Chapter 72

'It translated, place where you go to empty your bowels, but not toilet. Have half of my words just sounded like gibberish?'

'Maybe the magic ring is having trouble with words it is unfamiliar with.' Alex dried his with a rough towel and looked at the wooden ring for a moment before smiling.

"But what exactly is doing all the work? Or should I say who? I know you are listening to this, hurry up and speak up, weird word peeper."

'If it works by saying by translating my thoughts and emotions rather than my words, then It wouldn't be failing. Fine hold your tongue.' Alex thought before leaving the room where you go to empty your bowels.

Alex watched in amazement as he saw how the three worked.

They had separated the projected area into parts. Two parts had a bit of movement and the third was not being controlled. The elder is already working on attempting to sense it.

"Can summon more of it?" Ecknat asked as she noticed Alex return.

"The lightning mana?"

She nodded. "Like what you did after fighting. I was able to feel something when that ball of light appeared."

"I probably can, but lightning has had a tendency to be uncontrollable." He said as he thought back to what ha happened.

'Large concentrations of lightning mana, can make a catalyst or crystallized lightning like what happened with that car. This… might be a good thing. I mean as long as the damage isn't too bad.'

'A catalyst could be exactly what they need to jumpstart their affinities, it could kill them as well though.'

'Could it? If they can move as fast as they do and not break every bone in their body, does lightning even hurt them like it does me?'

'Did me.' He thought as he remembered that he had undergone a strange change.

"Ok. Turn the device off and move it to a safe spot." Alex commanded as lightning arced in his hands.

"How do I capture electricity exactly? Never mind I have a plan of where to begin." He said as he drew some of the surrounding lightning mana towards himself.

Alex made a ring of spacial energy. As he brought his hand to it, it lit up. 'That… was barely any energy.'

The shape of the ring changed and grew longer as Alex tried to force the electricity into it. The size of the electricity within his hands grew he released it in the ring, but other than a small portion of it most arced towards the ground and disappeared.

He sighed as he changed the ring to a large sphere. He reached out to allow the energy to enter it, but instead he felt a light shock as the lightning mana return to him.

Alex looked up. 'It would help if there was some more lightning mana.'

'Okay, so it's only visible when it arcs through the air.' He smacked his head as he realized how dumb he was.

'The air gets burnt, charred, no ionized. It can't travel through the air itself, it has to do something with the electrons of the molecules…'

'Change.' Alex's head felt like it was about to explode.

'Mana is an energy which changes how things are perceived, it changes reality. It shouldn't exist, but is found everywhere and flows towards the real counterparts. Conjured energy disappears, but if an earth mage moves a pile of dirt it doesn't fade. If I make my own shadow darker it returns to normal after I stop changing it. But a conjured flame still sears flesh and a rock crushes bones. So our affinities are something which allows us to control a specific portion of reality before it is corrected.'

'But in that brief moment where we control it, it is reality. Something isn't right, if that is true than lightning that I conjure would be enough. No!'

He came to a realization as he conjured up a ball of lightning. He surrounded it with spacial energy and immediately froze the area, but just as usually the lightning returned to wherever it came from. He scanned the entire sphere but found no large concentrations of any particles.

The three elves felt uneasy as Alex started laughing all of a sudden.

'Mages my ass, we are more like reality changers.' He stopped laughing as he looked towards the device.

'I don't really know how to get natural lightning at the moment, but I still haven't tried using trapping mana itself and compressing it. My spacial affinity can affect it but i cannot see it with my spacial affinity, just what exactly is mana?'

He focused as he looked at nothing in general. After a few moments several different types of mana appeared in his vision. 'Perfect, it's just like when I first awakened a lightning affinity.'

He felt nauseous as his perspective changed from being able to see the mana to not being able to. 'I had always thought that it was a strange side effect from pushing myself too far.'

After poking and prodding the mana particles, Alex scooped up as many as he could. A humongous cube in front of him was filled to the brim with little differently colored spots.

As little sparks of lightning, and even flashes of light and darkness appeared, Ecknat spoke up and asked Alex. "What are you doing?"

"I'm trying to compress the mana and see what happens."

'Although that will be difficult with the air pressure.'

He thought for a moment before making one of his spacial scoopers phase through everything. Although they didn't, the mana was still reacting as if it was being pushed around.

'Maybe because their both forms of energy?' Whatever the case is this will help a lot.'

Mana began getting expelled from within the cube as most of what Alex could see, were the lightly tinged yellow particles remaining.

Suddenly the sky above lit up with crackles of electricity as the mana was forced closer and closer. A loud hum was felt as alex brought it closer to the ground.

