Absently I glanced over to Ellaine. Her hands worked at the lure, doing this and that as she prepped it. An hour had already long passed and in that time I had recovered a great amount of my mana.
If I had to put it to a percent then I would say that it would be about 90-95% full. It wasn't all the way to a hundred percent but it was close.
Enough that I could perform that slashing skill once again. Honestly, I wish that I had practiced it before coming here. I could feel that I was wasting so much mana doing this but I couldn't help it as it was so new to me.
In fact that previous time was only my second time triggering it and the first had been a fluke. Honestly it was a wonder that it even worked in the first place.
I had been thinking about the skill for a while, well a while being the hour that I had rested. And at first I had come to the conclusion that it had been using the blade as a catalyst to launch my mana into a sharpened wave.
But no, that was not correct. When I dove even deeper into the mechanics of it I found something that I was not sure what to make of.
As I was recollecting my experiences with both the times that I had used the ability there was one common factor excluding the result.
And that common factor was that it strained not only me but the sword too. It had even broken [Promised Future]. Even now I still mourned that, my very first creation. And all it could do was break into pieces under the stress of my own mana.
Yet even now I could feel it, with the information that I had, the strings were connecting. My current hypothesis was that the mana that I used would somehow copy the concept of sharpness from the sword and project that onto itself.
And if that was true then if I could figure out how I did it then I would be able to drastically reduce the amount of mana used.
But for now I didn't have the time to experiment.
Smoke wafted from the lure, yet it seemed aimless, as if it had no purpose. I knew just what to do.
Call it instinct or whatever but I knew that I needed to throw the corpse of the creature that we were targeting into the smoke of the Lure.
And that was exactly what I did. One of the creatures was picked from the pile of live creatures and I threw it into the smoke.
For a second the smoke just wafted around it before like a bloodhound it split into hundreds of thousands of pieces and sought out the other creatures.
I leaned over and took a look at what Ellaine was doing during this and only found her slaughtering the remaining creatures.
It was as if she was taking out her frustrations on the poor things. Respectfully I just looked over to the horizon.
With all my focus I felt the ground, feeling the tremors in the land as a stampede of creatures found their way towards us.
It was not obvious at first but after a couple moments of searching for the feel I was able to feel it. The footsteps of hundreds of thousands of beings.
Even if I was confident in both of our abilities I was still a tad nervous. It was not just the thousands that we slaughtered but tens of times more than that.
I took a shaky breath, resolving myself as I flooded my body with mana. It was different from the other times though.
In every other instance that I had reinforced myself I had done it with brute force but this time I was going to try something different.
I had suffused my body with it, finding the attributes of protection and strength that were scattered around my body using the feel of my own protective armor and bringing them to the forefront of my being.
My body stiffened as power flooded through me but at a cost, my flexibility. It felt like I couldn't do as much as I could earlier.
I let my breath out and undid the reinforcement around my body. Again I flooded my whole body with mana but this time I didn't focus on concepts instead I just tried to use the minimal amount of mana as possible.
And although I felt as though I could lower the amount even further that wouldn't be possible without practice and time. Time with which I did not have at all.
I looked over and flexed my body a little, it seemed that I had discovered two types of reinforcements. One focused on certain concepts and the other that was focused on balance.
…
I looked over to Ellaine as she stood from where she had sat. The lure long forgotten. When I had finally turned my head to look at her the lure was completely undefended. Not that we would need to defend it. It had already done its purpose and could now retire.
She tugged on the sheath at her side, taking into her hands [Dignity] waves of mana flying from her as she hardened her eyes.
There was no need to ask, we both knew that we would stand here and either prevail in slaughter or die from their overwhelming numbers.
For a moment nothing happened but then it started. The rumbling earthquake, of thousands upon thousands of creatures.
It had started once more but this time it felt closer, as if it was barely any distance from us and that was the truth.
As moments later from the horizon we both saw it, a gulp echoing between us. It was like a tidal wave of bodies, barely any distinction between one and the next.
And they were charging, as fast as they could.
I looked over to Ellaine and nodded. There was nothing left to do other than fight. This would be a final stand, determining our survival or death.