But that soon dwindled as he activated [Mana Shroud], the Mana he actively pulled from the air being pushed back out to cover his body to keep the mist from even reaching his skin. The Mana coating him still had the odd properties as the mist, but now it was under his control, so it no longer attacked him and kept the aggressive mist of the environment at bay.
It was a push-and-pull, since if he made the coating too thick, he'd be unable to draw in the foreign Mana, and he'd form gaps in the protection, or it would dissolve entirely. Too thin, and the mist would pounce onto his wounds or eyes when it surged from a denser rivulet or with an unexpected breeze, forcing him to remove the attacking Mana from his body.
All of this required a lot of his own internal Mana to operate, one of the main reasons he needed a long break before mounting his approach. Even at the Skill's ideal execution, where he was able to strike a balance between a thick enough shroud to blend in while still letting him absorb the ambient Mana, it still consumed his own stores of Mana. Earlier, he tried using some of the Mana he absorbed to replenish his Mana, but he couldn't do that. The absorbed Mana could be used to produce a shroud over his body, but couldn’t feed into his internal Mana stores.
Ideally, he'd spend weeks practicing the nuances of the Skill and using different parts of it in tandem, but that the undead also treated the area with the statue of Oocile with extra attention in the form of this crab encirclement was not a great sign.
Perhaps it was too large and heavy for the crabs to take, so they were just keeping it safe for something else to come and loot it properly. Even aside from the rapidly depleting ticking clock of his ultimate priority quest from Terrania, this meant he had to finish his other quest as soon as possible.
He slowly made his way across the ruined luxury buildings, keeping an eye on the orderly procession of crabs within the thick mist, ready to notice any deviation. At the last moment before reaching open ground, he paused, his simple boots softly sinking into the moss below. Luckily, it seemed like the moss lost its corrosive features when it switched to focusing on mist production. If anything, it even helped with his shroud, since the mist's Mana was easier to take over right as it was produced.
Axl took a single step out into the open, redoubling his attention on [Mana Shroud]. He stopped for a moment, but there was no change in the crabs, so he kept going, his pace barely a crawl. One step after another, his focus on the delicate balance between Mana absorption and thickening the shroud, the ratio needing to change as the mist got denser with each step.
Not only density, but the mixture of mist and air got more chaotic as he kept going, with the swirls and eddies of the mist making it harder to keep the shroud steady. Almost halfway between the start and middle of the no-man's land, Axl had to stop entirely as a breeze picked up, needing him to have one side of his body impose an entirely different ratio of absorption and shroud than the other.
He started to breathe heavily at the effort, despite himself, adding to the disturbance of the mist, struggling to keep his mind focused on the left and right sides of his body in parallel.
With a snap, the shroud fell apart. The mist rushed into his injuries, eyes and ears, and even started to crawl into his body from his lungs. Trying to keep calm, he took several steps back and restarted the Skill. With bloodshot eyes, he looked at the line of crabs and blanched as three of them had left the march, pausing barely a dozen meters from him.
At a slightly lower density of mist and with the breeze gone, [Mana Shroud] was back up. Luckily, he was able to tie his sword around his waist with a blood-stained string he got from a corpse, so he didn't drop his weapon. But Axl struggled more than before to activate [Mana Shroud], his focus harder to maintain. Realizing he would only get himself killed if he continued, he turned back to his hideout.
Collapsing into the carpet, he almost passed out, but didn't let himself fall asleep, simply focusing on a few calming breaths of clear air, the neutral Mana on the third floor up barely tinged by the mist, a relief. He also felt an oddly powerful pang in his gut, only now noticing his body was thirsty and hungry.
Axl rolled his eyes at Roken, since this wasn't even the level of hunger Axl had most of the time when back in Luna. His water-elf body was apparently just used to being overfed. Maybe this was why the Legion attacked this village, their riches so extreme that it made them an irresistible target.
His internal Mana stores slowly refilling, Axl sat on a couch with meticulously decorated frills underneath it and tried to figure out how to break through to the other side. Any thoughts of creating a distraction were discarded, since the crabs didn't even respond much to his shroud breaking close to them, which at least let him escape after such a huge cockup. He could also try going fully around the no-man's land, there perhaps being a break or irregularity somewhere else he could make use of. But he looked up at the sky, the sunlight already starting to dim.
As his mind meandered, he started to form shapes, the thought of the shape bubbling up like the flashes of Roken's memories. But this was familiar, it was [Mind-Soul Bulwark] using his leftover mental energy to start forming a simple mental barrier around his soul. The simplest first step was simply four walls of a rectangle around the visualization of the soul, barely an exercise for the subsequent types of fortification.
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Rather than drain him, Axl found that the more he focused on the activity, the more it refreshed him, his internal Mana filling up faster, in fact. Not having any better ideas, he decided to spend the next half hour entirely on the defensive skill.
First, he shook away the sketchy work he'd done so far and started over, beginning with the condensation of what he vaguely conceptualized as his soul. He thought of his soul as a filled grey circle the size of a fingernail, sitting in the middle of his chest. Axl found he could keep that image steady even if he stopped thinking about it, the slight pressure of it almost tangible in his body.
He then started to draw a simple line beneath it, a yellow line like straight paint marking the loading areas in Ost's loading dock. The line, however, took some mental effort to focus on, and if he stopped thinking about it, it would start to fade, so he had to start over a few times before he made four of them, the grey circle surrounded by four yellow lines.
