A tense minute passed, then another, a bead of sweat forming on Axl's forehead and slowly trailing down his face. He half expected the metal dryad herself to burst in, or an army of undead wolves on his trail. But none of that broke the eerie silence of the tent, and finally, the seed was finished.
The arm seemed unchanged for a moment, floating in the air from a minor array plate below it, but then it started to dissolve, turning into dust and then just a spattering of Mana residue. Quickly, he checked his updated challenge notification, confirming this was it.
>>Siege of Valioon challenge update:
>>Destroy sources of Undeath (2/8 destroyed)
>>Reward: Improvement of rewards obtained from Law of Succession challenge, proportional to number of sources destroyed.
Disappointed he didn’t get to take the arm as well, Axl still took the array plates on the ground and even some of the Undeath-activated ammunition, only not able to take the largest of them, since he felt it would require far too much internal Mana to shove it into his storage.
Pretty much finished, Axl wondered how the slit he would leave. The two entrances were well guarded and watched, and if he tried to cut into an edge of the tent's rigid exterior, that also risked being seen by the guards outside. He was about to use one of Moxlin's camouflage arrays, but then he realized they weren't designed to be used in this mist, and it almost certainly would cause some disturbance that might make his presence even louder than just [Mana Shroud]. He'd not thought of it until just now, realizing he had basically painted himself into a corner with his half-assed sneakiness.
Then he had an idea. A terrible, slit-cursed idea.
Axl cleaned up the blood from the ground as best he could, covering the bits he couldn't with the large ammo still in the room, moving it around so that it would ever so subtly block the view of much of the middle of the room. He then took out the body of the Strength-focused undead and set him cross-legged near some of the unfinished ammo, and did the same with one of the mage bodies he could somewhat put back together and keep from falling apart. Lastly, he unloaded the cart, adding to the room's clutter, and shuffled back underneath it.
As he waited for the cart driver to return, he couldn't help but think of the many ways this was an awful plan. The driver would notice something was off and raise an alarm, a mage would come back ahead of time and notice, the outside guards would sense something wasn't right.
The waiting was harder than when he was stuck absorbing the arm's Undeath, his teeth grinding against each other with unbearable loudness, feeling like that would give him away. At the very least, he was glad Cas Kaltan would never hear he tried something this dumb—the grim thought oddly reassuring in that moment.
Eventually, the damn cart came rolling in, and Axl strained [Mana Shroud] to its limit, as he focused on the bored, sluggish motions of the driver. She even paused for a moment to look at the dead loader, seeing only a part of his cross-legged body, but she quickly looked away, a soft tisc sound of her tongue clicking in her mouth, as if she disapproved of his laziness, or wished to be able to share in it.
To his overwhelming surprise, the woman simply hooked off the pillbug from her full cart and hooked it onto the empty one, and started off. It was such a surprise Axl was even a bit late in lifting himself up, legitimately not expecting this to happen. The cart left the tent without incident, then slowly made its way down its usual path, the driver returning to her attempts at meditation while poorly driving the vehicle.
Sharpening up, Axl left the cart when he saw a narrow gap between tents, avoiding any nearby undead attention, and quickly started towards the next nearest source of Undeath. This time, he hurried far more than before, pushing the limits of getting close to a wandering soldier, when before he would take the time to duck into a tent. After all, it was only a matter of time before his latest stunt was uncovered, at which point he expected the camp to rouse up entirely.
In nearly twenty minutes, he covered more ground than he did making his way from the outskirts of the siege to its middle, and soon he found no more tents, instead a wide open ground full of corpses, all neatly lined up one next to the other.
He paused, cursing silently, since the next source of Undeath was there, wandering among the dead. This was a problem, since the wide-open area offered no real ability for him to hide, anybody being able to look in from the tents or deeper in was likely able to see him quite easily.
