The ritual lines blazed with unnatural light as they were augmented with white, magical fire. Alex held his arm up against the heat that pressed outward. Where the flame touched the white lines, the mana channeling along its pathways seemed to speed up several times.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Alex muttered while trying to process what he was seeing.

Through his Heavenly Eye, the mana flow appeared as a torrent of golden energy. He followed the lines up into the sky and saw that the small golden sun that had been providing them light the entire time was now feeding mana to the flames. Each pulse carried more power than the last, and the magical pressure building around the Rift seemed like a dam destined to break.

Mana! Hot mana!

Val circled nervously overhead, and his small form darted back and forth.

Val, can you see any weak points? Any place where the flows look different? Like… lots of mana in one spot?”

Val gained some more height before circling once more and descending.

All burn same. Big mana in the middle near angry Jonathan.

The Rift pulsed again, and Alex staggered back as a wave of pressure swept across the clearing, and there was a percussive blast of wind that accompanied it, causing the dirt of the forest floor to go airborne. He glanced over his shoulder at the portal and caught sight of Jonathan as he roared in fury and continued his relentless assault on the remaining elf.

Alex edged a bit closer to one of the outer lines of the ritual and felt the heat from the flames intensify.

It didn't look like the substance and the fire were just channeling the mana; instead, they were amplifying and refining it somehow. He'd already known that the ritual wasn't crude or novice-level magic, but for the first time, he could see the immense gap in magical understanding between their world and the elves. Whatever mana-conductive metal they were using was clearly used with deliberation, and the runes used in adjusting his ritual magic were unlike any he’d seen before.

"Maelis, what happens when an enchantment overloads?"

“Nothing good, kid. Either it fails catastrophically or exceeds its intended purpose. But even then, it's usually not an item that can be used a second time. If that's what happens here, neither scenario ends well for anyone around."

“Shit, we need to try and get rid of some of this mana… how can I stop the flow?”

Val fluttered down and flapped his wings to hover several feet above the flames on one of the lines. The small dragon opened his mouth and began to absorb the mana. For a brief moment, hope flared in Alex's chest as he saw it being consumed. Then Val recoiled with a hiss and flapped his wings around wildly, looking more like a panicked bat than an elegant dragon.

"Hot! Spicy mana! Hot, hot!"

"Val!" Alex reached up as his companion regained control of his movements and returned to his shoulder. As he moved through the air, Valtherion's scales seemed to shimmer with some lingering white flame energy that made him shine. "You okay, buddy?"

"Don't like drinking fire."

Another pulse of energy rocked the clearing.

Alex turned toward where Jonathan had been. Teresa stood in her defensive position, watching as Jonathan came down from his berserker's rage. He stood over the elf's mangled corpse and stumbled a bit before beginning to make his way back toward the team, looking exhausted and like he could sleep for days. Damien rushed forward and slid a burly shoulder under Jon’s arm.

"Hey!" Alex shouted as he ran toward Teresa. "Do any of you have magical training? Do you have [Mana Manipulation] or the ability to draw mana into your body?"

Teresa shook her head, her silver hair seeming even more white in the light of the flames. "Nothing like what you're looking for. Only in the most basic sense."

Greg responded in her defense, "We are fighters, not mages. It’s no different than any other weapon system that’s issued to us. A lot of the research and understanding isn’t our job. It’s to learn the skills we’re given and be damn good at using them."

"Great," Alex muttered as he turned back to face the ritual.

Alex looked at the ritual and couldn't tell if the portal itself was expanding or if that was just the vast amounts of blue mana beginning to swirl in time with the portal.

"Kid, you need to think of something fast," Maelis urged. "I don't know much about rituals, but I do know a lot of magic, and this thing is getting close to being done. If you don't think you can fight off an elven army, you should probably start making space."

Alex paced along one of the nearby lines and let his mind run through possibilities. Physical force didn't work. Val seemed to be able to actually drain some of the mana from it, but it was hot because of the fire.

Wait… Val couldn’t handle the mana because he probably tried to consume it like he does when he eats mana. But what if…?

Alex let his mind race as the sounds of chaos filled the area around him. The image of a water balloon appeared in his thoughts. He thought of a time when he and Jake would poke tiny holes in the sides of them with their teeth and then use them like a small water gun as a jet stream of water came out. His thoughts also drifted to what happened when the hole was too big. The entire balloon would rupture, and spray water and latex into his mouth.

He frantically removed his notebook from the spatial pouch at his hip. Flipping through the notes, he looked at his newest spell circle that had been designed to siphon the mana from the warding barrier. His eyes flicked back and forth across the page, and he thought about how he might tweak the design and replace the barrier rune within.

