Jake raised his right hand and felt the mana move for the first ti as a deliberate action rather than a background process.
Forty-five units left his pool and the ability activated with a sensation like cold water running from his palm outward, invisible and purposeful.
The lead soldier in the advancing squad stopped mid-stride.
The Chasm grasp had found the command crystal in his chest through the gap his Mana Sight had identified in the armor’s mana-resistant plating, and the compression force was working on sothing internal and small rather than the soldier’s body as a whole.
The crystal resisted for two seconds, its artificial construction having genuine structural integrity, and then it fractured under compression that had no physical component to deflect.
The soldier collapsed instantly, no transition between functional and fallen, the collective thinking that had been sustaining his movent cut off at its root.
The rest of the squad registered the loss through their own crystals and their advance paused while the collective recalculated, and Jake used the pause to activate Shadow Infusion.
The mana rged with his shadow matter in a way that produced a visible effect - the shadows around him deepened and moved differently, taking on a weight and presence that they hadn’t carried before, and when he manifested shadow serpents from the infused darkness they ca out larger than any he’d previously created, their scales holding a faint mana luminescence that was new, their movent carrying more physical mass behind it.
Six infused shadow serpents entered the open floor and crossed the distance to the squad before the altered soldiers had finished their recalculation, moving with the speed that shadow matter moved when it was also carrying four thousand units of his mana behind its montum.
The squad responded with the tactical discipline of their programming - splitting fire to address the serpents as threats while attempting to maintain pressure on the barrier, dividing their suppression pattern to cover both problems simultaneously.
It was the correct response and it wasn’t enough, because the infused serpents absorbed three volleys before the accumulated kinetic impact degraded them, and in those three volleys Jake was already moving along the room’s edge using Night Vision and Silent Movent to close the distance to the squad’s flank while their fire was directed at the constructs.
He reached the flank soldier before the squad’s collective registered his approach and drove his fist into the soldier’s chest with enough force to feel the command crystal shatter against his knuckles through the uniform fabric.
The soldier dropped.
The squad’s collective mind contracted around the second loss, their formation tightening as the distributed thinking compensated for two missing nodes, and Jake felt the tactical shift through his Blood Sense as their intent changed from advance-and-suppress to defensive consolidation.
They were going to be harder to approach directly now.
"Maudlina," Jake said, pulling back from the squad’s periphery.
"I need thirty seconds of full coverage, not sections. Everything you have."
Maudlina looked at her mages’ condition and then at Jake and made the rapid calculation of soone spending a resource they’d prefer to keep.
"Thirty seconds," she confird.
The barriers expanded and rged into a single continuous field that pushed outward from the group’s position and drove the squad’s advance back under the renewed pressure, the mages burning their reserve in a concentrated burst that bought the ti Jake had asked for.
He activated Dark Pulse.
The mana discharge left his body as a radial wave that he shaped with Mana Sight’s understanding of exactly where the squad was positioned, concentrating the outward pulse in the direction of the altered soldiers rather than releasing it equally in all directions.
A hundred and twenty units left his pool and the wave hit the squad with the non-lethal threshold set to maximum, the compressed mana detonating against their collective network with enough disruption to the crystal-based communication that the squad’s unified movent fragnted for the seconds it needed to fragnt.
Jake had quickly passed the word about the command crystals and they all need to destroy them and it will make the soldiers stop.
Ankerita moved into the gap before it closed, her talent working with the spatial precision Jake had co to rely on, and the compressed force she released targeted the chest cavities that Mana Sight had mapped, hitting the command crystals in three soldiers simultaneously with directed accuracy that didn’t require her to physically touch them.
Three more dropped.
The remaining two soldiers in the squad broke collective function entirely - two nodes couldn’t sustain the network that six had been running, and without the collective they were individuals in unfamiliar territory, their movents losing the tactical coherence that had made them dangerous, and Maureen’s n dealt with individuals far more efficiently than they’d dealt with the formation.
The ground floor went quiet.
Jake stood in the middle of it and checked his mana pool.
[ CURRENT MANA: 4,521 UNITS ]
His pool had barely registered the expenditure.
The fight barely dented his reserves, revealing just how much power he hadn’t been using.
Ankerita looked at him like she’d just realized she’d underestimated him.
"The mana discharge," she said.
"That was a top class mage ability."
"Yes it is," Jake said.
"You have been practising magic too?"
"No, its my first ti using it."
"First ti," she repeated, as though confirming sothing she’d suspected but hadn’t wanted to state prematurely.
"You must have got that from your mother."
Jake nodded.
"Apparently it ca with considerably more fuel than average," Jake said.
Maudlina had appeared at her sister’s shoulder and was looking at Jake with bright, undisguised interest, and she seed very pleased while looking at him.
"You are full of suprises, bou!" she asked.
"Just how many tricks you have up your sleeve."
"Enough," Jake said.
Maudlina’s expression was full of excitent, and her eyes glead with mischief.
The group spread through the ground floor in the careful way of fighters, assessing a cleared space for secondary threats, checking corners and the doorway the squad had erged from and the ceiling where the lighting panels continued their sourceless illumination with complete indifference to the violence that had just occurred beneath them.
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