The lines were more stable when forming a circuit like this, with the satisfying hum of a filled Mana inscription circuit, and Axl infused some of his internal Mana into it. At first, he almost destroyed the structure by infusing too much, but he quickly dialed it down into barely a trickle, the Mana now powering the enclosure on its own.
This was it, the very simplest version of [Mind-Soul Bulwark], a trickle of his internal Mana powering a mind-based defense of his soul. It took somewhat more time than he expected, just over an hour, from the look of the dimming sunlight.
For the first time since waking up in this body, Axl thanked Roken for being too broke to even own even a simple timekeeper, instead learning how to use the sun to roughly tell the time. The very idea seemed amusing to Axl, an unexpected benefit to the inconvenience of variable light levels throughout the day. In Ost, the hallway lights were either on or off, which seemed far more convenient.
He kept letting himself get distracted a bit further, then activated [Mana Shroud] with his full concentration for a few seconds. The brief experiment over, Axl looked in and was pleased to see the little rectangle and circle were still there, even fully unattended.
It was unfortunate that the skill took up between 5 and 10% of his total internal Mana stores, but his mind felt clearer, more able to focus. Most importantly, his [Mana Shroud] was easier to control. The next step of [Mind-Soul Bulwark] would take hours to put together, not to mention the instructions being more vague, so Axl went back out, hoping this would be enough.
When first entering the mist, he couldn't feel a big difference, but as he slowly got deeper in, he found the shroud more malleable, especially when trying to make different parts of it have different thicknesses from each other. He also wasn't quite sure, but it felt like it took slightly less internal Mana to use, but he only had a vague sense of that anyhow, so he could be wrong.
He easily reached his previous point, and the wind wasn't there anymore, so he continued in. The chittering of the crabs got louder as he got closer, the increased density of the mist making him focus harder and harder on [Mana Shroud].
Axl stopped two meters away from the crab procession, realizing he would have to speed up to pass between them, which would make it harder for him to fully focus on [Mana Shroud]. A slight breeze disrupted the mist above him, and he had to close his eyes for a moment to compensate, but then it was gone.
Not wanting to wait for another disruption, he started walking alongside the crabs, slowly gaining speed while trying to focus on maintaining [Mana Shroud]. His mind strained at the effort, especially with needing to navigate some of the irregular rubble, the mold hadn’t completely dissolved into even ground.
Realizing he wouldn't be able to actually match their speed, Axl went as fast as he could before cutting across, aiming for just between two crabs. A sheen of sweat had covered his body and he could feel the thumping of his blood in his ears as the crab to his side got closer and closer. It would actually touch him, grazing his upper leg as he passed it by, and he knew [Mana Shroud] wouldn't hide him from that.
Axl stopped and closed his eyes, feeling the crab about to crash into his leg. He tuned it all out except [Mana Shroud], dissolving his [Mind-Soul Bulwark], letting the trapped Mana and mental energy surge into him. The world went dark except for the Mana of the mist and his shroud, the universe was only him and the poison all around. It was him or the other, the mist of his shroud or the mist from without, and nothing else.
A presence arose from the mist without, something other than mist, but still not his own, so he pushed it away, his own mist rousing as it drained away the invading force, the rigid invader pushing through the atmosphere of his domain. It was stronger than the mist, of a very different composition, and hard to absorb, refusing his call. Still, he pushed harder as it grew nearer, its intrusion potent and driven. As if it were laughing at his struggle.
But this was his world, his will, and it would not be taken in this way. His mist roused with increasing power, the point of contact becoming so dense it almost congealed, pushing away. Fighting back.
The force was slowly deflected away, not touching his body, sliding off from an ever-thinning layer of his mist. Then it slid away, gone. His mist returned, fending off this unwelcome force, a profound sense of victory and glory palpable as his Mana surged, breaking Axl from his reverie.
The crab had stumbled out of its neat route and continued on, unaware of what had happened. Axl quickly continued onwards to the other side, [Mana Shroud] now effortlessly keeping the mist away. A gust of wind even caused a disturbance greater than the first one that broke his skill earlier, and it barely took any effort to create the necessary gradient to compensate.
As he left to the other side of the encirclement, he brought up the relevant change in his status window, knowing in a sense the improvement, but wanting confirmation.
Skills: Mana Shroud (Rare, Proficiency G.1), Mind-Soul Bulwark (Rare)
His [Mana Shroud] now had a note on his proficiency, reflecting a leap in his ability to use it. This felt like a more substantial gain than even the ten levels worth of Attributes, pushing away the weak crab better than defeating an Undead Legion soldier. For this was the Skill at the core of his being, what helped him survive his early days at the pit and later thrive as a miner, the vehicle of his fury against the Vikam invaders.
In a way, Axl realized this was all still largely due to this Mana-rich environment letting the Skill truly sing and the far more potent capabilities of his Status, not to mention the insane advantages Terrania was heaping onto him.
But this felt like finally some real power he could use to fight back, with promise of a lot more to come. A real victory for the vat-grown human clone Xel-389b, a victory for humanity.
Axl didn't bother ducking into the lavish buildings to recover, as he originally planned. He was fully comfortable delving into the mists now, and it was time to keep striking onwards.