"What’re you thinking, brat?" Maelis asked in a dubious tone.

If I can create a small enough channel and drain just enough mana away from a key junction point…

“You’ve been making decent progress with your runes. And you’re innovation with spell circles could actually be impressive in some circles. Don’t do something stupid now and throw away the opportunity to actually take that to its proper heights.”

Another pulse rocked the clearing, and Alex’s jaw clenched. He turned and watched more white flames surge through the ritual lines. With the enhanced vision of mana that he had, he could see exactly how the power was building, and it reminded him of a dam about to burst. The amount of raw energy flowing through the ritual would probably be enough to kill him a dozen times over.

But Alex knew that his unique skill set set him apart from most mages.

He ran his fingers through his hair as he finished calculating the modifications to the spell circle. His Willpower was his greatest asset, and if his control over the two complex skills was any indicator, he felt he had a real chance of making this plan work.

If anyone could create a controlled leak in the ritual… it should be me.

“Don’t even think about it. That much mana would–”

“Burn me from the inside out? Only if I can’t control it,” Alex finished. “But if I’m fast enough, if I can channel it away as quickly as it comes in…”

The ground trembled, and he knew that there wasn’t any more time to think through the situation. He scanned the area nearest the Rift and crossed the distance with his movement skill, passing a bone-weary Jonathan on his way there.

He closed and put his finger in the notebook to hold his position and slid to kneel at the major junction of ritual lines. He opened the book and held it in his left hand while holding his right hand, palm open, over the intersecting lines. He created the spell circle over the burning pathways and let his hand sink into the open hole at its center.

Val, I need you to move back with the others.

Val chirped in protest. “Stay with you.”

“Not this time,” Alex said while gently prying the small dragon from his shoulder. “Watch from a safe distance and I’ll let you know if I need any help, okay?”

As he positioned himself, the dire nature of the situation finally seemed to settle on him. Unexpected thoughts flashed through his mind, and the mental image of his friends appeared as he began to weave the modified draining spell. Olivia smiled at him, with Mark and Sarah on either side of her. Sam's excited and innocent face appeared next, poking out from behind Mark's large frame.

Others popped into his thoughts briefly. Edwin and Gabby, John and Ian, and, most surprising, the mental image of Jake. His brother's recent attempt to mend their relationship after years of tension and competition had been a welcome surprise. Despite everything, he appreciated that awkward apology more than he realized.

"Moore!" Jonathan's voice cut through his thoughts clearly, as if the surrounding chaos wasn’t there. "What the hell are you doing?"

Alex didn't look up and flexed his hand within the spell circle while readying his mana. "The only thing I can think to do. The ritual will finish in a minute or two."

"Stand down," Jonathan ordered. "We pull back and prepare for whatever comes out of the Rift and use our home-field advantage in modern weapons to hit them hard before they have a chance to dig in."

Alex shook his head.

"You don't even know what you're doing. Greg says that much mana is going to kill you."

Alex felt a bitter laugh escape him. "It might. But if an army of elves almost double the level of the most powerful people on Earth comes pouring through a broken Rift right now, there's absolutely no way that we can fight back how we are."

Without waiting for a response, Alex pressed his hand further down over the flames and felt the heat begin to burn. But as soon as he pulsed mana and the spell circle began to greedily drink in the nearby mana, the flames went with it. The circle's lines glowed blue, then white as his energy activated the pattern, and it flashed into normal physical existence.

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For one heartbeat, nothing happened. Alex activated [Mana Siphon] to try to pull more of the foreign mana through his body, and he knew he would need to prepare a spell to dump as much of it out as possible.

Then, the world exploded in agony.

Mana flooded into Alex's body like a tidal wave crashing through the ritual. Mana channels within his body that were designed to carry normal amounts of magical energy suddenly burned white-hot. The pain was worse than anything he'd ever known, and he felt like his nerves were being seared from the inside out.

His back arched involuntarily as the mana crashed through him. It felt like molten metal poured into veins of glass as they were stretched beyond capacity. He clenched his jaw down so fast and tight that he could taste blood. Alex wasn't sure if he bit his tongue or his cheek as he fought to maintain consciousness.

Maelis's voice cut through the haze, "Dump it! Now, kid! You can't hold it in!"

A desperate kind of clarity settled on him, one that he'd only seen come from moments where his life was on the line.

Drawing on his Willpower, Alex forced his trembling free hand into motion. He kept his right hand in the spell circle while dropping the leather notebook and thrusting his left hand over his head. Allowing as many mana threads as possible to spin into existence, he traced a complex pattern in the air as he clenched his eyes shut through the pain. It all threatened to overwhelm him, but he pushed through it all.

The windows winked out of his vision as quickly as they had appeared, dismissed by his desire for complete focus on the task at hand.

