"Kill!" As the battlefield progressed from the phase of intense fighting to basically the cleanup, the morale returned to the otherwise beaten people of the camp. That's why, rather than just silently massacring every monster left on the plain, Layn decided to hold his horses back.
The people that fought to defend the camp had to score a few more kills with their very own hands.
This way of letting the soldiers vent the frustration caused by the losses and wounded was commonly unaccepted in modern times. Allowing one's troops to disperse and vent on the civilian population turned out to be a problem big enough to warrant a special council that ended with claiming this kind of action as a crime of war.
But that was the case back in Layn's original timeline. And this law was implemented for the sake of protecting the civilians. Right now, it had no binding matter... especially since Layn was quite positive that hundreds if not thousands of years would have to pass for said law to be actually implemented.
'Now that I think about it, the ecological freaks would skin me alive if they saw me encourage this mass slaughter of monsters,' Layn thought, watching how both the few mercenaries that survived the ordeal and the people that Markus brought joyfully gave the carnage their best.
"That should generally wrap things up," Markus said, approaching the archmage from behind. Even though he was one of the strongest fighters, he no longer saw any reason to keep fighting. Most likely, he came to the exact same conclusion as Layn himself.
"Still, I expected you to use those blood arts of yours," Markus said, looking at Tom with a questioning look. "Some kind of new technique?" he guessed, leaning his head to the side.
"More or less," Layn nodded his head before shaking it vigorously. "Well, it's been a while," he said, extending his hand out.
"Come on," Markus said, grabbing Layn's hand and pulling him into a deep, bear-like hug. "We didn't see each other in years. How are you doing, man?" Markus asked. His voice changed, turning slightly higher than usual as tears of happiness welled up in his eyes.
"Seen better days," Layn replied passively, overwhelmed by the affection shown by this male friend of his. 'Did he decide the swing the other way in the time we were away or something?' Layn asked himself before sending a quick look at Yelna nearby.
Just like the two of them, she was on standby. But contrary to the two of them, she didn't join in the long-awaited reunion. Still, she kept a keen look on the battle to prevent any further unnecessary casualties.
"I guess that applies to everyone," Markus said, letting go of Layn's body and taking a step back. "But now, I need one answer. Tell me, are you..."
"Yes," Layn replied even before Markus could finish his question. "But I have no idea how that spell affected the two of you," he added, spreading his arms wide in a gesture of ignorance.
'I knew that they came here, and I tried to figure out how the arcana worked on them... Or wait for a second,' Layn once again attempted to crack this mystery when his eyes fell on Yelna's hand. Or rather, on the item she was holding in it.
'Isn't that her dawnbringer?' Layn asked himself, recalling the name of the weapon she cherished ever since the times of their journey together. 'But if they moved in the same way I did...' he thought before all his thinking ceased.
'That would be impossible unless they used some other method to travel through time,' Layn thought, sharply turning his head to look at Markus. "Where were you when the leap happened?!" Layn asked, agitated to his limits.
"Huh?" Markus shrugged, surprised by Layn's sudden eagerness. "Back at our observatory, at the tip of the northern peninsula," he gave the answer without the slightest hesitation.
Even if they could potentially have opposing interests in the current time, solving the riddle of time travel would benefit them all. And nothing that happened before it held any meaning today, now that all their pasts turned into a distant future.
"That's strange," Layn lowered his head and rubbed his chin, puzzled by the unexpected answer. "I assume you used some kind of hooking mechanism to catch on the prism, right?" he posed another question, looking at Markus with hope gleaming in his eyes.
"Huh?" Markus only shrugged in unease. "The hell are you talking about? We just stood in place and hoped the Shield of Aegis would suffice to ward off the danger," Markus reported his own experiences, putting a wrench into the way Layn hoped to solve the mystery.
"Ah, I forgot about that thing," Layn said. Once again, he retreated into the study of his thoughts, trying to figure out the math necessary for those two things that come together.
Shield of Aegis wasn't a hook. It was a simple shield that nullified any and all magic effects from the surroundings that were aimed against what it was protecting. And while it could potentially be used as a cart to ride the wave of changing the times, it still lacked the hook required for Markus and Yelna to enter the prism, or in other words, the magical path that connected two points in time.
"Something wrong?" Markus asked, noticing the unease of his former partner. Even though they didn't see each other in years, he was still capable of understanding the tiny amount of hints that Layn would ever let show on his face.
"I just can't figure it out how did you manage to hook in," Layn explained his doubts, too focused on analyzing the subject to even look up at his friend when he spoke to him.
'It shouldn't be possible unless they were in the prism in the first place," Layn continued to think, eliminating more and more possible explanations with each passing second.
Given how his base assumptions about the entire thing turned out to be false, he had no other choice but to reanalyze the entire thing from the get-go.
'But for a prism to be that wide... It doesn't make sense,' Layn thought, falling to his knees and starting to write off equations directly on the ground while using the blood of the nearby monster as an ink. But even after putting his thoughts into writing, Layn was still unable to get his math right.
'It would be impossible unless I fucked up the supply,' Layn thought after a few moments spent on crunching the numbers in every possible way. And while there were many variables that he could potentially get wrong back when constructing the theory for the gran arcana, only one combination appeared to allow for such a massive derivation from the intended outcome.
"What was there in the supply part?" Layn muttered, straightening one finger of his hand with every item he listed out. "The darkwood core, crystalized magic, heavenly residue, nuclear core," he counted all the items that he used to fuel the gran arcana.
And out of them, only two could lead to a mistake.
The first was the heavenly residue. Despite its haughty name, it was actually an incredibly complex drug, one that Layn had to spend over three years to source a quantity large enough from the black market.
With just the possession of this extremely toxic drug alone, he stood to lose not only his position at the court and castle but very likely his life as well.
Given how dangerous that substance was, Layn never dabbled into researching it a lot, limiting his scientific input to just testing its energy potential.
And as it turned out, this drug appeared to be a miraculous substance. While combining several magical-infused alloys was possible and common, with the growing complexity of the end-substance, the chances of materials properly fusing were growing smaller and smaller.
With more than four source materials, it was said that only a few workshops in the entire world were capable of combining them.
And then came the heavenly residue, a drug said to be sourced from the mythical heaven itself. And a combination of over seventeen different alchemy materials.
This was the sole example of a material that was believed to not come from this world. Whether it was heavens or some dying star that produced it, Layn didn't know. But he was more than happy to use all the energy contained within the unstable state of this matter.
'I made sure to test all its possible release gradients, so the mistake shouldn't be there,' Layn thought, recalling the experiments that he did. By decomposing the compound material back into its prime parts, Layn learned how to safely release the energy store in the connections that allowed the compound elixir to stay as a uniform object.
But this was something that Layn did more testing than necessary to ensure he was right on the money with his numbers.
'And that leaves the nuclear magic,' Layn thought, feeling how uneasiness spread out through his body. 'I knew this was still a theoretical field of magic and research, but still...' he thought, hesitating to even reveal the potential nature of the problem that caused his gran arcana to malfunction.
'Unless...'
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