Magical Soul Parade - Chapter 311: Pompous Arcanists

Chapter 311: Pompous Arcanists

It had been difficult to even start a conversation because none of them could form coherent words through their chattering teeth.

Finn had needed to command Ryuga to shrink down his size to something much smaller and rein in his passive aura. Even at his reduced scale, Ryuga was still nearly as long as a football field, but at least he was no longer a mountain-sized behemoth that triggered a heart attack upon sight.

It was only then that Finn could finally get the information he wanted from those traumatized survivors.

He learned that they were the lucky few to have survived simply witnessing the battle that had raged here. It had been a clash between Preceptor-level entities, and while they had been miles away, the passive effects had been devastating. Of those who survived, some had lost their hearing, others had taken extreme levels of soul damage they were still struggling to recover from, and one had even been permanently blinded by the flashes of light.

But what Finn learned after piecing all the information together, especially from the most stable survivor’s broken description, confirmed his deductions…

The Husk had been here. Casmir had been here. And Althea had been here. In fact, she had lived in this fortress for weeks before the battle.

But most surprising of all, Elias had also been here. Apparently, he’d been trying to bring Althea into custody.

Finn rubbed his chin as he stood at the head of Ryuga, thinking about the current situation. Elias was after Althea. If he had to guess, Thalia had stayed low-key over the ages, and it was only now, after sensing his arrival as the Errant Heretic, that she had been forced to move. Was that why the Ossuary was after her? Or had she simply become too powerful to ignore?

He knew she had employed the use of the Errant sword he had given her. She had finally figured out what he had hinted to her back then. Perhaps that was how she had carved her way out and escaped the combined pressure of two Preceptors?

Even the Adept who narrated the story to him didn’t see the very end; she only knew that a powerful individual arrived suddenly and the wave of his power knocked her unconscious.

“Well, Althea is fine. That is what matters,” Finn murmured, settling his thoughts.

Presently, they had long left the fortress behind, traveling hundreds of miles into the deeper reaches of the tear. And what lay before them now was a place that looked as if it had been plucked right out of an apocalyptic world-end.

For miles as far as the eyes could see, the lands ahead of them hung in the sky in broken pieces. It was a shattered landscape of earth and rock, with massive chunks of soil floating aimlessly.

Below them, the earth was nothing but a gaping, bottomless abyss. It was as if gravity had been destroyed entirely in these lands, the laws of physics becoming progressively more drastic the farther Finn looked. The air itself seemed to shimmer with a lack of weight, and the very light of the sun was distorted as it passed through the gravity-free zones.

At the far horizon, a massive superstructure hung in the air. All the floating pieces of earth seemed to converge around a central point there, forming a super-large chain of landmasses that together looked like a spherical, massive hive.

Finn raised a brow as he observed the structure. He, Madoc, and Osmund floated in the air just outside the abrupt range where these broken gravity laws began. Ryuga hovered silently, his massive shadow-like scales absorbing the light. Finn observed the whole thing carefully, focusing his Error Vision on the structure toward the horizon.

Suddenly, he spotted movement.

“People?” Osmund whispered behind him, his voice full of doubt.

It would turn out he was right. Those tiny dots started to grow larger as they approached, and Finn saw them clearly long before they drew near.

Ossuarists. Flying towards them on regal griffin soul masses, along with Arcanists mounted on complex artifact contraptions that pulsed with blue energy. The artifacts had rotating gears and stabilizing fins, keeping them level in the erratic atmosphere.

“Mechanus empire Arcanists,” Finn noted calmly as the party finally reached them and hovered at a very safe distance. They were clearly wary of the large, serpentine creature that served as Finn’s mount. Only two of the party members flew further forward to speak to Finn across the distance.

“Who are you and what is your purpose here?” one of them shouted, his voice amplified by some sort of acoustic artifact. “Identify yourself and the two individuals behind you.” His eyes had settled on Madoc and Osmund with a suspicion that was understandable given that they both looked totally alien with their white fur and curved horns.

Finn chuckled at the question, but he didn’t answer yet. Instead, he ran his gaze across all of them first, taking in their equipment and their auras before speaking:

“My purpose here?” He repeated with a mocking tone. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think the place ahead belonged to you or something.”

The Mechanus speaker, a middle-aged man with the stern face of a veteran, frowned. He was an Arcanist whose aura alone showed he was firmly within the range of Master rank, seasoned by years of combat. Beside him, the second speaker, a young female Ossuarist, looked at Finn again, this time with a more thoughtful, assessing expression.

“Watch your tongue, boy,” the Mechanus Arcanist chided. His aura flared slightly, a display of ego common to those who had reached the Master rank.

“You look to be a talented Ossuarist, given that you have managed to bind such a creature. It is a powerful soul mass, especially for one so young…” he paused, his tone taking on a sagely, chastising air. “But that does not mean you can go around saying whatever you want. You will live a very short life if you do not learn respect for boundaries.”

Finn didn’t respond to the lecture. He simply watched the man. The arrogance was almost amusing.

“This place you see is under the jurisdiction of the joint coalition,” the man continued. “We do not allow unidentified entities to approach without vetting. You would do well to—”

Finn tsked softly and nudged Ryuga forward. He dismissed the man entirely, intending to go directly toward the superstructure in the distance.

Instantly, the whole party went into a state of high alert.

“Stop!” the Arcanist shouted. “Halt your mount or we will be forced to attack!”