As the spell took shape above, he adjusted it on the fly. He had planned to use the largest and most powerful spell he knew to dump the mana into it, but as he realized the sheer amount of mana pouring into him from the elven ritual, he knew that the single spark rune ritual wouldn’t be enough to hold it all. He widened the ritual base and added the spellcasting control nodes for additional stability. He let the threads wrap tightly, and as the base came together, it was nearly 50 feet in diameter and hung a few meters above his own head, pointing exactly where he intended.

What had begun as the standard lightning ritual became his personal creation— a spell circle beyond anything he'd even toyed with. It was a colossal working with dozens of stabilizing notes and multifaceted power channels that spiraled to multiple empty catalyst nodes.

He clenched his jaw tighter and, in his mind's eye, did his best to direct the many flows of thin mana strands, showing a level of control and precision that he'd only ever felt once before. His enhanced casting speed allowed him to build the spell circle in a matter of seconds that felt like minutes.

Once it was built, he inserted multiple spark runes and an activation rune into the appropriate catalyst nodes. He pumped the creation full of the mana that threatened to disintegrate his body from the inside out. Without the mana siphoning from the Rift ritual, he never would've had the amount of mana required to build the spell circle, but the amount of mana that it would take to activate the spell itself was many times over Alex's entire mana pool.

That was what he had been banking on, and he let his entire mana pool dump into the spell construct overhead and felt a brief moment of respite. He opened his eyes, but before he could even register what was going on around him, more mana crashed into his core through his right hand. Liquid fire felt like a punch to the gut and caused him to scream in pain, but through it all, he allowed the mana to travel through his right arm into his chest through his core and up his left arm and into the spell circle.

Alex was unsure of how long the torture lasted or how many cycles he repeated of expending his full mana pool. But, even with his obscene levels of willpower, his eyes blurred and he felt the muscles in his back beginning to relax of their own accord. Alex made the final gesture and activated the spell circle.

The world went white.

A column of lightning that was pure and blinding erupted from the center of the spell circle. It punched through the golden orb hanging over the camp and into the sky overhead with such force that the air seemed to tear apart, and a singular hole appeared in the thin sheet of clouds before the beam even reached it. A rippling effect of several circles spread out from the hole in the clouds as the lightning disappeared into the sky beyond.

The flaming sun cracked, revealing itself to be more of a glass orb than a floating sun, and shattered outward with explosive force. The pieces of it fell several feet before dispersing and vanishing completely.

It wasn't an ordinary lightning strike but instead, a continuous torrent of the magical lightning attempting to break open the heavens. Where it branched out from the beam and bits of lightning struck the clouds, they transformed instantly—boiling internally into a storm that rippled even further outward. The dimming sky flashed white as everything for miles around was illuminated. Birds dropped from the sky, overwhelmed by the discharge.

The ground beneath Alex cracked from the pressure, and small fissures spread outward in a perfect circle. The air warped with heat and created a shimmering space of odd discharge where physics seemed suspended, and several of the nearby rocks floated inches off the ground.

The following clap of thunder was so loud that Alex felt something pop behind his ears, and he felt like the earth around them began to shake and tilt. The storm expanded rapidly, and he opened his mouth wide to try and pop his ears while looking up and saw the storm and lightning expanding rapidly in an unnatural display across the sky.

Where Alex's siphon had connected to the ritual, the burning lines began to dim. That same effect spread outward along the trail that the flames had started on, quickly extinguishing entire sections of the elven working just as Alex cut off the siphoning spell circle around his right hand.

For one blessed moment, Alex felt relief as the pressure within him eased and the smoldering mana channels in his body saw rest.

The small golden sun that had fed the ritual had vanished completely. As darkness crept in at the edges of Alex's failing vision, the once-bright golden light now seemed impossibly dull and artificial compared to the brilliant blue-white lightning that still burned into his vision.

In unison, both his spell circle and the ritual lines went dark, and a heavy silence fell over the entire forest.

Alex collapsed backward, and his body felt like it was on fire. He looked straight up into the sky and wasn't sure if he was able to turn his head in any direction, even if he wanted to. He saw smoke rising in his vision and wondered if it was from the extinguished flames of the ritual or his body. Blood trickled from his nose and ears, which felt distant compared to his spasming and sore muscles.

Alex closed his eyes tightly and felt tears beginning to well in his eyes. When he blinked them open, he saw Valtherion swimming through the air over his head and circling erratically. Feelings of elation, pride, and worry all flooded through their bond. Dirt sprayed onto his face and hit his cheeks, though he didn't have the energy to flinch away as Sam skidded into the crater in the ground that he lay in. He saw the teen’s mouth move but realized that he couldn't hear anything at all, which explained why the entire world seemed so quiet.

