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He stuck a hand out and said, “Oh, hi. Um, right, Luna did say that she’d be bringing you all. Well…I’m Erwin, but I guess you already knew that? Anyway, welcome to my humble abode, I suppose?”
Luna grabbed his outstretched arm and said, “Your gloves are still covered in the ant’s venom. Don’t kill the kids.”
Erwin’s gloves vanished, and he shook everyone’s hand while he grinned sheepishly, “Right, right. Sorry. Still, they’d probably be fine, I know I have the antitoxin around here somewhere, but proper— Oh! Actually, now that I’m thinking about it…” His attention moved back to the spatial terrarium and was only pulled back by Luna’s cough.
“Right! Training. I remember. One of you makes unlimited mana, yes?”
His glasses increased in glow as he inspected each of them, before settling on Matt.
“Yes, yes. Use a Skill, please.”
Matt met Luna’s gaze with a raised eyebrow, and when he received a nod, he pushed [Mage’s Retreat] to its maximum.
Erwin studied and hmm’d for a good minute before asking, “So, this never gets tiring? I can see approximately where the mana is flowing from, and it’s just appearing. I mean, all mana just sort of appears, but it’s usually less obvious. No spiritual strain, no resting limitations, no environmental factors?”
“Not at all. I’ve also got a Concept that gives people around me mana.”
Matt’s Concept seemed to be less interesting than his Talent.
“Interesting, and with your Talent I’m certain you can get good use of it. Regeneration transfer is interesting, but only really worth the hassle if you really need the efficiency.”
Matt, understanding his misconception, used his Concept on the man without lowering [Mage’s Retreat]’s mana draw.
That got the man’s attention, and Matt added, “It doesn’t reduce my own regeneration. It’s a mana generation Concept.”
Erwin nodded like a chicken, eyes focused off into the distance, “Now that is a fair bit rarer and is quite the interesting combination. I would have thought you would just use your mana as a supplement to your Concept. But with this, I presume you must have outright copied your Talent over while building your Concept? That must have been quite the challenge.”
Matt nodded, but the higher Tier man moved on before he was able to speak.
“Anyway, I hear you’ve been making rifts with that? Then… Oh, unique Skill? Now that’s interesting.”
Erwin looked to Luna and asked, “What happened to it?”
Luna met his gaze as she said, “I passed it to the Emperor.”
Erwin deflated slightly at that before he popped back up and said, “Well, if you made it once, you can make it again. Come on, let’s get started on that now.”
He vanished with a pop into the air, then a second later, reappeared and hurried out a different door than where they entered, motioning for them to follow him. Doing so, they were outside, and he waved out at the grass next to the massive lake. “First, let me see you make a rift.”
Matt eyed the lake and asked, “Is that creating a safe zone? It looks big enough to prevent rifts from spawning, like the seas do.”
Erwin shook his head. “No, nine percent too small, and the Coastal Exclusion Principle doesn’t really apply to artificial rifts anyway.”
Not knowing what else to do, Matt brought out his concrete slabs and arranged them in a circle, after clearing the grass inside. As he arranged them, he realized how cheap and crude they were compared to the sophisticated machinery he had passed in the lab. If he had a few hours, he could make a better set with the things he learned with Kelley. That wasn’t even taking into consideration the rune library he had in a partition of his AI.
“I, uhh… These are pretty old, but… Umm.”
Erwin didn’t seem bothered, and just waved at him to continue.
Matt sat down and started pouring mana into the formation. It took longer than he expected, but a rift flickered to life as the mana density increased. The monsters that flooded out were quickly minced by the formations he had built into the device, but Erwin grabbed one of the purple skunks and inspected it during the time it took Matt to Tier the rift up to Tier 2.
As the monsters remained the same, Erwin’s next inspection was much quicker. “Even having heard about it, it’s still so strange to see such a low-Tier Rift here. Perhaps while I- while you’re here, we can get some insights into more ‘natural’ rift formation as well.”
At Tier 6, his attack formation struggled to kill the monsters, but with a wave from Luna, the monsters pouring out of the rift just vanished.
As Erwin stepped into the formation and started looking at the rift with his glowing glasses, Matt noticed his friends were looking at him with weird looks.
“What?”
Mathew was the first to speak. “I knew you could do that. And I’ve gotten a lot of your mana… But this…”
When he trailed off, Tara picked up, “It’s wild. Almost unbelievable. That’s like. Not really done.”
Matt countered, “I’m pretty sure a lot of guilds and nobles make rifts. It’s not that weird.”
Liz interjected. “It’s more that you do it all by yourself. A guild doing something is like a higher Tier doing something. It’s impressive, sure. But they’re so powerful, it doesn’t have the shock value that your rift creation does.”
Vinnie nodded his head. “Exactly. It’s like you don’t need anything but some space and time. You can delve as much as you want, wherever you want. We traveled around to go to places with rifts. You’re basically the opposite.”
Matt actually felt quite embarrassed. He wasn’t doing anything that anyone with unlimited mana couldn’t do. And they hadn’t even seen his rift experiments with items and mana types.
- Writer
