Fortunately, New Derby was just over a hundred miles away from Riverside. Because of this, Elise was easily able to contact their envoy there and prompt them to gain an emergency audience with New Derby’s council. At this meeting, she used their mouth to explain the situation and plead for help, calling upon the agreed terms of their alliance. Although their council had a number of differing opinions on whether to provide help and, if so, how it should be done, the decision ultimately came down to Floyd Godson, the overlord of New Derby.

The Champion sat on the highest seat, stroking his blond horseshoe moustache. He didn’t hide his boredom as his eyes glazed out during the audience, but neither did he hide his sudden flash of interest at the mention of Dahlia Howe. This glint in his eyes only grew sharper on hearing the remaining Avatars were personally coming to Lyfort, which had just declared war on Riverside. At this point, he interrupted the meeting with a roar and waved his hand dismissively.

“That’s enough said; we’ll be there,” he said.

And with that, a considerable portion of New Derby’s army climbed into trucks and minivans and started their journey to Riverside, expecting to arrive before the day was over. In total, a thousand of them were making the journey, effectively doubling Riverside’s forces and allowing them to significantly outnumber Lyfort’s troops.

In addition to this, Silas contacted Skully through the envoy and told him about his plans for the mana barrier. Although he currently only had the outline of the design, the challenge must have sufficiently hooked the skinhead as Skully said he too would join the soldiers on the trip over. This way, the Duellist and Runesmith could directly work together on the design.

While this was happening, Elise sent advance troops to secure their front. To their surprise, there were very few Order troops scouting the fields as it seemed they truly had holed up inside their town. All the more, this just gave the humans an even greater advantage as they positioned sentries on all points of note in the area, allowing them a clear view of Lyfort’s movements at all times. Fortunately, the day passed without considerable movement from the Order’s settlement. The scouts said it appeared a commotion of some sorts was occurring inside, but so far the Order showed no intention in sending expeditions outside, instead fortifying their walls. Either way, the human forces planned for a full-scale assault tomorrow.

In the evening, Silas was asked to be in the procession receiving New Derby’s VIPS, which he accepted without issue. Soldiers had come first, armed with rifles and swords, securing the road and making camp downstream of Riverside, but now people of influence were arriving. They came in sports cars, convertibles, and SUVS, but the Champion went one step further by streaking through the road in a sleek white McLaren supercar.

Floyd arrived ahead of the others, and the receiving procession waited with bated breath as the McLaren roared in the distance, switching modes to cruise control when it neared until it eased to a stop before them. Its butterfly door swished up and out stepped Floyd, his dirty blond hair trimmed since the last time Silas had seen him. He wore a utility vest over a white, sleeveless shirt, putting his criminally muscled and tattooed arms on full display. His thin eyes shifted over the reception, and he smirked on seeing Silas.

Out of the other door slipped out a stunning blonde in a crop top and jeans. She walked over to Floyd and leaned into him as he pointed out Silas. Her eyes widened, and she smiled charmingly his way.

“If it ain’t the Duellist himself,” Floyd said, ignoring everyone else there as he strode up to Silas and gave a painful shoulder pat. “The other cunts were all surprised when they saw your name pop up onto the leaderboards, but I wasn’t surprised at all, was I?” The woman beside him shook her head, hanging off his words. Pleased, he turned back to Silas and jabbed a meaty finger into his chest, grinning. “Didn’t I say your talents are wasted in a shithole like this? You only proved me right by exploding up like that.”

Those around Silas looked to each other with surprise and confusion at Floyd’s shameless insult, but Silas himself had prepared for such brazen behaviour from the Champion. “I guess you did, but come, let me first introduce you around. Then I’ll take you for a tour around Riverside and show you that it really isn’t bad here.”

Introductions were quick as Floyd only cared about people of sufficient influence or power, and his bar was high enough that only a few in the procession qualified, including Elise and Dom. Afterwards, he returned to Silas. “Let’s go then. You’ll struggle to impress me, but maybe that’ll change if you reveal you’ve got some high-class brothels here.” He guffawed to himself and ignored how the woman beside him stiffened and the sudden tension in the area.

It even caught Silas off-guard as he recalled how Olivia had been working at such a place in New Derby, clawing for scraps before he had come across her. Fortunately, he quickly recovered as he remembered the strategic locations Elise had urged him to take Floyd to, the first being the Alchemists guild so that they could show off their potions and hopefully get large orders for them.

