They carefully approached the pack of Ohmior Knights. When there were only fifty metres more between them, the enemies brandished their weapons. The entire group stopped then. They were tense, waiting for John to go ahead and initiate the fight.

‘Got to get this right,’ John thought. If he placed the AoE wrong, it would make everything a tad more complicated than it had to be. “Three… two… one…” he counted down. “GO!”

The Unstable Arcana spawned at the same time the command rang out. A wave of silver magic washed over the backline of the semi-circular formation of enemies. Picking a target at random, the Unstable Arcana threw a Mana Chain at the bowman, while the staff and sword-wielding Ohmior Knights were only subjected to the damage.

Standing outside the area of effect, the four-armed and axe-wielding enemies started charging first. Shredding guitar and drum sounds accompanied Metra’s warcry as the First of Wrath met the extra-armed golem with Rex Magnar. Playful glockenspiel sounds played to John’s right as Lydia followed Aclysia and Beatrice into engaging with the axe-wielding enemy.

John fully trusted that those four would be able to keep those enemies busy. Metra’s buff and Astrotium exterior would allow her to keep one enemy occupied on her own. Aclysia would tank the other one, while Lydia and Beatrice dealt the supporting damage to keep them in place. Undine would stay around to heal that group – or Metra, if things got so desperate that she would die otherwise. Even if the buff was disabled by that intervention, if taken out of the fight, she wouldn’t be able to do anything.

While the frontlines clashed, the rest of John’s party moved through the centre of the walkway to assault the backline. They would have been met with energy arrows and magic, had it not been for the continuously spawning Mana Chains hindering the movements of those two. By pure chance, the sword and shield-carrying Ohmior Knight had not been hit by a single Mana Chain and was, by now, outside of the damage range of the Unstable Arcana.

‘Now,’ John gave the mental command, causing Gnome and Salamander to fuse mid-run. Emerging out of a blur of bodies and energy came a curvy, tanned warrior woman, wearing a yellow dress beset with grey blades and plate. Her braid fluttered in the momentum of her charge, glowing like the surface of a lava pool.

Smlere’s fist crashed against the shield of the Ohmior Knight, stopping the advance of the enemy. Raising its sword, the golem was ready to punish this clash. A quick assault by Rave put an end to that plan, the Lightbearer dashed around the shield and punched the Ohmior Knight in the side.

John was a bit worried whether her knuckles could take it. Her bodysuit had been ruined during Copernicus’ ascension to Tier 5 and the replacement was not ready yet. What she currently wore was the best stand-in gear the Gamer could fashion in the hasty preparation for this barrier. However, he didn’t have the time to stop and check on her.

With the three melee enemies distracted, John, alongside Siena, Nia, Sylph and his Mandala Sphere, went to the backline. The Unstable Arcana continued to pulse twice a second, bombarding the two with Mana Chains. Although they kept breaking them with relative ease, it did keep them stationary in the continuous damage pulses and an easy target for the assault of the group.

The majority of the group went to assault the enemy healer. Siena and Sylph dealt raw damage, Nia interrupted whatever shields or heals the enemy tried to cast, and the Mandala Sphere cast another Unstable Arcana with the mana stored inside it. This added to the Unstable Arcana John had originally placed and the Companion Arcana pulse that continuously hit both the healer and the bowman with two regular damage pulses and an extra, cost-free one every 30 seconds. Every single one of those pulses created a Mana Chain.

They also continuously applied Arcane Rejuvenation to his enemies.

John first followed the rest of the group to the healer, but retreated after he hit it once with Remnant Kick. The Martial Arts Technique, unlocked by Arcweaver, dealt damage according to how much mana he had spent on Arcane spells in the last minute. With more than three quarters of his almost 12’000 MP sunk into Unstable Arcanas, that was a hefty chunk of change. The kick blasted a golf ball-sized hole into the leg of the animated armour.

Although helpful, that was not what John had been primarily after. The successful hit with a Technique meant that every stack of Arcane Rejuvenation was consumed. Another Perk gotten through Arcweaver, that one let him regenerate 0,5% of his maximum mana per stack, with stacks being generated each time an enemy was hit by one of his arcane spells.

John used Magus Step to teleport away from the healer and in front of the other enemy’s drawn bow, about two metres up from the floor. The arrow hit him square in the stomach, dispersed on Particle Skin, and took a fair chunk out of his regenerated mana pool. It hardly mattered, as he hit the bowman with Remnant Strike. That dealt next to no additional damage. While the two Techniques didn’t share their 1-minute cooldowns, they did share the damage stored. All that mattered here, however, was that he consumed the Arcane Rejuvenation on this enemy as well.

