“So, this kind of blew up a bit,” Thera whispered beside him as they looked around, Ben unable to disagree.

“Yeah, this is a bit more than I was prepared for when I first thought to give this another try.”

With something sealed away in a mythic item by a god too dead to explain himself, neither the surviving gods of the sirens nor the rest of the gods filling that world were going to take any chances. While the puzzle was arguably left for the mortal worshipers of Eletar to challenge, Ben could say with confidence that it would be impossible for them. Whatever had been put inside of there wasn’t meant to get out, leading to their present circumstance.

After the intervention of their gods, the puzzle had been moved from the church to the untamed lands, taken through the gate network while both templars and adventurers were gathered and put on standby, all of them prepared to fight whatever they were about to face if that was what it would come to, leaving only to open it.

You’re up.

Yeah, I see that. Just remember that whatever I’m about to unleash on the world, it’s not my fault.

“Amy, Jake, come on. Let’s do this and hopefully not live to regret it.”

“Great pep talk,” Amy muttered, even as they went over with him as the two allowed him to take over their bodies to take advantage of the powers they held.

From his first time using it, Ben knew that the puzzle’s design meant matching mana inputs with specific outputs from that entire spectrum of power and while he could cheat that so a person wouldn’t need to be able to personally hold each branch of mana to do it, there was no escaping that the people doing it would need the sort of mana sense to clearly see all branches. Something rare enough that having those two with him was a necessity as three pairs of hands moved to touch the floating orb, watching how mana lit up, flashing and streaking across it until, as one, he used his friends to react to it.

Thus began the chain reaction. Once the first bit of mana was reacted to it set off a wave of more, slow at first but building, both in speed and volume, forcing those three bodies and souls to move under his command until the point that it got to be too much and they finally failed, going beyond what could be managed.

The first failure of many. Each time demanded a repeat but with each they got farther as Ben slowly built on his previous model of the puzzle, deciphering its design and the psychology of its maker.

A failure wasn’t just a reset, it altered the puzzle’s state for the rounds after, with patterns there too to be discerned and discovered each time, ending on the wall that was their human limits. The three of them had been applying mana through touch as they observed where it landed, but that was solvable too. It was a problem for himself and Amy only but with Jake’s soul at his disposal, it let his true self and her body step back to focus on simply observing, watching where mana needed to be applied next before directing Jake’s power around the sphere to strike with precision, everything they’d seen until that point letting Ben get further than ever before until the next problem struck. The concentration of mana reactions taking place across the item became too dense to be determined through a person’s mana sense, no matter how good it might have been.

A clear sign to his suspicion that the puzzle was meant to be unsolvable yet again, not an insurmountable one. As obnoxious as the design was, Ben believed he was coming close to having the pattern behind it, accepting the next failure as he started again, more confident than before from how far they’d gotten and letting his knowledge build up as more failures came until eventually, his model was complete enough to allow him to go beyond the point that his mana sense was worthless by making predictions alone, allowing him to see the next point that the puzzle was meant to be impossible to beat. Jake’s mana recovery rate was failing to keep up.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Really, the fact that they’d gotten to that point meant that the puzzle was showing that it was meant to be impossible for mortals from its very inception. Jake was an archmage, and the speed he would regenerate mana was ridiculous for even other awakened skill holders, made all the faster once Ben had modified his soul. The idea that he was doing so many inputs while not even bothering to construct the mana into any complex spells was a testament to the cost behind it but that was solvable too, giving mana from his own pool to ensure his friend would be supplied while at the same time taking from Thera to keep him topped up as well so they’d both be prepared to face whatever was going to come out, even if more and more he found himself wondering if that was really going to be a good idea.

If the evil he felt from the item was really what was stored within then the god who’d caught it had done his best to make sure it would never get out, with the question of what it could be making his thoughts go wild. An evil void god passing through their system that Eletar had been the first to find and managed to trap, an outsider that had somehow managed to find its way into reality all too close to the sirens home planet, or maybe just some insidious plot from that god’s mortals, playing with powers they weren’t ready to handle. The more he thought about it the more it felt like he knew far too many things that could go wrong in that universe that a god might want to seal away with the strongest lock and key they could find. How was he so sure that he was making the right choice?

Because if it really was so dangerous, the right choice for him would have been informing the other gods and not turning this puzzle into a tourist attraction, he told himself. Something is here, something significant enough to set off my evil authority in a way I was completely unprepared for, but it’s something worth finding out. And if it’s so bad, well, then I guess we’ll have to see if we can’t just lock it away again.

From the ones within his range, he could tell the various people around him were getting nervous, the length of his current run implying that they had to be getting closer to an end that none of them could expect and as illegal as it may have been, he used his calming to ease them just a bit. He didn’t know what would happen when it was solved, but whatever change was going to come, he didn’t want any first reactions being to immediately attack it. Whatever they were going to find needed at least the chance to be understood, if for answers alone, and it felt like they had to have been close in getting them.

As the pattern continued to ramp up without failure, he was able to look farther ahead and believed he saw its inevitable end point, drawing ever closer. Soon enough, each affinity and non-affinitied mana were covering swaths of the sphere at once until in an instant they’d reached the conclusion, the part where no more predictions could be drawn as all areas of the sphere were being hit by all types of mana at once, bringing with it the question of if they’d succeeded.

If there was anything else beyond it then Ben had no choice but to admit it was still impossible. If he couldn’t see what the mana was meant to be doing while still having more to go then that was an insurmountable wall, yet that wasn’t what happened. With that mythic item swaddled in Jake’s power, seams opened up along it, peeling back to look like a flower in bloom to spill its contents out, Ben in the prisoners’ minds before anyone could react and catching them before they hit the ground, trying to keep them safe and leaving him to yell out for the others around him in a way that hopefully wouldn’t scare them when worldspeak was going to be newly bound to their mind.

“Everyone relax, they aren’t dangerous!” Ben called out before continuing on in a quieter voice. “This is just a significantly different problem than I’d been prepared for.”

In his arms, looking confused and panicked, were both a siren woman and a young girl, the two released upon a new world.