Aethernea : Soulbound [Book 1]

Episode 110 - Sparkbloom

Previously:

The day of the practical exams is finally here and Kiel is inside a large arena created by the Replica Dungeon. Nelaira tricks Deora into attacking the Rroda brothers, and Deora ends up pursuing Kiel with a barrage of fireballs. Kiel runs away, dodging the fireballs, however, Deora manages to hit him with an explosive airball. Kiel loses his consciousness and remembers how he got trapped inside the burning house as a child. After waking up he gets into a life and death situation that makes him overcome his fear of fire and launch a counter attack on Deora. He manages to poison Deora, knocking him out of the competition. Seeing Kiel win his fight, Rhur finished Nelaira off in a fit of rage. Kiel manages to recover through applying a healing ointment. Kiel and Rhur team up to attack Zor.

* * *

Zor had created a spatial barrier, sealing off the region of space around him. Besides the metaphysical things such as mana and the mind, other things couldn't pass through the barrier.

Reflection barriers targeted objects which touched them, preventing them from proceeding, which made it so they couldn't target objects which were protected by foreign mana. However, Zor's spatial barrier was different. Zor wasn't targeting objects which touched his barrier, he was targeting space itself. By changing space itself, the change would affect anything and everything that entered that space.

This was the principle that the majority of protective barriers used. Even the magical egg Elaru had given Kiel was based on the same principle.

And so, Rhur's and Kiel's attack was thwarted before it even began.

Both Rroda brothers realized instantly that blindly chucking things at the barrier would not work and halted their assault. Spatial barriers couldn't be broken by brute force. It was like trying to shatter space itself. Or it would be more accurate to say that doing that would be like trying to cool down an object by repeatedly hitting it – there was basically no correlation with what they were doing and what they wanted to achieve.

To continue their assault, they needed to bypass, overpower or break the barrier first.

To bypass it, they would either need to use spatial magic to teleport their attacks inside the barrier or use metaphysical attacks, neither of which the two of them were capable of.

Breaking a protective barrier wasn't any easier. Kiel had experienced this fact first hand 12 years ago, when he almost died because firefighters and peacekeepers couldn't enter inside the barrier shielding his house. They had even thrown many mana bombs attempting to cause irreversible damage to the spell making it fall apart, yet still failed.

Attacking the spell pattern with mana denser than the spell itself wasn't enough to break a fully formed spell. Once a spell formed a reality-altering effect, the spell pattern and the reality-altering effect would form an intimate relation, reinforcing each other. If a spell pattern was damaged, the reality-altering effect would repair the spell pattern, and if the reality-altering effect was negated, the spell pattern would try to recreate it.

This self-recovery process wouldn't fail as long as there was enough mana to power it, which was not difficult considering the fact that the recovery was very mana efficient.

If one wanted to break the spell, one would need to sever the connection between the two by damaging the critical points of the spell pattern or destroying the entire spell pattern in one go.

The critical points of the spells were like invisible strings connecting the spell pattern and the reality-altering effect, and one needed to accurately slice them all off at the same time for the spell to crumble. Unfortunately, not only were those "strings" constantly moving along with the spell pattern, but they also couldn't be felt or seen. It was no wonder that Spell Breakers were an extremely rare and sought after variety.