'Water and dust. I guess even though I can't see the mana that doesn't mean it wasn't present.' He thought as he watched new forces pop into existence.

He pressed the energy closer and closer, the snaps growing louder until they settled down. Alex changed his focus as the mana particles faded from his vision, but a nearly invisible object was still seen just a few feet in front of him. He increased the pressure and the object grew more and more visible. They all watched in amazement as the object grew darker.

"You made a rock." Taeral said.

"A lightning rock." Ospret corrected.

"No a lightning stone." Alex answered as it slowly floated towards him. He slowly reached out to touch it, half expecting to feel a great shock.

He opened his eyes which had unknowingly closed as he felt it land in his hand. 'Nothing happened?'

He closed his eyes once again in order to focus on the energy within. He watched in awe as he felt lightning mana naturally travel towards the stone and settle in the air near it. He took a moment to try and draw some of the energy in and nearly dropped the stone as a stream of mana entered him.

'Even when I was up on the mountain it was not nearly this efficient. If the mana flowed this easily then I wouldn't have been in the Noble class.'

"Can you feel the mana?" Alex asked while turning towards Ecknat.

"No but I can definitely feel that stones presence." She said while staring at the stone in his hands.

He could feel that she wanted the stone so he tossed it towards her.

"How long did that take?" Alex asked.

"Around half an hour in human time." Taeral answered.

'Human time?'

He turned back to the elder.

"Try to draw the mana within the lightning stone within yourself, and tell me if you get this feeling similar to fullness or something breaking."

"I'll have to ask for your forgiveness but it'll have to wait. The other elders have likely felt it's presence and are on the their way here. I have to take it away and hide it's presence before they arrive. You two take him out through the cellar."

Alex noticed the worry on her face.

"So they didn't know that I was still here."

Ecknat shook her head.

"That's fine you must've had your reasons."

He turned to the other two. "Lead the way."

'She is a really good liar.' He thought while being pulled down a set of dark stairs.

Above ground Alex was busily removing any traces of himself while also setting up create paths of broken branches, hoping that if they do decide to investigate the area, that they wouldn't know where to begin.

"That guy that I fought, was he an elder like Ecknat." He asked.

A surprised look appeared on the two elves faces as they realized that the elder had shared her name with Alex. "N-no, he would have been at some point though. After he was caught he lost all hopes of gaining that title." Taeral answered.

"So, the ones above, are they as strong as her?"

"Some, and some are stronger."

Alex nodded.

"Why are we going so slow?"

"Their senses are sharper than you would expect."

"Then let's just run, I'll dampen the noise and vibrations." He said as he silently took off sprinting in the dark tunnel.

A strange feeling spread throughout his body as he ran and pushed himself to go faster and faster. With no bit of reference to how fast he was moving in the dark tunnels he could feel that the two elves were easily keeping up with him.

Alex had never felt so free before. He didn't know how long he had been running but he was sure that back home, he would have torn a few muscles and be lying down trying to recover with some light mana.

"Slow down, we are coming up on the exit."

Alex slowed down and caught his breath while Ospret opened up an old door which of course dropped a bunch of loose dirt onto her hair.

A grumble was heard as Alex covered his stomach with a hand. "Sorry."

"It's fine we're already out of the village, we just have to dodge the patrols and we will be out." Taeral said as she climbed out of the hole.

"We?" Alex asked.

"Ospret works as a healer but after you fell asleep, Ecknat told everyone that she had to go out for important business." Taeral said while pointing towards the now blushing elf.

"And I, told everyone yesterday that I would be going off to join her. Going on an adventure with an alien is just to interesting to pass up."

"An alien?… Oh right, I guess I am kinda…"

Taeral looked around. "Wait here for a moment, I stashed some things that I would be taking, and I'll get a look at the path ahead while I'm at it."

She took off quietly while Alex and Ospret found a small area nearby that would make it difficult to spot them.

"Will we be able to find these spots to talk to the gods without the maps that Ecknat was going to get?"

"All it takes is a bit of talking and asking questions to find out where to go." She answered.

"That will be fun." Alex said the sarcasm in his voice evident.

"What you don't like talking?" She asked.

"I'm just not used to it, when I was younger it didn't always go well, but things got better in the world over the years."

"There you two are. Taking the time to get to know each other Huh. Here Ospret put this on. Let's go I found an opening we can go though, but we have to go now or we will be sitting here waiting for another."

Ospret put on a cloak which covered her from head to toe and the they quietly followed Taeral who carefully looked around while urging the to pick up the pace.