She did her best to ignore the sounds of combat going on around her as she worked to treat the injured enchanters as fast as she could, only keeping a side eye out for anything flying through the skies towards them as she pushed herself to heal broken bones, stitch together skin and stop any internal bleeding she could find to ensure everyone that was meant to be in her care survived through what had occurred.

When the demon's attack got through she had failed, plain and simple. While she and many others had been placed there specifically to ensure the safety and the weapon, she was the only one who had been equipped to stop the strike, and her lapse in judgment had kept her from doing anything that could have potentially helped. Only as it lay as rubble on the ground that she realized the rare skill the creature had deployed against them; magic nullification.

The skill had to have been imbued in the very rocks that were thrown to let them bypass any potential barrier, and leaving her powerless to stop them as they came since she’d only reached out to them, trusting her supply would be enough when what she should have done was throw something in their path to physically block it instead of just believing in herself.

But it’s too late now.

There was no point in regret, now all she could do was fight the wave that was sure to break through sooner than later, doing whatever she could to keep even one more demon from spreading out into the world, and once she was sure the woman she was working on wasn’t going to die she moved to ensure she got the necessary help in that, rushing back to her aunt’s side to treat her uncle.

She didn’t need to ask how he was, she could see it plain enough. While she’d worked to treat the major damage when she’d gotten to him before helping the others, there was still more. Shards of metal and stone buried under his flesh that she ripped out with her magic before closing the wounds with other spells, trying to increase his vitality as much as she could while helping to reduce the less obvious signs of damage going on beneath the surface, needing him to be back in top shape as he eventually stirred, bring a large hand to his face.

“Ugh, gods above, what happened?” He grumbled the moment he could talk, her aunt throwing her arms around him as Thera went to explain.

“I couldn’t stop an attack on the weapon and it’s been destroyed.”

Guilt was thick in her voice as the feeling of failure threatened to crush her, but Falk only waved it away.

“If you couldn’t stop it then nobody here could have. Now what’s the situation in the battle?”

She didn’t know, her thoughts had been too focused on healing until then, but helped him up to check as they all looked towards the invasion point, seeing the chaos and carnage that was spreading.

To Falk and Sonya, they could see the fights going on, different groups trying not to collapse against the weight of the horde as they tried to hold their lines as long as they could to keep anything from breaking through, and they had the strength to keep it up. These were people who had trained and honed themselves under the effects of the system; creatures that had been brought into it only seconds after coming for war didn’t have the chance to grow under it and were being slaughtered, but a difference in skill was nothing against numbers. Even if a single person only died for every hundred demons, they still knew they wouldn’t keep up.

Thera was able to see even more than that though as she looked out, seeing the same thing that had been there since they’d arrived. The air was filled with spirits, each of them doing whatever they could, causing random spikes of earth to rise from the ground to impale some demons as others were burned or had their vitality drained, and that wasn’t even looking at the acts of the light and life spirits, each putting all they had into healing what wounds they could, saving those who may otherwise have fallen without their intervention, letting them fight all of the longer.

And even that wouldn’t be enough. No amount of stories could have prepared them for the real thing, but with nothing else to be done, she held out her staff and began casting her spells.

The first of which being earth healing, flooding the land with her mana to help those standing around her before ripping out giant chunks of ground to throw at the gate and watching as they came down, crushing everything unfortunate enough to be in their path. With her mana, even from afar she could sow a level of destruction unimaginable to most people, but it still wasn’t enough to make a dent as her uncle fired his own attacks, though in a more controlled way, as his death mana shot out, bullets fired and aimed at wherever he could confidently strike as all of those fighting tried to hold out the best they could, all of them waiting for the eventual call to be made for them to return to their fortified bases, letting the beasts by while the launched more distant attacks from safer positions.

Her heart was pounding at the futility of it all, feeling like the world was already lost, only for her uncle to raise a question that made it all worse.

“What happened to the boy?”

The instant the words left his lips, her head whipped around, trying to find him and coming up blank. The moment she let herself get distracted with her healing she’d just assumed he was staying close by, but in all of the chaos around them he was nowhere to be seen as she felt her panic grow. If he was in danger then the skills he could use were limited and she didn’t even know if he had brought a weapon with him, his entire point in joining having been to work on maintaining a machine that was no longer in a state where it could be saved.

It was as she desperately looked around that his location was given away by a flash of light, pulling all eyes to not only the wreckage of the weapon, but Ben, standing there with a metal sphere in one hand as the other reached out towards the frey as a torrent of mana drew into him.

One of his skills had awakened, she didn’t know which one, she didn’t care enough to guess with everything going on, the only thing she cared about was getting to him to drag him to whatever safety their group could provide, only to stop before her first step as she witnessed what began to happen around him.

Everywhere in front of him, pebbles began rising in the air, not one or two or even ten, but thousands, until that next second they vanished in the blink of an eye, making her question what she’d even seen.

Space magic? No, don’t be stupid, Ben can’t use space magic. But the ones he can use aren’t geared for controlling things from a distance either, he can only kind of cheat it with a couple things. So what did he just do?

The question was answered by turning her head slightly to the fight beyond them, where thousands of demon corpses that had been attacking only seconds later now laid, bullets of earth firing out with his will at a fast enough speed to tear through anything that got in their way and to keep going from there.

But his magic also can’t do anything like that, at least normally, so did he just awaken it? If not, what the hell is happening to him?

She felt her eyes pulled to the ball in his hand, the same unnatural feeling she’d gotten any time she’d looked at the weapon exuding from it, only for her attention to switch back to Ben with what he did next.

