Being the son of a potion mistress came with many benefits. Orion had access from a very young age to all kinds of dangerous compounds, things that could have easily ended his fragile life.

  Asteria was well aware of this. She wasn’t the type of mother to constantly watch over his every move, but the danger of toddling around her lab couldn’t be overstated, so she did the most practical thing—she gave him protection by immunizing.

  Orion would never receive the exceptional benefits her class offered, but he could be protected against the most common dangerous elements she had lying around.

  Among them was the Last Breath, the purple powder she had personally invented, which could knock out anyone with a body score below a hundred.

  Little Orion had been given nearly infinitesimal amounts since he could eat solids, and the amount gradually increased over time, until he had developed enough immunity to move through the noxious cloud, when coupled with the general antivenin he’d just drunk.

  If he had been forced to breathe it in, this natural immunity wouldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds, but it was enough to keep the poison from seeping in through his skin, and that was more than enough, especially with magic at his fingertips.

  Ophelia went limp as soon as they jumped out of the carriage. No matter how much he might have preferred to keep her upright and awake, Orion’s main goal was to get them both out of the chaos inside the coach, and the amount of mana needed to shield her from the Last Breath would have worn him out in just a few seconds.

  Healing spells were still not his strong suit, though he was steadily improving by incorporating the new information the blood crystal provided.

  This very same knowledge allowed him to coat his lungs with a field of vitality, much like the side effect of Light mana, but more concentrated and localized, which extended the time he could spend in the haze before succumbing to it.

  P_bub = (E_s?R?) ∕ (ΔE_m?V) was the spell’s formula. A pretty rough one, if he were honest, but he had to come up with it on the go and didn’t exactly have the mental space to optimize it yet. The important thing was that he kept P_bub, the pressure inside the bubble, above P_atm, the atmospheric pressure.

  Everything else, like E_s, which stood for the light mana-derived vitality, ΔE_m, the energy needed to conjure one mole of O?, and R, the universal gas constant, he could handle easily enough.

  With a grunt, he heaved Ophelia over his shoulders and kept running toward the sounds of explosions, feeling his lungs fill with fresh air. The spell would probably last for a while, given his recent growth, but it would be wise not to push himself to exhaustion, so he decided to keep it active for only a few minutes before relying on his natural immunity.

  I bet anyone with evacuation training would be pulling their hair out. You usually don’t run toward the fighting.

  Still, Orion ran because he knew that the only safe place for miles was right next to his mother.

  Asteria was currently defending herself against a bandit group from a distance, firing enough shots to keep them at bay without taking a single direct hit.

  When Orion finally reached her, he staggered out of the fog, exhausted from burning through his mental energy while navigating nearly blind and focusing on keeping his lungs free of poison.

  “Mom!” He called, and Asteria kept her focus, not letting his arrival distract her. She waited until she’d finished the last wave of exploding arrows before turning toward him.

  Two quick steps saw her stuff a vial inside his mouth, then she repeated the same process on Ophelia, who weakly stirred. “It will take her a few minutes to completely neutralize the Last Breath. What happened?”

  “There were enemies inside the carriage,” he replied grimly. Whoever Ophelia was, it seemed that someone wanted her very badly. Whether dead or alive, he didn’t know, but it didn’t really matter.

  They also attacked him and his mother, so they would never have Ophelia now.

  “The others?” Asteria asked, pointing a finger behind her without looking back and releasing a single blast of silver fire, which then spread into a dozen smaller ones.

  “Some are dead, but the fighting was still ongoing. I decided to leave anyway because the more they had to protect Ophelia, the worse casualties they were taking, and another group had tunneled through the bottom of the carriage anyway, so it would have become impossible to escape unscathed with so many people," he replied, completing his report.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  He hoped that the adventurers, if they really were adventurers, and the other guards had survived. The two hostesses as well, though he was beginning to suspect that almost everyone inside the coach had been involved in this mess, aside from the lone merchant who’d been unlucky with his choice of transport.

  And of course, from the two Voidwalkers. They had gotten on at the very last minute and couldn’t have been accounted for.

  “I see. You did well coming here. We’ll have to move on soon enough; the Last Breath is starting to fade because they have several mages working to disperse it, and staying here when they could rush us is a bad idea. We’ll have to get to Last Thaw on our own and hope the others can survive on their own," Asteria decided, taking another handful of purple powder and spreading it around, which significantly thickened the cloud and obscured them completely.

  “Now, this will be very unpleasant. Unfortunately, I never managed to develop this spell beyond the basics, but it’s all we have, so bear with it,” she continued. Before Orion could ask what she was talking about, she firmly grabbed his and Ophelia’s arms and chanted.

  “Only where there is Light,

  can the Mother be seen,

  Yet it is in the dark,

  That her absence is felt,

  Let us be with her,

  One step into twilight.”

