Captain Lauren and his knights watched in awe as Eri’s inventory pouch expanded and swallowed one cannon after another. The floating spatial pouch moved effortlessly as if it were an independent creature, moving and expanding under Eri’s command as it devoured the massive artillery pieces into its lightless maw.

  In mere seconds, it sucked up all twenty-two cannons, leaving the second story of the pumping station empty.

  “So as you can see, I wasn’t talking out of my ass,” Elen gestured unhappily. “Eri has a spatial pouch. And that thing is going to be our ticket out.”

  The boy nodded. “The pouch has more than enough space to accommodate everyone here. Once that is done, I can sneak back to Castle Elathion on my own. I’m good at stealth, and with myself alone rather than a large group, our chances of slipping by undetected are much greater.”

  A stretch of silence followed. The knights’ expression carried varying levels of disbelief, while Joarris' party was simply appalled to the point of speechlessness at Elen’s suggestion.

  The Knight Captain was the first to speak.

  “Disregarding the insanity that your ward somehow possesses a functional magical artefact from the Age of the Gods,” Lauren stressed, “Your plan is utter madness! Our minds would unravel from being trapped in timeless space! This is common knowledge! Spatial magic cannot preserve sapient creatures!”

  Lauren’s words were the catalyst for everyone to start shouting. Some of the knights were outraged at Elen's suggestions, others were intensely curious about where Eri managed to acquire such a rare artefact.

  Elen waited for three seconds before she spoke.

  “His can,” Elen correctly cooly. “Preserve sapient minds, I mean. I’ve been inside.”

  That immediately shut everyone up. They all stared at Elen, utterly stunned.

  “You… You’ve been inside? You had risked going inside?!” Alvine was the one who shouted, voice cracked with horror. “Time flows differently in a spatial space. You could have ended up stuck alone in complete emptiness and isolation for thousands of years! It’s a fate worse than death!”

  Bori gagged slightly at the thought, his face pale. “I’ve read the stories before: people whose consciousness were trapped in time-spatial magic. Even dying to demons would be a million times better. You can’t even kill yourself in there. Stuck in an endless loop, infinity in each second… Your mind going insane, or worse! Everyone knows to never enter a spatial space!”

  “It was less ‘risked’ and more ‘left with no choice’. Look, it doesn’t matter,” Elen sighed. “I can guarantee you it’s safe. I was held in there for hours before, and it barely felt like a second. In and out, you can’t tell any time has passed.”

  “Prove it, then,” Bori snorted. “If you are so confident, then show us—”

  Elen didn’t even hesitate.

  Eri opened the pouch’s opening wide, and the matron stepped inside. She disappeared instantly. The boy then sealed the pouch, shrinking it until it fit perfectly on his palm.

  The onlooker’s reaction was immediate.

  Bori turned and vomited. A knight fainted. Everyone carried intense expressions of horror and revulsion.

  Alvine raised a shaking finger. “You… You monster! You killed her! How could you—”

  Eri opened the pouch again, the tiny leather sack floating in the air and expanding until its hole was two metres wide.

  Elen stepped out, a bored expression on her face. She raised her arms wide. “Ta-da.”

  Silence. There was a thud yet again as another knight fainted.

  Only Lauren maintained any semblance of composure. “How long were you in there? Do you remember your name? How many fingers am I holding up?”

  “‘Less than a second’ to that first question. ‘Fuck you’ to the last two.” Elen rolled her eyes. “It’s me. I’m sane and well. This isn’t the first time I’ve been in the pouch, or the first ten, for that matter.”

  “But that’s…” Lauren struggled to speak. “This shouldn’t be possible.”

  “How many people can you fit in there?” Joarris, ever the pragmatist, asked first. “Do you need to make multiple trips between here and the castle?”

  “No need. The space is infinite, from what I can tell,” Eri explained. “One trip is all I need.”

