Everyone had their thoughts on how best to accomplish the creation of [Mana Sense], and thus far, Velik had been dutifully taking their advice. He’d done his best to try it every which way, but nothing had really resonated with him. That simple, ten-minute conversation with Jensen had been by far the most useful, more so than days of theory and visualization exercises.

But in the end, he decided the best way to do something wasn’t to sit safely in a city. It was to go out beyond the walls into the wild places that waited at the edges of civilization where he could put his skills to use. No amount of study could beat first-hand experience, and so that was what he went out to find.

In truth, he didn’t even have to go that far. People liked to pretend humanity owned the world, that everything from the coasts to the mountains was firmly under their control, that even the frontier was pacified now, but that simply wasn’t true. It wasn’t hard to find the holes in the map, the stretches of forest a hundred miles long or the treacherous bogs that locals knew better than to wander too deeply into.

Velik picked a familiar spot he knew was full of magic: the necropolis he’d gone to with Jensen on their first expedition. It was a font of undeath, and that meant all sorts of monsters that relied on magic just to keep moving. As a place to practice sensing mana, it was about perfect. His familiarity with it made it a logical choice, too.

The only issue was that it wasn’t conveniently located, but eight hundred miles wasn’t as daunting these days. Powerful hunters could easily cover that distance in under a week. Those with specific abilities like Aria could do it in a day, though she’d be completely wiped out by the time she finished portal hopping.

Velik started the journey about an hour after midnight. The gates were closed, but he went right over the wall, startling a trio of guards in the process. A thirty-foot fall was nothing to him, and he was already in wolf form by the time he landed. He stuck to the road, scaring more than a few weary travelers with his passage, but making good time.

Pre-dawn light was just brightening the eastern horizon when he reached the necropolis. It was a huge underground city, perhaps a third the size of Ashala but with eight different interconnected floors. The expedition had cut their way through to a few specific vaults, extracted the treasure, and then promptly bailed rather than fight off endless waves of undead.

The entrance was a ravine with a large, sloping tunnel bored through the south wall. They’d climbed up from a dried river bed when they’d first arrived, but the ravine was flooded this time. Velik approached from the top of the ravine, took a moment to locate the hole, then leaped into the open air. Momentum took him to the far wall, then he used [Air Walk] a few times to adjust his trajectory.

The guide marks he’d helped carve into the stone to keep the expedition from getting lost were still there, not that Velik needed them. He swept through the tunnels, following the scent of mana wafting up toward him. It was a musky, mildewy thing, dead leaves and rotting wood mixed with half-eaten remains, dusted with that sharp edge mana had.

The first zombie found him five minutes later. Velik crinkled his nose as he studied the mana flowing through its limbs. Streamers pulled its muscles back and forth and pooled into orbs in its joints. Every step the zombie took shaved some of its mana away, but the air was so thick with it that the monster easily pulled in enough to replace what it spent.

Velik split it in two with an upward swipe of his spear, the head reshaped into a wide, single-edged blade. The slash started at its groin and passed through the top of its skull, which wasn’t actually enough to destroy it. Strands of mana hung between the two halves like melted cheese, gummy and elastic. Given enough time, they’d stitch the zombie back into one piece.

It took six more slashes to fully dismember the thing. Only once the mana holding it together was completely spent did he get the kill notification. Curious, Velik watched the body as ambient mana pooled around it, no longer actively pulled in to fuel its movement.

This isn’t working. I might get a rank in [Mana Sight], but the goal was to merge it with [Mana Scent]. Maybe some of the stronger undead will give me something useful.

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Velik stepped past the hundreds-year-old corpse and headed deeper into the necropolis. He knew for a fact there were undead who could cast spells down there. That was as good a place to start as any.

* * *

Velik crushed the skull of some sort of skeleton that shot jets of freezing cold air at him underfoot. It shattered with a satisfying crunch, but there were eight more of them in this little troop still trying to kill him. If he stopped to admire his handiwork, he’d be giving them free shots.