As if to punctuate the situation, he heard a loud, moaning wail from behind, a stern undead voice uttering, "An infiltrating enemy is in our midst. Estimated to be an assassin at the middle of F-Grade. Peak rewards for contribution. All forces in sectors fang, claw, and spear, rise to attention and begin emergency patrols."
The wail then returned, and the message restarted. Soon, Axl noticed the undead stirring within the tents, begrudgingly leaving their meditation to follow their new orders. He'd been able to escape detection so far, but he'd be immediately seen with all the undead roaming around.
Maybe he could charge into one of the tents, kill the inhabitants and just camp in there? But that held risks of its own, with perhaps others noticing the missing and reporting it.
Instead, Axl charged into the field of corpses, focusing his [Mana Shroud] to boosting Agility as much as he could, hoping there was some sort of processing facility or at least unevenness in the terrain he could better hide in.
There was none of that. After several seconds of sprinting, the loud undead voice still booming in his ears, he saw it was only an endless field of bodies. Soon, it filled his entire view before it got obscured by the mist, and he slowed down, then dropped next to one of the corpses, to a space between two bodies where there could conceivably be a third due to an irregularity in the soil, and waited.
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First, he activated one of Moxlin's Camouflage arrays, lining up the six talismans evenly on his chest and activating them. He raised his hand and saw that indeed he was see-through, but with a truly noticeable green outline where his [Mana Shroud] was blending him into the mist, in addition to keeping its attack at bay. Axl deactivated [Mana Shroud]'s Mana absorbing function, redirecting the use of will to empowering Endurance and Vitality, and while he could still deal with the assault of the mist well enough, it would still cause a small amount of damage over time, and there was still a visible distortion on the edges of the camouflage.
It was as he feared, the camouflage array was useless in the mist, and Axl deactivated it, annoyed that he had to burn one of the six he had on hand with the experiment.
Soon, the message only repeated every few minutes, but the wailing alarm continued every thirty seconds, as if to remind the undead to keep to their search. Axl had to assume they would come here too, and if any did, he'd need a lot more than [Mana Shroud] to evade detection. He could dig a hole and put himself inside, but he was worried that the disturbed earth would be easily detectable by undead that were earth or soil-elves, perhaps even with Cores of that attunement. And then he'd be caught and literally in a hole, so not the best way to start a fight.
Maybe he could use [Mana Shroud] to get him in the ground and more attuned to earth and soil? It was feasible, and in line with how he used [Mana Shroud] so far, but something about the idea rubbed him the wrong way, it wasn't how he wanted to develop the Skill he'd had since birth, just reflexively changing it to best survive the next threat in front of him.
It was like Oocile warned in his annotation of [Elided Tome of Equanimity], that he regretted furthering some of his Skills in ways that ultimately served him poorly, even if it felt necessary to survive. He'd been able to correct some of those deviations later, at great cost, but not all.
So setting aside the threat, Axl took a moment to think what direction he needed [Mana Shroud] to go in. It was already at proficiency G.8, so only two more improvements before it reached F grade, like his Lineage, and then it could only be improved more when he reached F-Grade himself. It was also the aspect of himself he wanted to reach the F-Grade next, the one most worthwhile to push his cap from level 22 to 24, just in case he had to ascend at level 24 for one reason or another.
He thought of its multiple uses, how he used it for alchemy to bring in Mana and control it in concert with [Gastric Cauldron], how he used it to boost his Attributes, often synergizing powerfully with his class or at the very least temporarily side-stepping its weaknesses in not letting him specialize. He also used it a good deal to hide, but that felt wrong, an oversimplification.
He remembered sitting at his soldering station, the narrow desk crowded in his rig bay, and how he used [Mana Sense] to see how his circuits functioned, to better improve his plate armor’s oxygen purification efficiency or fix an out-of-balance drill motor. His Skill was to help him see the world and navigate it effectively, understand and reach out to change it. It was insight and will.