  “Are you telling me that not only can your spatial pouch transport people safely, but that the carrying capacity is limitless as well?” Lauren’s eyes were wide as saucers. He turned to Elen. “Do you have any idea of the implications behind this?! The logistic capability alone is—”

  “Absolutely absurd. I know,” she sighed. “Why do you think I was trying so hard to keep him hidden?”

  “He could store infinite provisions: medical, food, general supplies… Everything an army needs. The hurdle of military logistics would be nullified,” Joarris realised. “Actually, scratch that. He could just transport the entire army on its own — an entire Crusade. Eri could sneak into a major Hellgate and deploy everyone behind enemy lines with his spatial pouch — no need to suffer hundreds of thousands of casualties just to break through.”

  “He won’t even need a hundred thousand men,” Bori shakily pointed out. “Just a few Saints and a hundred Jewelled Chosens, and he could deploy them right at the Demon King’s feet.”

  “The war would be ended instantly,” Raharim concluded in awe.

  “I care less about the war and more about getting out of here, if I’m being honest,” Julie muttered. “Can’t say I’m too happy about stepping in there, but if it gets us all out safely…”

  “There’s still a problem of whether he can sneak out,” Alvine hesitantly said, still a little pale. “Streets are going to be crawling with Silver, Gold, and Ruby Core Demons. There’s no way in hell he’s going to pass them all by undetected.”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  “About that,” Eri coughed. “I have a plan for that.”

  “More God magic?” Bori said sardonically, though there was a hint of uncertainty in there as well.

  Eri shook his head. “No, this one’s much simpler. Captain Lauren, the Caustic Oil pipes within this pumping station run through the entire district, correct?”

  “It’s a distribution centre, so technically yes,” Lauren answered hesitantly. “This station supplies only to the closest streets, but it does link up with the other pump stations across the port.”

  Eri nodded. “Alright, good. Joarris, you mentioned before that the pipes were set to rupture from overpressure, right? And this applies to all the pipes throughout the district, not just locally?”

  “Ohhh no, I can see where this is going…” Bori murmured. Joarris chuckled and nodded.

  Eri grinned. He then tapped a waist-tall device by his side — the same one he nearly set off early before Elen showed up.

  The hissing cylinders and runes on his Hellbomb glowed faintly.

