Micky spared a sliver of attention on the conversation happening in Archibald’s new residence, and another on directing the Starry Wasps.

  He was currently in his human form, sitting on a rocky protrusion by the wall of a vast cavern, watching a swarm of Starry Drones pluck the green mushrooms from the hollowed-out carapaces of a bunch of Workers.

  Behind them, a wave of Knights consumed what was left of their lesser kin to make space for more, while a third group of Soldiers was preparing rows of freshly slain Orange insects farther back. Finally, another swarm of Red bugs was flying over the remains and scattering new spores. The smaller insects were too dumb to follow detailed instructions for long, so someone had to check up on them every now and then.

  The room Micky was in was one of many, similar situations playing out throughout the hive. There was a second type of rooms that functioned as warehouses to store the prepared mushrooms, as well as hatcheries where the Starry Breeders were working overtime to replenish the ranks of their consumed children. Thankfully, the Blue creatures at least were smart enough to fulfil their roles without supervision, leaving fewer areas for Micky to oversee.

  Killing and breeding so many low-level insects was quite costly for the hive, yet the Queen had begrudgingly agreed to sacrifice a lot of her stashed nectar to make this possible, with the understanding that this would lead to greater prosperity for her species once Micky was done empowering her strongest descendants.

  The good news was that he didn’t have to patrol the hive too often – just checking up on each room once every day or so was more than enough to minimize the losses. None of his duties were mentally intensive either, allowing him to devote most of his efforts towards something equally important.

  ‘Almost there,’ he thought, drawing the third rune in his second core.

  He’d stacked the symbols over one another, preserving the circular shape of the enchantment as it spun in three dimensions inside the spherical organ. He focused not on the physical runes themselves, but rather the static projection in his head, working alongside the Scribing trait to maintain its shape and activate its effects.

  The moment the final detail fell into place, the structural integrity enchantment began exerting its influence on the core, its crystalline walls instantly feeling firmer as a result. Micky didn’t rush to get rid of it, holding the enchantment in place for a good fifteen minutes to ensure that he was in complete control before allowing the mana to disperse.

  ‘I guess I’m ready to move to the next step,’ he thought with a sigh. ‘Stacking the runes inside the same circle is a great start, but drawing a proper unit cell will take more than that.’

  Technically, he’d reached his current level as early as during his training on Robari, though he’d had to spend the past few days adapting the Spectral Art to the ice affinity. It felt somewhat different from plain air or water mana, because the two interacted extensively inside the organ. In theory, the colliding flows should have made things simpler by slowing each other down, but the convenience was offset by how heavy and chaotic their product was.

  All things considered, practicing Internal Runecrafting with ice mana was about average in difficulty. Earth might have been easier, but he wasn’t as familiar with it, nor did he have any available hosts right now, so this was about the best he could do.

  ‘Let’s draw them side by side this time.’

  Keeping things simple, he tried to shape his mana into a pair of concealment runes next to one another, overlapping slightly while sharing some of their features. The enchantment wouldn’t really do anything special – other than amplifying the effect a little, but he hadn’t picked these runes randomly. Concealment enchantments were the first he’d tested the new spell on, as well as the ones that he’d spent the most time drawing, so he figured that it was a great place to start.

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  Sadly, it didn’t take long for him to run into the first issue.

  Micky didn’t even finish forming the outline of the enchantments before the chaotic flows ripped it apart. It was inevitable that his initial attempts would fail, of course, but he still hadn’t expected to do so this badly. The problem was that he had to shrink the runes to fit them both inside the circular cross-section of his core, their shape no longer hugging the crystalline walls as tightly.

  The enchantment now resembled the number “8”, the gaps near the middle allowing the unbound mana to freely flow around the symbol, accelerating to a speed he could hardly fathom.

  In theory, it wasn’t a bad thing that the flows now had a way to bypass the enchantment without slamming into it, as it relieved some of the pressure acting on the intricate construct. However, the symbol was rotating in three axes, so it didn’t take long for a momentary misalignment to occur, the violent current ripping the runes apart a fraction of a second later.

  ‘Alright. This will never work if I keep approaching it in the same way,’ he realized after several more failures.

  He’d have to come up with a new trick to deal with this.

  Not in a rush, he decided to take a short break to relax his mind and tend to his other responsibilities. Getting up, he walked to the next three caverns on his schedule, confirming that everything was in order. It wasn’t until the fourth that he spotted a minor problem.

  The Starry Soldiers hadn’t placed enough dead Workers to cover the floor entirely, so the Drones had only planted about eighty percent of the required mushrooms. It wouldn’t be the end of the world, but there was no reason to be wasting valuable time. The plan was to start granting second cores to people and wasps alike as early as tomorrow, so he was going to need all the life mana that he could get.

  ‘We’ll need more remains and spores over here,’ he sent to Nephthys, who presumably relayed the message to her mother. The familiar still wasn’t strong enough to tap into the whole network by herself.

  Only when two new groups of insects arrived to patch the inefficiency up did Micky resume working on his own project. The background rumble of buzzing and stampeding creatures used to be quite distracting, though he’d slowly learned to filter it out after staying underground for weeks.

  Commanding the mana inside his abdomen again, he decided to vary his approach slightly.

  While practising on Robari, he had quickly learned that he couldn’t stifle the flows too much, as that would only put more pressure on the enchantment, making it impossible to maintain. This was why he’d come up with a way to project the shapes into his mind and focus solely on them, without directly observing the physical symbols spinning inside the organ.

  Allowing the mana to rampage freely wasn’t a scalable solution either, however. Opting for a healthier middle ground, Micky was hoping to leave an outlet to relieve the pressure without affecting the enchantment as much. As soon as the symbol began to form, he pinned down the two points where it touched the core, restricting its rotation to a single axis.

  The mental load instantly shot through the roof, because he now had to draw and maintain the enchantment while also paying attention to the rotation. On the flipside, the physical load on the runes plummeted, making it a little easier to keep them from crumbling.

  ‘Promising, but not perfect,’ he thought after playing with the new configuration a few times.

  Adjusting to the mental effort would only take some practice, but the construct itself was still falling apart relatively quickly. The pressure it was under wasn’t uniform, as it was much lower near the gaps and higher by the fixed points at the top and bottom of the symbol.

  ‘Hmm… I need to force as much of the mana to pass through the gaps as possible to minimize its impact on the enchantment,’ he realized.

  Over the next few hours, he focused on precisely that, only taking a short break to watch how the wasps were doing every now and then.

  The better he got at it, the more concentrated the mana grew, eventually forming a narrow ring that spun around the enchantment at a tremendous speed. It resembled one of the basic pre-casting exercises he had mastered years ago while learning to add rotations to his spells, though keeping it going at the same time as drawing the enchantment was a daunting task.

  The runes were spinning in the same direction as the ring, though they did so much slower, because their rotation was driven solely by the leaked mana that Micky failed to rein in. It was impossible to prevent that entirely, which was why he had to go through so many hoops to control the rotation in the first place.

  Micky got better with every attempt, managing to activate some short-lived enchantments by the following day. Percy eventually entered the hive with Archibald, taking over his duties of overseeing the wasps and leaving this part of his mind to focus solely on the spell.

  Hours turned to days, Micky slowly improving enough to keep the pair of concealment runes active indefinitely, though he still failed to find much joy in his success.

  ‘This is a great trick when dealing with only two identical runes, but it relies on the vertical symmetry of the enchantment…’ He frowned.

  Would this even work once he added a third rune into the mix?

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