Unfortunately for them, they were grouped pretty tightly, probably more so than a group of human mages would have been comfortable with. Velik had already killed the three outliers on his way into the main core, and now there was nothing between him and them.

A well-shaped [Dread Lance] obliterated the entire group at once. Velik ignored the notifications streaming in to study the interaction between his own mana and the rapidly disintegrating undead. There were hidden eddies and swirls there, details he was only vaguely aware of, but he didn’t think studying them further would help merge the skills together.

His investigation was interrupted by the final two skeletons. They stood on low rooftops opposite each other, both raining down jets of frigid air that left trails of condensation tracing their paths. Reaching them would not have been difficult, but Velik didn’t see any reason to put in the effort. A storm of whirling steel whipped across the empty space instead. Four throwing knives sliced through the skeleton to his left, rapidly splitting the skeleton apart at the joints over the next two seconds.

Velik walked away, and six seconds later, his knives caught up with him. Both skeletons were nothing but piles of bones, and he went back to prowling the necropolis for a monster that might actually show him something new.

* * *

Zombies swarmed by the thousands. Wights and ghouls—Velik wasn’t sure what the difference was, but the notifications labeled them differently—tried to ambush him. A few ghosts and a whole battalion of spectral horsemen did their best to kill him. There was even an enormous abomination of flesh, muscle, and bone that stood twenty feet tall and could break stone with great sweeps of its enormous hands.

None of it gave Velik what he was looking for. For a moment, when a duo of liches attacked him outside what appeared to be a massive cathedral, he thought he was onto something. Magic came at him from every direction, so much that he couldn’t keep up with it using just [Mana Sight]. By the time the liches collapsed into piles of dust, all he’d netted for himself was another rank in [Mana Scent], which he’d used to predict what kind of spells were forming behind him.

If that doesn’t do it, I don’t know if anything down here will. Those liches were both level 50. There can’t be much stronger than that left.

He was already down on the bottom level now, probably a mile or more underground. The architecture was impressive, with far more finely cut marble and precious metal accents than he’d seen anywhere else. Whoever had built the necropolis had been obscenely wealthy, or perhaps had possessed some sort of magic to conjure such materials out of nothing.

Velik stepped into the cathedral, following the trail of mana flowing like sludge deeper and deeper. It was there that he encountered his first surprise. The necropolis was full of traps, some mechanical but mostly powered by magic, and that made them easy to pick out with [Mana Sight]. The first time he’d encountered one, he hadn’t quite understood what he was looking at, but triggering it simply caused a few dozen darts of magic to bounce off the wall behind him when he dodged out of the way.

He approached the altar at the back of the cathedral’s main hall, alert and wary. The liches were as intelligent as undead could get, and he fully expected them to have some traps set up somewhere. He hadn’t spotted any yet, however, which was strange unless the cathedral wasn’t actually their lair. The battleground could simply be a coincidence, the random spot where they’d happened to meet while rushing out to intercept him.

Then something rose up under his feet, thrusting him into the air on a platform of pure magic that hadn’t existed a moment ago. Velik lunged to his side to roll off it before it smacked him into the ceiling, but he only made it halfway there before another equally large platform came down to meet in the middle.

The pressure wasn’t enough to kill him, but it clapped his whole body hard enough that he fell limply back to the floor when the trapped platforms vanished. With a pained groan, he dragged himself to his feet. “What the hell?” he muttered.

The words were barely past his lips when the floor flashed with magic and the platform hurled him upward again. This time, Velik made it off before he was crushed. He landed heavily near the front of the cathedral and studied the swirls of mana.

There was nothing there. It wasn’t hidden in the mana flow. It just didn’t exist. And yet, it clearly did. A hesitant step forward wasn’t enough to trigger the trap a third time, but once he made it back to the middle of the main hall, it threw him up into the air. Velik was ready for it and darted out of the way in time.

It resets itself every time, but… No, there’s nothing. He started to get excited. This is new. This could be it. I have to figure this out.