It was some time later that Dom took over from Silas in touring responsibilities, telling him then that Skully had also arrived. Silas found the casually dressed Runesmith checking out the Mages guild, where they greeted each other warmly. The skinhead looked the same as before: gaunt with a great many tattoos inked into his skin, the most notable being the full-face skull tattoo on his head.

“You know, I just heard from Floyd that you’re also on the leaderboards,” Silas said on meeting. “Hidden under the name Reynard.”

“Oh, get off it, lad. Skully’s the name, and runesmithing’s the game, so why don’t you show me this design of yours already.”

Silas took Skully to his house and showed him what he had done so far. He had a fitting image for the mana barrier which he could now reliably draw, even under pressure, but beyond that, he was struggling with what to occupy his mind with when actually engraving the rune. Initially, he had tried to simplify it as much as possible and imagined himself with a mana barrier surrounding his body while engraving, but that hadn’t worked. Thinking perhaps then the trouble could be with the longevity of the rune, as he had learnt during his first forays into runesmithing, he had next tried to decrease its duration but that had also failed to work.

Skully listened to all this patiently, occasionally stroking his chin, deep in thought. Afterwards, he brought out his book of runes and flicked through, stopping near the end of it. He showed the page to Silas. “Here, this was the one I used to help a lightning lass shoot bolts out of her fingertips. Note, she came to me complaining about the difficulty of building her charges up and controlling the directions they shot in, and although I managed to help her, the rune was anything but straightforward. See, the issue is that lightning is wild, lad, so anything we did to it just went straight out of the window.”

Taking the book from his hands, Silas read through the passages and frowned. “So you succeeded by ignoring the lightning?”

“Exactly - there was no point in focusing on something we could hardly affect, so instead I made a rune to slow the flow of her mana down and another to cut direct vessels from her body into her fingertips, thickening at the ends. I mean, most of the work went into preventing her natural healing process from closing up those tunnels. Once we got all of that sorted, though, her control improved exponentially and helped her reliably zap anything and anyone she wanted.”

“Huh,” Silas said, wondering how this could apply to the mana barrier but also on how insane Mia’s control must be to be able to do the same thing as this woman with none of the assistance. “So have you got any ideas for the barrier?”

“I’ve drafted some up,” Skully said with a grin, flipping the page to show several scrawled images with jotted points beside them. “I think the way to succeed with this is not to focus on the barrier aspect but rather on how a person would be able to maintain mana in a fixed position outside their body. Sounds the same, doesn’t it? Well, I reckon the difference between them is massive. Think about it, all these mages make barriers by continuously releasing mana and attaching it to a spot for a time before it all drifts away, which is why they continuously have to release mana. That’s just far too mana intensive for us to work with, especially for a barrier that’s constantly up, so better we work on releasing one burst of mana and fixing it in place indefinitely.” He paused. “You said you know a lass who can do this already, right? Go get her - I reckon she’ll have a clue or two that can help us.”

Getting Mia, it quickly became clear that she could already do what they proposed on doing, the only difference being they had to runify it now. This was easier said than done, especially given most of her explanations were deceptively simple and misleading to an ordinary person. They were stuck without progress for a while until Silas allowed his mind to drift off and think of other people who could do similar things. It wasn’t exact, but Josh had his Magic-Repellent Skin, and the shaerd too had their innate arcane resistance.

As such, the party working on the runic mana barriers grew as Josh and Clio joined them. Their abilities were different as they only countered magic, whereas mana barriers resisted physical attacks as well, and Josh’s ability worked by temporarily covering his skin in a layer of some sort of material, whereas Clio’s body simply resisted magical effects at all times. However, it allowed the two engravers more ideas to work with as they first reduced the distance of the mana barriers from their skin to a few millimetres, giving them their first taste of success.

From here, they worked through the night on having the rune be active at all times: the difficulty being the amount of mana such a function would drain. It was near dawn when they came up with a solution to this by making the design more organic: instead of sending a wave of mana out and having it magically stick in place, an impossibility for all those who weren’t proficient mages, they instead made it so that multiple broad, hand-sized barriers rose from the skin - connecting the two through thin tendrils - and overlapped over one another to make one body-encompassing barrier. Since there were countless points of contact between the body and barrier, it made it far easier to discourage the mana from drifting off and thus massively increasing total efficiency.

It was the morning after that they finally finished, arriving at their first proper prototype of a runified mana barrier.