He didn't need to attune [Mana Shroud] to the ground's Mana, specifically, or even the light that reflected from his body, letting others see him. Because that was the vehicle of vision, photons entering eyes that have touched an object, carrying its shape and color and texture. He needed to bend the light around him, like a stone sitting on a river, parting the waters to either side.
No, that felt wrong, the image natural but flawed. Water would be disturbed that way, forming a crest of turbulence behind the rock, the water parted and pushed aside in a chaotic morass. His will demanded better. Then he remembered reading about how the Terran ancients build their airplanes, with wings that parted the air in a specific way, letting the force push an entire metal construct up, miraculously without Mana and only simple combustion engines.
This is what he wanted, to push the light aside and bring it together behind him, not to propel him this way or that, but with the controlled will of seamless reconstruction.
Getting up, Axl took a deep breath, arms slightly outstretched as he focused entirely on [Mana Shroud], not relinquishing his absorption and takeover of the mist, but wanting to extend that to the light from the sun above that hit his body, revealing him for all to see.
Because unlike the ancients and their lack of Mana, this light had Mana of its own, a simple mixture of heat and light-attuned Mana carrying matter so thin and ephemeral it didn't even seem to be there at all. Its flow was also unrelenting, Axl barely able to hold onto a thin stream before it was disrupted, flowing everywhere in a chaotic morass.
Still, time flowed slowly as Axl iterated, because he'd seen that speed before. It was lightning, but devoid of the weight the Dao impinged upon it, the terrible power it carried in its bolts. Upon the realization, his Glimpse of Lightening quivered, but Axl tamped it down, not wanting to sully his insight with the taboo element. It was not what he was after now, after all.
Despite rejecting the potency of lightning, the insight remained, and soon Axl parted the light before him and reformed it behind him, effortlessly, as if cutting flesh with his sword, and stitching his own with his healing. It was not enough, however, as light was bombarding him from all sides, as he was visible from all sides, and he needed to be at the center of this, untouched, light passing by him from all directions, reforming into the vision it carried before touching him.
Again, the vision of lightning inspired a solution, since a bolt of lightning was no object to be blocked, it was energy and vital power made manifest, crossing any medium, even other aspects of itself, as he could vividly remember in his vision. Light was the same, streams that passed each other effortlessly, for they were no mere river, they were pure energy manifest, unshackled by the limitations of lesser physicality.
Axl raised his hand, struggling to maintain the insight as it risked crumbling in the lesser ignorance of the sensible, the untrue but apparent. He saw it perfectly transparent—not the somewhat distorted camouflage of Moxlin's talismans, but eerily complete invisibility. Even as he moved the hand against the sun or close to the ground, it was maintained, so omnidirectional as well. Seeing his concepts work solidified their resilience, his mind coming to terms with his counterintuitive realization, and he felt [Mana Shroud] settle, now able to grant him invisibility.
He even gained a step in proficiency, which he hoped—not that he didn't expect the gain, but more that he hoped to restrain the gain to only a single step, to not warp the Skill so fully into specializing in stealth. It was only an extension of his curiosity and will, after all.
Skills: Mana Shroud (Rare, Proficiency G.9), Mind-Soul Bulwark (Rare, Proficiency G.4), Attuned Drill Strike (Rare, Proficiency G.2), Bolting Motion (Rare G.4), Mental Map of Irialith (Common), Minor Telekinesis (Uncommon, Proficiency G.4)
What he did not expect was an Achievement to follow his upgrade of [Mana Shroud].
>>Achievement Obtained:
>>Grounded wielder of true invisibility (Stable):
>>Obtain true invisibility while still in the G-Grade. Reward enhanced by not using Linage Inheritance, dedicated light or stealth-based Skill, or impartment.
>>Reward: +50 to Perception, +10 to Intelligence, +20 to Wisdom. +10% to Perception.
>>Oocile rebalancing activated.
>>Reward: +8 to all Attributes. +1% to all Attributes.
Always good to get extra Attributes, after all.