Slime Evolution

Chapter 414 - In the Shadows [BONUS]

The two began carefully exploring the corners of the ravine.

Lohan activated his senses, trying to sniff out and listen to the vibrations of the mana currents escaping from the black rocks. However, the task proved to be far harder than he’d initially expected.

Although the initial seal the Broken Suns officers had placed on the rift was low quality and very weak compared to the high standards of Yrneha and Thalendor’s mages, the barrier was still good enough to mask the thermal signature and hide the exact location of the magical rift’s original opening, especially for someone who had never dealt with anything like this before, like Lohan and Lisa.

All they could tell was that void mana was leaking diffusely through dozens of small cracks in the stone walls, but the actual rift remained completely hidden under some kind of magic.

Lohan was even bold enough to send a small clone through those cracks, but the energy leaking out from there was so intense that after rolling only a few centimeters, the small clone was quickly corroded by it and fell apart.

It had been a while since any of Lohan’s clones had died so quickly, even with him currently at Level 16, the energy leaking from there didn’t care in the slightest about the resistances he already considered powerful.

’And to think this is just the energy leaking from the seal...’ he thought, shocked.

"I can feel that the source is very close to here," Lohan commented, his gelatin drooping in frustration. "But their illusion is annoyingly efficient at hiding the exact coordinates. With my enhanced magical sensitivity, I could certainly break this spell and find the root of the problem, but to do that I’d need to spend several hours, maybe even days, running tests, wasting an enormous amount of biomass, and applying continuous energy flows to this place."

"And we don’t have that kind of time," Lisa finished, swaying her two white tails thoughtfully under the moonlight. The energy of the place was bothering her quite a bit, since even though she was a creature focused on Spiritual Energy, she was still very sensitive to magical energy, but just standing there wasn’t enough to hurt her or anything like that. "Besides, finding the exact location of the seal right now doesn’t mean we’d be able to do anything about it immediately, or even that we’d be able to see what’s hidden behind the barrier without triggering the magical alarms the Broken Suns left here as security. Our only option right now is to wait for them to come do the covert repair with the new materials they bought in the city."

"Yeah, you’re right," Lohan agreed, flattening his mass against the fossilized marble of the slope. "They’ll bring the magic keys and the level twenty runes that cost them a fortune. When they open the gap in the previous seal to apply the containment reinforcement, the structure of their illusion will drop for a few seconds due to the instability of the energy flow. That’ll be our chance to analyze the spell they used, record the exact location, and use that information to handle this in the best way for us."

The two quickly moved into the deep shadows of a dark leaved bush growing on the side of the ravine.

Lohan activated his umbral mimicry as he covered his and Lisa’s bodies, blending them into the recesses of a giant root’s bark, making it so that unless someone specifically searched for them, they would be impossible to find.

They methodically silenced their mana signatures, becoming invisible ghosts to any ordinary sensor the enemy guild might have brought to the northern rift.

A few minutes later, the rustling of dry leaves and the metallic clang of metal armor echoed through the rift’s access corridor.

Lohan stretched out his auditory perception, picking up the approach of heavy footsteps coming from the Thalendor trail, confirming that it wasn’t Alice and Dylan approaching, which made him grateful for the high speed of Lisa that had bought them so much time to prepare.

If they had waited for Alice and Dylan, by the time they arrived the Broken Suns would already be on alert and a big mess would probably start with them unprepared.

The newcomers’ breathing was labored, revealing the physical effort they were putting into carrying the heavy protective equipment against radiation and void mana contamination. They looked completely exhausted from the long climb before dawn, with no idea that the enemy’s eyes were already watching them with full attention.

Lohan focused his processing channels to record every visual and auditory detail of the intruders, making sure no important information slipped by unnoticed.

Leading that group of officers, walking with a haste that betrayed his nervousness, was Eldrin, the blue robed mage Lohan had monitored in the second floor meeting room of the mansion.

His face was tense, and his fingers gripped the handle of a crystal staff that glowed with a violent, uneven light.

Right behind him came Garius, the golden armored division leader who seemed to hate being awake at that hour before dawn, the scout Sariel, who carried her bow in hand with a posture of continuous alertness, and the cleric Orion, who inspected the surrounding rocks with palpable suspicion.

Although all of them were fully armed and prepared for possible combat in the forest of Mythlorien, the officers walked in a relaxed manner, chatting openly among themselves, never once imagining that Astralis Requiem’s leadership was hidden just a few meters away, watching every millisecond of their movement at the rift.

After all, to them this was a completely secret operation that not even their own guild leader knew was happening, so how the fuck would Astralis Requiem, who had never even found traces of them in Thalendor, know about this last minute operation, and not only that, but take steps to personally step in and deal with them during it?!

And it was precisely this feeling, or rather, the lack of urgency, that Lohan wanted to capitalize on.