I've Got A Mana Processor In A Magic World-Chapter 201: Void Phantom: Spatial Seam
"This is fucking space magic!" Zephyr yelled as he gripped the cut on his other arm instinctively to stem the bleeding.
The cut itself, because of the nature of the attack that wounded him, was uncanny. It wasn't just a normal gash, rather, it was more like a deletion. Like the skin that was supposed to be cut was missing. A thin, perfectly clean slice of flesh, about six inches long, had been removed from his forearm as if by a razor-sharp, invisible wire. He could even see the musculature beneath as blood spilled out.
As he scanned the chamber for any more monsters, he noted the uncanny ambience of this new chamber — Level 3, Void Phantom Den, as the Voice of The World had just tonelessly announced.
It filled Zephyr with an awareness of a palpable wrongness. The chamber was much larger than even the previous Level 2 chamber, but compared to that, this was utterly silent… unnaturally so. Even the light was dim, casting long, distorted shadows that seemed to warp and fold on the ground eerily.
And the fact that there were no other monsters besides this one single Void Phantom made Zephyr extremely alarmed.
"Shit!" he sucked in a breath as he stared at the ghost-like figure of the monster he was meant to face up against on this level. "What have I gotten myself into… How am I supposed to go up against that?" he hissed, before gritting his teeth and dashing towards the Phantom despite the alarm bells ringing in his head.
'It's better to attack than to stay put like a sitting duck!'
Perhaps the fact that it was only one creature served as a spur to be daring. If he could overcome the phantom monster, then this level was done.
He charged straight at it with conviction, feeling more motivated as he covered more ground.
Surprisingly, the monster didn't even move, simply observing, unconcerned.
Zephyr couldn't have been happier. Immediately he was close enough that the Phantom was within his 10ft range, he activated the Fire Arrow spell saved in his register memory, blinking it into existence.
He felt it activate like normal, skipping the entire travel time and appearing directly inside the shimmering figure, right where he saw a congregated mass of darkness — its core probably. The sensible part of him knew what was going to happen. His short fight with Lytheron had shown him that space magic was the bane of his saved spells. But another part — the more wishful part of himself — hoped it wouldn't be so…
Reality turned out exactly the way his common sense expected.
The spell simply vanished… and without the slightest effect.
The void phantom's figure simply folded in on itself and reappeared some ten feet to the left, without traversing the intervening space. To the monster, it hadn't dodged. The physical distance simply ceased to exist for it, as though it had folded space for itself.
Your spells are never going to work, host. Aegis interjected.
The target creature is surrounded by a stable, low-level spatial distortion field. Therefore, your register-memory spells, which rely on displacing a spell attack directly into a target's physical location, will always be utterly useless since the target's space is not congruent with local spacetime…
"In English, please!" Zephyr yelled.
In other words… the spatial coordinates you are instructing the spell to appear in does not exist within the creature's personal frame.
"Well, fuck." Zephyr cursed. The one clutch he felt he could depend on now proved useless in this situation. The only option left for him was to cast spells the normal, 'slow way.'
"…if that would even work too," Zephyr muttered, just as the spatial phantom lunged at him.
Zephyr didn't have much experience with space magic. But for a creature that was this proficient in spatial magic, its movement was weird. Contrary to Zephyr's expectation that it would just appear right next to him out of nowhere, it charged at him in a rapid series of instantaneous spatial jumps.
Blink, blink, blink.
But that didn't mean it was slow by any means. Even with Zephyr's nano-enhanced senses, he could only barely track its movement, relying mostly on the distortion it left behind and those that very briefly — millisecond level — appeared just before it materialized in a position. The dim light in the chamber distorted and fractured around the creature whenever it moved, which also briefly revealed its next intended position before it fully arrived.
But spotting was one part, reacting was another.
With lightning quick reflexes, Zephyr threw himself sideways, bringing his legs up in the air with measured movements that ensured that as his feet hit the ground, he was in the perfect position to execute two lightning-quick spells. 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞
First, an instantaneous mental command for a basic earth spell, channeling his connection to the earth through his feet pressed against the floor.
An eruption of black stone — like a makeshift spear pillar — sprang up exactly where the creature was supposed to materialize.
Second, without breaking concentration, he executed a Basic Wind Gust, aiming it just over the creature's trajectory. The wind was meant to create friction and disorient the monster, giving him a precious half-second… that is, if it simply didn't phase through the monster again.