0,5% of John’s mana pool was about 60 MP. A damage pulse by Unstable Arcana cost 200 MP. John hitting two opponents with it meant that there was 120 MP per pulse that he could reclaim. The Mana Chain launched with every pulse counted as its own damage instance, upping that by another 60.

John’s passive mana regeneration had been considerably diminished, but he had active ways to deal with this.

Of course, this active way also put him in harm’s way.

The bowman adapted on the fly, using its bladed bow, a design that could only fit into a fantasy setting. With Skitterstep, John teleported back to the ground before the retaliating strike could hit him. Using half of his regained mana, he created another two Unstable Arcanas. Damage pulses and Mana Chains continued to shower the two enemies.

Out of the safety of short-term invisibility, John threw a simple punch at the enemy’s leg. The retaliating kick was predictable, and John used another one of his five Magus Step stacks to get behind the enemy. He got another jab in, then he had to use Skitterstep. Purgatory’s claws dug visible trenches into the silvery-white plate.

Another teleport, escaping a swipe this time. The Ohmior Knight moved fluidly into a sweep. It caught John before he could Skitterstep. Particle Skin kept him unflinching, at the cost of his mana. The short jump of Skitterstep and 1 second of invisibility that followed saved him from getting grabbed. Enough Mana Chains had formed at that point that the bowman had to deal with breaking them first.

As successful as John was in dancing around his opponent, utilizing the primary teleportation from Magus Step and the bonus teleportation from his shoes, he was nothing more than the distraction. Even with Purgatory, it would have taken him minutes of working on one spot to claw out a considerable chunk from the animated armour. In the meantime, even with all of the measures taken, he was losing mana.

The cost for Unstable Arcana was upfront, the pulses and applications of Arcane Rejuvenation spread out over time and all of it gated by his Technique cooldowns. For all of the dodging he could do with teleportation, he was still much slower than the Ohmior Knight and did get hit occasionally, with Particle Skin taking its appropriate toll. It got considerably harder after he hit 0 stacks and had to cast Magus Step on its 10 seconds cooldown.

‘Can I do this on my own?’ John wondered, feeling his Stats grow with each passing second. Even if he didn’t supply them with mana, his elementals still counted towards Rising Annihilation, as did the Artificial Spirits. Their attacks and his own punches all increased his Physical Stats, up to a maximum of half his level in each. Even maxed out, he wouldn’t be able to dodge, much less block, the attacks of the bowman.

The real benefit was in what else Rising Annihilation enabled.

Even while dodging, John’s mind was fast enough to check on his buffs and track when it finally maxed. As soon as Magus Step was off cooldown again, he teleported backwards. The Ohmior Knight’s fist crashed into the pavement. It saw John, several metres away, raising his left arm. With his vastly superior speed, the golem pulled back its bowstring, the arrow manifesting in the process.

One purple arrow flew. At the same time, John activated another enchantment of Purgatory: Arcane Ascension. Usually, it cast one of John’s spell as if he had used three times his maximum mana. With Rising Annihilation maxed out, it instead cast it for fives times the maximum while reducing the one-day cooldown to thirty minutes.

A thousand mana each, a barrage of almost sixty Arc Lances shot out, a split second between each of the silver, crystallized manifestations of arcane might. The first few clashed with the arrow, destroying it and themselves, but the rest slammed into the Ohmior Knight. The adversary’s breastplate rattled under the repeated impacts, then cracked. More and more of the armour blasted away.

When the torrent of spells came to an end, the pitch-black core of the armour was in plain view, drifting away like dark mist. Still, with shaking limbs, the Ohmior Knight readied another arrow. It was battered and broken, but it wasn’t dead.

‘It wouldn’t really be a Raid enemy if I could defeat it on my own that easily,’ John thought and just stood there. The arrow came for him. Then a devouring blade cut through it in mid-air, deleting the magic from existence.

Jack, Sylph, Siena and Nia had defeated the healer. Between their damage ability and the continued AoE by John, them winning had been a foregone conclusion.

‘Could have timed things better so I got another Arcane Rejuvenation out of it before it died,’ John thought and ran in to do exactly that with the bowman. The Remnant Strike had little force behind it, but it did give John 30 seconds worth of stacks, plus the several dozen hits via Arcane Ascension. Ignoring the item for the sake of average calculations, if John had the necessary mana to keep the Unstable Arcanas running without pause, that would have meant the Ohmior Knight would have had 90 stacks on him (60 from the pulses and 30 from every second Mana Chain hitting him, on average). That would have translated to about 5400 mana. To cast an Unstable Arcana that lasted for 60 pulses, John would have needed 12000 mana, however. That was not only more than what he had, it would have also left him without a buffer for Particle Skin. ‘Intellect would increase my recovery margin and allow me to cast bigger Unstable Arcanas.’ John realized and looked to the rest of the fight.

