Right now, I feel angry. Well, feeling angry is an understatement. At the moment, I can feel anger surrounding my thoughts like a cloud. If it were any other time, this much anger would have been enough to short-circuit all of my thoughts. I would just be like a mad bull lashing out at anybody next to me.

  It is mostly training and discipline that is allowing me to maintain my focus right now. It is a good thing that I can do this. After all, I have to focus on quite a few tasks that I have to do.

  Let's just say that I have picked the absolute worst time to take command of this group. Right now, every direction that I can see is literally a dead end.

  Well, the problem with this mission starts with John himself. John knew from the start that this was a risky little plan. That things could go really wrong in this gamble of his. After all, we didn't know the strength of our enemies. We don't even properly know the layout of this place. We also did not know that if the enemy would have a nasty little surprise for us. (I did not expect that surprise to be a dragon.)

  Considering all of that, any plan that we would have made was most likely to fail. That is why John had made this plan in such a way that we could retreat from the place as quickly as possible. After all, the enemy cannot really catch us once we are back on the ship. The only thing we would have needed to do was to reach it. We would have failed our mission, but we would have at least survived.

  That means that the man had made sure that we would have a path of retreat. That is why stealth was so important to us in the first place. That was the only way that we could have retreated if the enemy had attacked.

  Right now, the Aegis have screwed over this retreat path of ours completely. Well, I guess I should first explain how exactly Anthony has fucked us all before throwing the blame on him. You see, the man had an emergency beacon with him. He is supposed to trigger that when he is in danger, allowing his troop to locate him.

  I guess that they must be under the assumption that Anthony is in some life-threatening danger. That is why they are trying to get to our position as quickly as possible. The problem is that in their hurry to get here, they are not giving a single flying fuck about stealth.

  Every step they take is like an invitation to the undead, telling them where exactly they are. I am sure that they don't realise the danger that they are in. (It is rare to fight necromancers near the hexmountain, especially if you are not a sentinel.)

  They must already be quite deep in the outer circle, but they are quite unlikely to make it here. They are going to be surrounded by the undead pretty soon. They must have already begun fighting the creatures even as I record.

  Right now, that is the main problem that we have. We need to get out of this place and quickly launch a rescue operation for them. If we could be sure that the path would remain clear, we could have slowly sneaked out of the place. Granted, the only thing holding back the creature is me right now. (I am at fifty percent of my mana storage, by the way.)

  I don't know how the fuck we can do that. We have two paths to take. On one side, we have a dragon, and on the other, we will have an entire army of undead. If the path behind us had been free, we could have escaped quite easily.

  Granted, I would have had to stay back to maintain the door against the beast. Once everybody was a decent distance, I could have retreated pretty quickly. Even if the dragon somehow managed to get to me, I would have survived it. I am quite durable, you see. I could have escaped the creature somehow.

  Speaking of my durability, I can feel the wounds on my body disappear. The burns on my back have already disappeared. I can feel the blood mana flows in my body, making my life a living hell, and at the same time fixing all of my wounds.

  Well, there is no use in thinking what could have been. There is no easy escape for us. The problem is that the folks on the ship will also not be able to help us. Right now, they are having their own problems. Already, they are struggling to keep the ship afloat.

  The undead have all swarmed against them, you see. I would say that of every ten skeletons in this place, seven are presently attacking the ship. Now, the undead are not as much of a threat as they would have been if the necromancers led them. They are still attacking the ship, though.

  The disciple's tomb has anti-ship defenses in place. Things such as ballistas and cannons that the undead can use to attack the ship. They might have really shit aim, but the searchers also don't know how to pilot the ship. (An undead not possessed by its master is not able to show a lot of fine movement, you see.)

  So the ship is not going to be very helpful at the moment, it looks like. Well, I guess I should explain about the undead and what we think has happened to them. You see, I don't know how exactly a necromancer grants intelligence to an undead. (Well, the searchers guess that it has something to do with the soul.)