The two spells activated within a split second, as Zephyr's body was still regaining balance.
'It's on time!' Zephyr's mind was in hyperdrive, processing stimuli as fast as his body allowed. He watched as the spells hit the position in space just as the creature was about to appear, but again… nothing happened.
The creature materialized and phased through the earth construct as though it wasn't there. Its outline only kind of clipped the edge of the stone slightly before it phased through the solid matter as if the barrier existed on a parallel dimension. The wind gust, meanwhile, passed entirely through the creature's point of materialization, tapering out into a tame breeze in the distance.
The void phantom was already through the barrier and dashing at Zephyr, seemingly aiming for his center of mass.
Zephyr, who watched with wide eyes, commendably reacted quickly to his failed attack, turning his unbalanced momentum into a dive to the floor with his good arm, rolling backward and simultaneously activating his passive camouflage, {Silent Mirage}.
The spell activated within half a second, swallowing the noise of his movement and creating a field that cancelled all visual information of his presence. He blended into the surroundings, unseen and unheard.
The spatial creature stopped instantly. Its shimmering outline blurred, momentarily confused.
'Yes!' Zephyr thought.
Then, with an unnerving mechanical certainty, the creature snapped its gaze directly toward him, its body folding and preparing for the next instantaneous jump again.
"It sees me?!!" Zephyr yelled, dashing across the room even as the monster's gaze followed him mechanically.
Negative, host. It does not 'see' you in the traditional sense. I do not think it perceives light or sound the way you do. It's more like it senses spatial displacement, Aegis corrected.
Your {Silent Mirage} spell, while eliminating sound waves and distorting light, still requires an active mana envelope and manipulation of the local environment. Even when perfectly executed, your body and the mana shell around it occupy space. Your presence is an active gravitational anomaly in this creature's sensory range.
Zephyr felt his scalp tingle in true fear for the first time since he'd entered this dungeon. He couldn't hide, and all his spells were useless.
"I need to neutralize its spatial manipulation before I can do anything," he muttered as he sprinted sideways along the perimeter of the cavern. "I need a spell that can lock space."
You're grossly oversimplifying 'locking space', host. This creature is exploiting a low-level application of frame-dragging, essentially carrying a personal pocket of spacetime relative to its movement. To neutralize it, you must either introduce a counter-gravitational field or a high-energy plasma field that destabilizes the local geometry of the space it occupies, Aegis stated.
"Counter-gravitational field?" The translation came across through their neural link somewhat understandable. "I don't know gravity magic! And high-energy plasma requires charged particles and a medium, which I don't have in this dry air, Aegis!"
The spatial phantom was closing the distance again, bursting forward in a rapid succession of silent, instantaneous blinks.
Zephyr moved in response, zig-zagging across the cavern. Somewhere at the back of his mind he remembered that he was just seconds, or if he was lucky, minutes away from the other champions finding the correct route and coming in here.
But at this point, he kind of hoped for them to find him. He didn't care any longer. It might even give him time to think and figure out a way to get out of this terrible situation.
So far, Zephyr had just been dodging, running and firing effectively useless spells that did nothing to slow the phantom monster down over and over again.
This was now a passive situation — A passive situation that heavily favored the phantom monster rather than him.
In fact Zephyr had considered dashing back into the tunnels to the Level 2 chamber again, but the narrow, hive-like nature of the tunnel, coupled with the fact that the phantom monster could disregard all solid material meant he'd be doing himself more harm than good dashing for the tunnel.
The only option he had right now was to learn space magic on the fly… Something he hadn't bothered to do because Aegis had mentioned that it should be saved for a later Tier — something about having lots of expertise and needing Zephyr to have the capability to follow up.
But Zephyr wasn't looking for anything advanced. He just needed something basic. This was no longer a fight. His survival was literally on the line right now!
"Aegis, the fundamentals! How does it work? Just give me the basic physics idea! I don't need anything much!" Zephyr yelled as he twisted his body unnaturally at the dying minute to evade a spatial slash from the Phantom monster.
The concept is simple but highly non-intuitive. The creature bends spacetime around itself, creating a local, closed loop. It does not move within the loop, rather, it simply instructs the loop to shift its coordinates, so if you want something basic, I'd recommend targeting the seam — the instantaneous boundary where its personal loop reconnects with the external reality frame. That is a notable weak point, Aegis explained hurriedly.
"And how do I spot the damn seam then?!!"