With the backline defeated, the battle was firmly under their control. The best thing John could do now was to hang back and make sure his mana wasn’t unnecessarily spent on Particle Skin. The rest of the party first reinforced Smlere and Rave, defeating the sword-and-shield Ohmior Knight after a couple more minutes. Then they all flowed on to the axe-wielding one, which was defeated in a matter of seconds. Lydia had managed to string the enemy’s legs together with Strimata, leaving it easily defeated.

Then they all watched Metra battle it out with the final enemy. The First of Wrath was insistent on duking this out her way. John wanted to respect her wish, but when she was almost thrown off the battlefield, he finally had Aclysia intervene with her taunt ability, Master’s Shield. From there, the entire group nuked the enemy.

“FUCK!” Metra cursed, slamming Rex Magnar against the railing. The weapon, one of the strongest forged in human history, bounced off the stone with an angry screech, akin to a broken note on an electrical guitar. “SHITFUCK!” the ancient weapon screamed, in her rage attacking the stone several more times. Since this was Gaia-crafted scenery, it only took minimal damage. The supreme deity didn’t have to care for the fact that Metra should have been able to shatter stone with a casual kick.

“Calm down,” John said. Usually, that would have just caused an angry person to get angrier. With the relationship between the two of them, it convinced the First of Wrath to at least stay her weapon for the moment. Her helmet opened, retreating into her collar segment by segment. John walked over and gave her a hug. “You almost got that one, good job.”

“Almost is for lesser warriors,” Metra growled, but let herself be embraced. She wasn’t exactly angry at the lot of them for intervening. Knowing her, she was also angry at that, but the primary source of her current condition was that she still had the rage that had raised her buff, while the buff itself had been disabled. Robbed of the satisfaction of victory and a body that was weakened considerably by the end of the beneficial effect, she just needed to vent.

“We won without casualties, which is the mark of a successful battle,” John told her. “What’s more important to you, your pride or my success?”

“Your success, my king,” Metra conceded and let him claim her lips. By the time their kiss had ended, she was mostly calm again. If they hadn’t wanted to keep on going, he would have instructed her to peel out of her armour then and there.

“This worked about as well as I expected,” John then reported to the group. “Arcane Rejuvenation works pretty well for enemies that don’t care to dodge… I may have to massively invest in Agility in the future though.”

“Increasing the reliability of your Mana Chains would also be a sensible approach,” Lydia pointed out.

“Right,” John agreed. “Doesn’t really matter how I do it, as long as I can hit enemies with cheap spells and Techniques. Maybe Silver Arcanist will give me something that can be used for reliable stacking…”

Rave snapped her fingers in front of John’s face a number of times. “Keep the build crafting for dinner and let’s keep going before I die of boredom.”

“Right, right… how are your hands, by the way?” he now had the time to inquire about his earlier worry. “Everything working alright, even without the bodysuit?”

Rave raised her hands, the gloves he had given her in tatters. “Sorry there, tiger, but these won’t do. Blew them apart with my martial arts.”

“…but are your hands fine?” John was more worried about her physical condition than some throwaway gloves. Throwaway by his standards, admittedly. The L-Baelementium used to Create them was worth a fortune to the average person.

“I’m a sturdy gal, I can punch metal for twenty minutes,” Rave joked. “Or kick it. Anyway, just some joint pain, nothing Undine can’t fix.”

John let out a displeased sound from deep in his throat. “Alright then…” he accepted the situation, since there was nothing else he could do. That she got a little bit hurt during fights wouldn’t stop her and John wouldn’t demand that she sat this one out for that reason anyway. “…I should have a stern talk with Magoi about this whole thing. There’s no reason why we needed to attach the grinding session to our relationship talk.”

“That does give Lee the time to work out though, which works out for us,” Rave pointed out, leaving her boyfriend silent. “What? Ya don’t want her to have thunder thighs during your first time?”

“Not if that means you get hurt,” John grumbled.

Rave laughed and kissed him on the cheek. “Aren’t you being an example boyfriend today? Ya know what good boyfriends do?”

“Throw their girlfriends at fantastic beasts crafted by the entity that dreams up reality, for the purposes of challenging and growing their abilities?” the Gamer asked a rhetorical question.