimmer as an illusion of light and shadow took form.

Kai turned to Thanric, "I'm going to set up a series of barriers in the line of fire. Tell your people to launch their best attacks through those barriers. Have them co-ordinate with each other if they need to."

Thanric chewed his lip, frowning as he started, "Kai this is-"

"An experiment. You love experiments," Kai said, cutting him off intentionally.

Thanric's frown turned into a vicious grin.

"Now, the barriers will lock any attack fired into them, slow their passage through time, and cause them to gather up until I release them all at one. The crew should be able to add multiple attacks, choose multiple targets. Shit, I'm assuming they can select targets."

"Kai, they are Empire adventurers. They do what they need to do, and they have defended this ship from worse threats than this. The gold rankers on the Child could handle this on a good day… not saying it's easy, but they know what to do. And Kai, don't forget I'm here."

Thanric waved someone over and started relaying instructions.

The crew member's eyes going wider as The Sage spoke.

Kai would let them pass the message on as he turned back to his part in all this

"Alicia, Buff me."

"Full cocktail?"

"You know it."

The two of them ginned as Kai felt his mind focus and his mana channels flow with freshly absorbed and converted mana.

With his new mental alacrity and abundantly regenerating mana, he focused and reached out to clamp his intent down on time as he made his barriers.

Two thick sheets of translucent blue mana that pulsed purple appeared, and he moved them into place.

The adventurers who had not yet received the new instructions looking over to him in confusion as Kai fixed the spell constructs onto the ship itself so they wouldn't drift away.

When he opened another in front of where he stood, Alicia got started, firing shot after shot of golden and dark black shadow from Gift off into the field in front of them. She was constantly moving about to adjust the angle and position of their attacks. The shots slamming to a halt in the barrier just as magical rings were forming to change and amplify what they had created in some fancy way that Gift loved to do.

Word must have got around, as the deck was lit up with shots and spells slamming into the nearby barriers.

For Kai, this was the easy part.

All those barriers did was slow time. Meaning all the attack magic that was being jammed into them didn't affect him or the barriers at all. The spells, arrows and, surprisingly, something that looked like a javelin were all just passing through. The barrier itself doing nothing but allowing Kai to hang a pocket of manipulated time in place and forget about it.

When he connected barriers with his space and time abilities, it was stupidly easy to lock things off and move them about. He still had to pay the mana cost of creating them both, but the distortion would remain in place so long as the barrier held.

Of course, it meant the barrier became an exploitable weakness, but that was a small price to pay for the sheer versatility the new trick offered. Figuring it out had allowed him to create a completely time locked storage area within the domain, though Syl insisted he should be able to do that without the barrier.

With the barriers in place, he had to move onto the hard part, the part that would take all his concentration and most of his remaining mana.

"Syl, let me know if I'm going too far and jump in if I look like I'm losing control again."

"Again?" The Sage asked from the side where he stood with his notebook.

They both ignored Thanric as Syl answered Kai's statement by saying, "Just like we practiced."

Kai lifted his hilt, his focus, into the air and looked right down through the hollow core, lining things up so that the main shot wasn't caught in an arc circling its target too fast.

The fact that he was calling the sword hilts he got from Inego focuses now, even mentally, still kind of irked him. But being so loose with what it actually was called was getting annoying. He had to accept it; he needed to be more certain of things in his life, less wishy washy.

He was a fucking wizard now. Well, he defiantly preferred battlemage.

Shit, he had to focus, the state of flow, the zone, as he called it. It was supposed to help him stay on task, pay attention to details he could easily miss. The problem was to do that. It didn't half activate his mind and his mind fucking wandered.

Seeing that everything was perfectly lined up, he signalled Syl, and she locked the focus in place with her own barrier.

The idea being he didn't push his control too far by juggling too many different spells at once.

Satisfied Syl had it, he anchored his spatial distortion on the now floating wand and stepped back to don his dragon scaled gauntlets to help with the next step.

In their time practising, training and experimenting in the domain they had discovered, Kai's mana control increased significantly when he let his scales form on his skin. And now that he had fed the pseudo growth item all the divine dragon scales it would eat for his level, the natural armour had grown to reach just below his shoulders.

He absently wondered as he flexed how many scales he would have to absorb before he would also have dragon scale spaulder's or pauldrons as a second skin

Happy that each of the scales sat comfortably, he started forming his mana bolts. Each one adjusted slightly for the target he had already selected.

The mana bolt he made for the mark that should be the big ship's drive received the most concentrated power at about four hundred percent of his total mana.

The other five smaller ships would have to do with around sixty percent each.

When he was happy with the mana he had put in each one he reached out with a gesture of his scaled arm and applied what he thought of as his spatial aspect pressed down with all his intent on the mana bolts forms, compacting their structure as tight as he could shrinking them down to fit through his wand.

They turned into purple pinpricks of light, each of them absently drifting dangerously close to escape his control to shoot off towards their target and he had to work harder and harder to keep track of them.

The next step, and possibly where he could lose it all, was merging them into one.

It was a little trick that Gift had come up with and one he was thinking of calling a mega mana bolt. Only, the bolts were barely visible to the casual observer even when he forced them all to merge, so mega didn't quite fit.

When they swirled around each other and merged without so much as a crackle of volatile energy, he smiled and mentally pushed the purple speck towards the focus.

Now, the final touch.

The moment just before the slowly moving mana bolt hit the spatial distortion that would cause it to fire, he locked the whole thing down in another time dilation barrier.

It was done.

He stepped back as he let out a long held breath.

"It's ready." He turned to Thanric, "I can trigger it on your mark."

"Wait, you built a trigger into that thing?" The Sage asked curiously. "And without using any true spell forms… you're insane."

"What good is an ultimate if it takes too long to set up and you can't release it on command?"

"What's an ultimate?"

Kai chose not to explain it was a gaming term again as he looked about and saw everyone had stopped firing off attacks and was now looking at him.

"Everyone is waiting for me, aren't they?"

The sage nodded.

"Okay, I just need too…"

With a thought, Kai turned off his advanced auto level up.

He wanted any and all mana he received from this to go to repairing Syl's still damaged core.

"Kai!" Syl hissed.

She must have felt him do it.

He released everything, the time dilation barriers and his mini mass of mana bolts all at once.

There was a tremendous bang as the sound from hundreds of attacks, all held in time, their normally bearable sounds compounding and amplifying each other, as they all went off at once.

Kai decided to make a mental note about arranging for sound protection for future instances like this one, as he and most people in the vicinity were knocked to the deck by the shockwave.

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