  What we do know is that the intelligence of an undead does tend to be limited. They can only act using the orders that they get from their masters. Well, their masters are all dead.

  Now, with that being the case, Amelia tells me they are going to follow the last orders that they have been given. These orders are most likely going to be some variation of defending the place. They will patrol the place, getting rid of anything that they deem as enemies. At least until the death mana powering them is depleted and they go back to being a corpse.

  Now, we don't know if that will make the undead more or less dangerous. After all, with a necromancer directing them, attacking the undead would make them retreat. On their own, the undead will keep charging at us, either till we are all dead or till they all are.

  The only exception to this rule seems to be the dragon on the other side of this door. The creature is too intelligent for me to think that it can be bound by commands like that. Maybe that is why it killed all the necromancers. Because they were trying to bind it.

  Well, that doesn't help us much. After all, the creature is still chasing after us. It seems to be bent on killing us. Otherwise, why would the creature bother to keep attacking this door? It has been about ten minutes since I started powering the door, you see.

  Even now, the damn thing is pounding away at the door. Its claws spark against the door, causing the entire thing to shudder. I am sure that with the formations to enhance it, it would have already broken into the room. (That is how ferociously it attacks the door.)

  Other than that, it also keeps throwing dragonfire at the door. The dragonfire is especially draining on my mana reserves. The flame is not just flame magic.

  It has been enhanced by something else, making it more aggressive. I think a way of describing it would be that the flame is sticking to whatever it touches.

  The only way to remove the dragonfire stuck on me was to use my mana to attack the dragon's mana. (That is why my healing of the burns was so delayed. Blood mana is not designed for head-on conflicts like this.)

  Well, it is about time that we made a plan for how to escape the place. It is clear now that we will not be able to escape this place without fighting. I have decided that we will have to confront the dragon. Fighting the dragon will be easier than trying to fight an entire army of undead, you see. Also, the beast might be intelligent, but we hold advantages against the creatures.

  First of all, the creature is massive. It is barely able to move in its place. If we can just pin the creature down, then we wouldn't even need to fight it. We can make use of the inner circle of the tomb to escape. We have many places to escape if we somehow enter the inner circle. Also, entering the place makes sense from the perspective of our mission. After all, we need to find any remnant of these necromancers in there.

  At the very least, even a document about why they were attacking will be enough. We don't want to leave the place empty-handed. I am already starting to get a few ideas on how to trap the beast. After all, the room that we are in can act as the perfect little trap. Wait a minute, I need to check something. I manifest a few control strings as I begin to grope around the door. I finally find what I'm looking for as the control strings snake along their merry path.

  Right now, I am following the remains of the link between the mana reservoir and the formations. This link itself is useless since I destroyed it. It is still able to tell me the location of the mana reservoir, though. When my control strings find this reservoir, I almost feel like whistling in victory.

  It is at the top of the room, you see. Well, this is going to be quite useful, though I am not going to tell you what exactly I plan to do. After all, there is no way that we can let the beast know our plans in any way. The beast won't be easy to bring down. I only know myths about the dragons, but it is enough to tell just how powerful an enemy they are. The myths mention how intelligent they are.

  Also, I have seen the creature on the other side of the door. It would take Anthony and John working with each other to even be able to injure it. (Well, I might as well ask a unicorn to bless me as compared to asking these two to work together.) Even as I am recording them, the two of them are standing at the other entrance, looking for any trace of the undead. Even now they don't forget to give each other a stinkeye. At least they are not killing each other. Breaking into a duel here would have been too much.

  Well, if my plan works, then we can get away with minimal fighting. It is not going to be particularly fair, but I am a formation mage. We are the most powerful when we don't have to play fair. Still, it is not going to be easy and knowing my plans, it is most likely that I am going to be the one to suffer the most. Well, there I go demotivating myself.

  I am shutting down this log for now. After all, I have a plan to fine-tune, and at the moment I don't have the energy to be second-guessing myself. (And I am also on a bit of a clock here.)