Sam's hands glowed with gentle green mana that Alex had begun to recognize as either nature-attuned or healing magic. They pressed against Alex's chest, and he felt warmth spread through his scorched mana channels. The spell dulled the pain to a more manageable level, bringing the world slowly back into focus.

Sounds slowly returned in muffled waves, and he heard Sam speaking excitedly mid-sentence. "—stopped it! You actually stopped it!" Sam's excited voice faded in. "You saved us. Everyone could see it. I was farther away and on the other side of the rise, but I could still see your spell in the air!"

"No, no, no… I’m— Wait," Alex mumbled, and his thoughts felt scattered as he tried to move. “I can do more... I’m not finished..." He tried to sit up, but only managed to flex his abdominal muscles and groan.

"Easy," Sam urged him to continue lying on his back and channeled healing energy into his damaged body. "You need to rest. The ritual's gone, look!"

Beyond them, cheers erupted from across the forward staging area, and that growing excitement could be heard even from their position near the Rift. Hunters who had watched from a safe distance now approached, some clapping, others staring in awe at the gathering storm in the clouds overhead. Some people cheered and yelled out congratulations and thanks.

Jonathan limped forward with Damien's support, and even though his face was filled with exhaustion, his eyes shone with newfound respect. "Jesus fuckin’ Christ, Moore. Never seen anything like that," he said.

Teresa and Martin began setting up a defensive perimeter, more from habit than necessity. Their movements relaxed, and much of the urgency was gone from their actions. Greg glanced at Alex several times nervously and kept flicking his eyes upward. He took a few steps toward Alex and Sam before shaking his head and moving quickly away.

"You don’t need to do any more, Alex," Sam beamed and helped him take a small sip of water, followed by a sip of a healing potion. "They were saying over the radio that the lightning was yours and you could be seen from a hundred miles!"

Val chirped proudly and settled carefully on Alex's chest. "No more spicy mana!"

More people gathered around from the support staff of the mission, and several of the upper management patted Sam on his shoulder while looking down at Alex with expressions ranging from awe to disbelief. Even though there was a clear shift in the atmosphere to one of levity, the management team quickly began to get people in order and assess the area while combing the camp and setting up a more distant perimeter to keep out potentially interested passersby.

Yet something nagged at the edge of Alex's awareness. It was a feeling that something just wasn't quite right.

"Kid…" Maelis's voice floated through his mind and was uncharacteristically hesitant.

With Sam's continued healing, Alex managed to push himself into an awkward sitting position. The Rift hung silently in the air, where it had always been, and was no longer pulsing or fluctuating as it had during the ritual. It looked exactly like any other Rift he'd seen.

"I need to check something," Alex said as he ignored the protests of his damaged body.

"You shouldn't be moving yet," Sam insisted. "Your mana channels are still healing, and—"

"Just help me up." The urgency and seriousness in Alex's voice silenced further arguments.

With Sam's support, Alex stood shakily. The celebration continued around them, and as he rose to his feet, the cheering grew louder and more intense. Alex limped toward the Rift with Sam's assistance. It floated innocently, showing no signs of the massive magical war that had been waged over its mana.

"See?" Sam said encouragingly. "It's stable, and there isn't an army of elves pouring out. You were able to stop whatever they were trying to do."

Alex squinted, focusing through the lingering pain and hazy mind. "I just need to be sure."

Despite the flash of agony that it caused, Alex activated his Heavenly Eye to scan the Rift. At first, he saw nothing, and the window popped up as normal, showing that the system recognized it as a normal and stable Rift. But as he looked closer and saw the slight change, he felt his chest tighten.

"No," he whispered.

"What's wrong?" Sam asked as worry crept into his voice.

Alex shook his head slowly. "I failed… The ritual worked."

Sam frowned. "But the lines went dark and the golden sun disappeared…"

"Because it finished," Alex realized, and the horror of the situation began to settle. "It completed as planned."

He looked around, and Sam also began to look around worriedly, wondering if they only had moments before elves began to pour from the Rift.

"Sam, you need to get me over to Jonathan. Right now." Alex didn't want to cause panic in the people gathered and beginning to work through the encampment. When they walked up to Jonathan, he interrupted what the man was about to say in favor of getting directly to the point. "It's not over. The ritual completed successfully!"

The look on Jonathan's face faltered, and the words on his lips died. He straightened, and his expression shifted to concern and alert in an instant. "What do you mean?" he demanded and took a step forward, away from Damien.

Alex pointed at the seemingly benign Rift. "Scan it. They weren't trying to break it open from the outside..." He swallowed hard. "They were upgrading it from a D rank to a C rank."