In the seconds they all watched him after his skill awakened, trying to understand just what was happening, more and more earth was pulled from the ground, a constant volley that tore through the demons below faster than the eye could follow, with each shot expertly missing allies despite the sheer volume of attacks he was sending, but that wasn’t all. Along with those shots was another cloud of dirt floating behind him, breaking into the finest dust and reforming into bigger masses again and again at a speed that made it look like the air was vibrating with the change before that stopped with the cloud of it taking shape into a dozen long polls, the bullets he was shooting still going as the first of his new weapons floated to his hand, lightly touching it as it did.

The moment it happened it turned to dust again like he’d been doing before, but it wasn’t just the poll. With a blank, empty expression he looked at the hand that had destroyed it as one of his magic rings crumbled to dust, before trying again with another and another, the same thing happening each time before he seemed to give up, letting the rest of them collapse to the ground as drips of blood began to fall from his eyelashes.

“Ben!” Thera yelled, broken from her daze at what she was seeing as she tried to run to him, only stopped by the powerful arm that grabbed her. “Uncle, what are you doing!”

In the face of her urgency though, Falk spoke calmly. “Sonya, you go heal the boy. Thera, we’ve just got to trust he knows what he’s doing, we have bigger problems.”

She looked to where he gestured, taking her eyes off Ben to see the battlefield, along with the army that had been between them and the invasion point falling under the assault. They weren’t all dead and many were still fighting, but like many other locations, they’d been broken through, meaning the tide was coming for them.

As much as she hated it, she understood what her uncle was saying as her aunt ran to do what he said, leaving the two of them to fight as Thera made a choice.

With an onslaught of world-killing beasts coming their way she didn’t want a single one of them getting to Ben or her aunt, she wanted their entire focus, so she cast a dark spell. One that came more naturally to her than any other magic she could wield, yet one she hated with everything she had; charm.

Since the dark mana she possessed within her was naturally so, she didn’t even have to go to the trouble of applying the effect of it to cast it as a spell instead of the passive effect she normally dealt with, all she had to do was direct it, putting the force of her mana into drawing in each beast to bring them her way, not giving them the chance to think of going anywhere else while as one the horde’s eyes locked onto her, every instinct they had making her their target as she pressed her staff to the ground the second they got close and activated her earth magic.

With how fully she had their focus, each of them consumed by her near maddening effect, even the ones behind her victims couldn’t see what she was doing to the ones ahead, so extreme was their tunnel vision as the structure of the earth beneath them changed, the ground’s density became thinner than water, making each of the monsters before her sink into its depths, unable to swim up in the strange situation as they drowned in the dirt.

Of the few who escaped the powerful spells at play, her uncle handled with his magic, tearing the vitality from them and giving her the leeway to look at Ben.

From the panic on her aunt’s face to the growing amount of blood pouring from his own, she could only feel a grip on her heart from the fact that whatever Sonya was doing, it wasn’t enough to make up for whatever he was putting his body through, but all fear turned to shock a second later. He was still standing there, hand outstretched as he fired off thousands of bullets of earth, as another change took place.

For the second time that day, Ben’s body exploded in light, dimmer than any other to the point that it could have been missed if she wasn’t looking at him as it happened yet still definitely there, and along with it came fist-sized spheres of stone, over a dozen of them with no two looking the same before they broke up and were fired off, only to be replaced with more. Not just stone this time, but metals and ice, something she’d have sworn was bone and materials she couldn’t begin to guess the identity of as what he had to be doing snapped into place, the absolute impossibility of it almost making her deny her very eyes. Ben was materializing his mana.

Forget the sheer difficulty of doing such a thing, forget the fact that along with the power he was already showing, the volume he was creating was simply not something that could be done with his mana pool, what made it unbelievable was what he had to be using to do such a thing. Ben had no affinitied magics, the type that the few people in the world who could manage that same insane spell had. What he did have was his material user skill, or whatever it had clearly just awakened to, meaning that everything he had just done had been accomplished with plain mana.

If there was anything that was going to awaken a skill, it was going to be that, but it seemed that wasn’t the end goal of him doing it, but the start as he kept making more and more balls of materials, firing them off the instant after they came into creation before he finally stopped, having achieved whatever he needed to as he created what had to be twenty head-sized metal spheres before expanding them all to an outrageous size, each as big as a carriage and focusing on them once again, his face still unreadably empty before he shot them off in rapid succession, each of them having a single target as they traveled through the gate all of the demons were flooding through.

She didn’t understand the point but it seemed he’d gotten all he needed to from that as he repeated the process, making more and more as hundreds of them appeared and followed that same path, traveling through the gap between worlds until something that had never before occurred during any known invasion across hundreds of worlds took place. The gate vanished.

For just a moment the battlefield stood still. Every soldier struggled to comprehend what they were seeing as even the demons seemed to instinctually grasp that something had gone wrong, but whatever that may have meant didn’t stop the fact that everyone there was still locked in a battle for their lives. They could look for answers after.

Thera’s own slaughter kept on going, but however Ben had managed to achieve what he did, he was clearly reaching beyond his limits. His body was beginning to break down on a scale similar to when Yuzu had filled him with her unrestrained power, and as a final act he made the last few large metal containers vanish as if they’d never existed to begin with before collapsing into her aunt's arms.

All she wanted to do was run to him, to flood his body with her life-saving magic, but if she stopped what she was doing then more people would die, so she had no choice but to grit her teeth and trust in her aunt as Thera handled the rest she’d drawn in with her charm, hundreds more being killed before she could move to her real desire of doing whatever she needed to, to ensure he’d be fine.