Luckily for his moral dilemma, the survivors simply attacked without reservation, the swordswoman racing ahead of the mages, her blade glowing with a faint orange light. Sam sighed, and raised his left palm. A cone of devastation pulsed from his hand, his Ancient rank projectile skill tearing the surface off the land for over five miles. When the dust cleared, all three of them were still left standing. The mages were shielded somewhat by a set of azure force bubbles, but their skin was still scorched.
The swordswoman was a lot worse off than the mages. The right half of her body was in ruins. At the last moment, she had twisted herself, using her blade to shield from the attack. Now it was a length of melted metal, completely useless.
Sam teleported in, feeling threads of the Dao reach for him effectively as the mages tried to lock down space. They possessed Daos of a similar stage to his own, but given his secondary Fragments, he still had an edge over them. Besides, even if he hadn’t been able to teleport, his sheer speed was high enough to blitz his targets anyway.
Terra’s Will finished off the swordswoman with a lateral swipe, a ghostly sheath of Dao energy ensuring that the E Ranker died. Her upper body was obliterated, and the flesh shot out with such force that it noticeably cracked the rocks below. Sam shot through the cloud of blood, and was upon the mages a moment later.
They slammed their staffs down in unison, and a swirling portal appeared beneath their feet. Sam reached out, trying to get to them in time, but it was too late. The E Rankers were pulled through the portal, and out of Sam’s grasp. Before it could fully close, though, he thrust a condensed bomb of purified mana in after them, hoping that whoever was on the other side would be met with a deadly surprise.
On his end, Sam couldn’t see if his parting gift had achieved anything, so he pulled up his notifications instead. That party had been surprisingly essence rich, boosting him almost to the next level. Before Sam let his victory get to his head, he felt a slight prickling on the back of his neck, coming from the direction of the obelisk. He sighed. The Shadow Raven would be a far more difficult foe to face. A few easy wins against weaklings meant nothing in the face of true might.
***
On the other side of the portal, the two alien mages ran for their lives as a blastwave of concentrated mana tore through their landing point. The prospectors made their home in a heavily populated area of the city of Anang, capital of a D Rank planet named Stillgrave. It was named that because the planet itself was the remnant of a stillborn Worldmaw, the massive egg that the baby had died in acting as the crust of the planet. Gravity had done the rest in terms of its internals, compressing them down into a substance nearly indistinguishable from magma. It was a planet famed for its connections to a dozen elemental planes, as the lingering pallor of potency left by the planet’s macabre birth pierced through the dimensions. Each major city had a rift leading to a different elemental plane, with Anang being that of Earth.
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“Who in the gods was that?” One of the mages exclaimed, paying no heed to the collapsing building behind him.
“I don’t know, but the Foreman is going to be displeased with us. Granak was one of the best squad leaders,” the other replied, genuine fear in his voice. “You know how the boss gets when missions fail.”
The mages teleported across the city, which was built in the caldera of a massive mountain, a piece of the Worldmaw’s egg, broken in the failed birth of the monster. It jutted out of the planet at a sharp angle, and over the eons, its surface had been ground down, forming cliffs and screefields more recently shaped into cities. Anang was a crude sort of place, filled with the hard-bitten sort that found themselves delving into the elemental planes in the first place.
The largest building in the city was perched on the very peak of the mountain, a citadel of gemstones and stark black rock. It was where the mysterious Foreman made his home, lording over dozens of teams of prospectors. The man was on the cusp of D Rank, but due to his cultivation path, he rarely left his castle. He followed a truncated version of the path of Sovereignty, one oriented around monetary gain rather than a sort of feudal power system. The more money he made without having to lift a finger, the stronger he got.
The mages, well known within the organization, were allowed to pass unharmed over the battlements of the fortress, making their way down into the main courtyard. A large notice board stood in the center, covered in slips of paper. Each had a message on them requesting a certain quantity of a certain mineral.
One of them glowed a dull red, showing that more than half of the prospectors assigned to it were dead. Both of the mages grimaced at the sight, but carried on regardless. Heading towards the spire in the center of the courtyard, waves of crushing pressure began to beat down on their heads.
Bowing their heads, the mages headed into the spire. It was completely empty, save for a staircase winding around the inside of the tower. With twinned expressions of dread, they started up the stairs.