  The world fragmented and became blurry, transforming into a chaotic swirl of colors and ideas. Orion had to forcibly turn [Verification Principle] off, lest he fry his brain with the sheer amount of disconnected data trying to invade his mind.

  When it was over, he collapsed bonelessly, unable to find the strength to complain. His brain felt like it was about to leak out of his ears, and the groans of pain he heard around him told him he wasn’t the only one.

  Someone retched, and he heard the wet splash of vomit close enough to his head that he managed to find enough strength to roll away.

  That turned out to be the wrong move, as his head throbbed mercilessly, drawing another groan from his lips.

  “Stay still for a little while. It will pass soon enough,” his mother murmured from above him, sounding strained. She still began muttering to herself, casting more magic, though he couldn’t see what kind.

  A few minutes later, Orion finally stopped praying for death and found the wherewithal to speak. “What was that?”

  “That was a blink spell. Not something I’m proficient with, as you might imagine, but then again, bringing people along when traveling through the void is never pleasant,” she replied, sounding a bit better now.

  She then helped him up, being careful not to jostle him too much, and once she was sure he could sit without falling, handed him another vial, this one shimmering gold.

  Orion drank without hesitation, and instantly felt the unmistakable rush of Light mana flooding through him, soothing the pounding headache and alleviating the weakness that had been dragging him down.

  Possibly sensing his incoming question, Asteria smoothed his dusty curls and explained, “I couldn’t give it to you earlier because Void poisoning develops differently for each person. The best thing to do is to get used to it early so you can develop an immunity. If you drink healing potions all the time, you’ll have to go through that every time you blink.”

  Orion grunted. He wasn’t exactly eager to go through that again, but he appreciated her looking after him.

  Cracking his eyes open just a little now that he wasn’t feeling like he was about to keel over, he relaxed once he felt no pain. Opening them fully, he saw his mother walk over to the other passenger, Ophelia, who seemed to be even worse off than he had been.

  The poor girl had vomited so forcefully she had given herself cramps, and bile dribbled down her lips as she softly cried. Asteria wasted no time cleaning her up with a cloth she conjured from somewhere, then gently tilted her head back and dribbled the healing potion into her mouth.

  Satisfied that the girl he’d risked poisoning for wasn’t about to die, Orion looked around.

  Surprisingly, the landscape wasn’t much different from what he could remember when the carriage had stopped. The thicket that had surrounded them back then was no longer there, but the open fields and rolling hills remained the same.

  “How far did we go?”

  “Just a few miles,” Asteria sighed. “As I said, blinking isn’t my specialty, which is ironic given our family name. But still, it’s enough to get out of their divination range. There was no one that strong among the bandits, and if your assessment is correct and the guards in the carriage were holding their own, the same applied to that group too. There were just too many to take on in a prepared field.”

  She seemed frustrated with her inability to handle an entire group of bandits—bandits who had known of their arrival ahead of time and included several mages among their numbers, along with two other groups, one of which had infiltrated the carriage from the beginning, and the other that had been waiting for the perfect moment to burst in from underground.

  Frankly, it was a miracle they were still alive and well enough to talk about it.

  The more Orion thought about it, the more convinced he became that they had somehow stumbled upon a major operation.

  Inspecting Ophelia again didn’t reveal anything new, just a vague ache that warned him he shouldn’t push his mana usage any further unless it was absolutely necessary.

  [Ophelia Leston-Ames - Lv. 27] [Golden Spoon - C-Rank]

  Her rank alone was enough to show she was someone special, but she didn’t come from the Sanctum, that much he was sure of. So why would such an important asset to the future of any faction travel through the Sanctum’s lands, and more importantly, who would know so much about her planned route to set up such an ambush?

  A groan signaled her survival, and Orion prepared to unload all his questions on her as soon as she was coherent enough.

  Unfortunately, Asteria caught his eye and shook her head. “Keep it for later. We’re beyond their divination range, but that doesn’t mean we’re safe. We need to get to Last Thaw before they can set up another ambush there.”

  With a sigh, Orion relented. “How will we get there? I doubt walking is an option.” If they had thought to bring brooms, they might have flown, though the idea of bringing Ophelia along felt tenuous at best.

  There simply wasn’t that much free space on a broom.

  “Well, I’m not the best summoner or transmuter, but I can do this much,” Asteria murmured and clapped her hands.

  “O Moon Mother, watcher of the deep earth,

  Whose light softens stone and awakens form,

  Let Thy silver gaze fall upon this ground,

  And shape from rock the steeds I need.

  By Thy touch, let clay grow sinew,

  Let hooves be carved from rock and bone.

  Grant them breath from silent stone,

  That they may carry Thy will and mine.”

  The ground beneath them trembled as the spell took effect, and Orion watched as two great shapes emerged, becoming more and more defined as she chanted, until two horses stood before them, their eyes made of moss and their bodies of dirt and stone.

  “Well, I guess that’s better than walking,” he muttered.

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