  “Alright, here’s what we are going to do…”

  ~~~

  Eri told two lies.

  The first was the capabilities of his spatial pouch. He had never fully tested the limits of its carrying capacity, nor the long-term effects of keeping a living creature within it.

  All prior experiments across Thalmyra involving sapient creatures and spatial magic always resulted in horrifying abominations being born. No thinking mind is capable of handling the passing of infinite millennia.

  When left to their own devices across the endless aeons, past the brink of madness and thought, strange things happen beyond the mere eradication of one’s psyche.

  Whatever came out was never the same as whatever went in.

  The horrific nature of spatial magic did not deter Eri, however. Over the years, the boy had conducted several experiments with his Inventory pouch, first with inanimate objects, then living organisms like plants, followed by lesser animals such as bugs, birds, and fish…

  Before, finally, sapient creatures — humans and demons.

  For the most part, the pouch seemed endless. Inanimate objects could be stuffed within and retrieved with little to no discernible changes. In fact, they seemed removed from the passage of time entirely, stuck in complete and perfect stasis while in the pouch.

  The effect appeared to be the same for plants and lesser animals. Even after months, uprooted herbs remained healthy. Animals emerged in the same condition as when they entered, with their minds appearing unaffected by the time spent within — an utterly miraculous discovery, for it was the first known case Eri was aware of whereby a spatial space left a sentient mind preserved.

  Past those experiments, however, his avenues for further research were limited.

  He had first tested it on demons, but surprisingly, the System had intervened. The pouch adamantly refused to take in any creature or object that could be considered an ‘active threat’ to Eri. Demon corpses were fine, but a live and hostile demon was rejected entirely, regardless of whether it was wounded, dismembered, or even missing most of its torso.

  Interesting, live explosives or projectiles aimed towards him could not be swallowed by the pouch either. An inert bomb or arrow could be thrown in without issue, but if the object were primed or used in a manner that could be assumed hostile, the pouch would not accept it.

  It was the first restriction Eri had faced with his Inventory. Naturally, he tested it in every manner he could devise, hoping for a loophole, but the pouch — or perhaps, the System — seemed intelligent enough to discern when an object represented a ‘threat’ to his person.

  It was a significant, albeit annoying, discovery. Still, the advantages of the pouch far outweighed this minor inconvenience.

  The next step, naturally, was to test the pouch on a person. However, Eri couldn’t risk anyone knowing of his spatial Inventory. That left only Elen available as a test subject, since she was the only one in the world who knew of his secrets.

  Eri didn’t bother even attempting, for the consequences of failure were too great to consider. He would sooner throw himself into the pouch first than risk Elen’s life or sanity.

  It was only when he had been faced with no other choice that he dared make the leap. Elen had been close to dying at the time, and with all previous animal test results suggesting the spatial pouch’s unique preservation of the mind, Eri had given in.

  It had worked, to his enormous relief. He did not think he could forgive himself if the pouch had rendered Elen insane, or worse.

  But that was only with a single person. He had never stored more than one sapient mind in the pouch before; Eri never had the opportunity to do so.

  As such, he could not confidently say that with everyone enclosed within presently, the positive results seen in Elen’s mental stability when she was carried within his Inventory pouch would be retained.

  However, given that the alternative was death, Eri had opted to leave that part out in his explanation. It was already hard enough to convince everyone to enter his pouch, even with Elen’s demonstration.

  Besides, Eri was reasonably confident that the spatial properties of the System operated at a far greater aptitude and stability than any other known storage artefact — for everything seen thus far indicated it came from a power beyond even those of the Elderkin or the Old Gods — and so he had decided to place faith in its abilities.

  All of that was the first lie. The second lie that he had told… It was the one he had told Elen.

  Eri had informed her that he could vaguely sense the Archon, that he could sneak past it and retreat to Castle Elathion safely.

  He had lied. There would be no running away. No chance of sneaking past the demon.

  Eri could sense its gaze on him — an ancient, patient thing. Such was its intensity that there was no way he could miss its weight on his soul.

  It already knew who he was.

  The Archon's honour guard had already sealed off the streets around the pumping station before Eri even told his plans to the group.

  Eri had withheld this information from the rest. They did not have his [Observation] Skills, nor were they aware of the Archon waiting quietly a mere few hundred metres from the pumping station the entire time, its massive bulk unmoving as Eri had explained his plans.

  Eri did not know why it didn’t simply attack them straight away, but the situation remained the same regardless: Escape was an impossibility. But Elen would never let him face the threat alone, so he had proposed the Inventory idea first instead.

  It helped rid the place of human witnesses for the next stage of his ‘plan’, at least.

  He was going to talk his way out of this disaster; Eri was quite possibly the only human on the continent who could pull it off.

  Because that Archon knew who he was.

  And so now Eri sat, perched atop the enormous blood effigy he had constructed from the corpses of the King Hydras and his foul magic earlier. He looked to the North, where the Eye of Damnation cast its baleful glow upon the Violet Maw.

  From the mist, the monsters emerged.

  Gold-Core Demons, numbers surely ranging in the hundreds, squeezing between narrow streets, crawling over each other, crushing buildings and flattening rubble with their unstoppable mass.

  Ruby-Core titans, their visage indescribably horrifying, jerking forth on distended limbs and circling the blood spire. Despite Eri’s open vulnerability, not once did they attack.

  Then, their Master arrived.

  First came the tremor, those deep vibrations underfoot that rattled even the foundations of his spire. A titanic heave in each step; a mountain stumbling forward.

  It was not a creature made to move on land, yet it did so anyway. A horned crown of jagged bone rose first from the mist, black and dripping with oil. Then came the serpentine neck, scaled plates gleaming like wet obsidian beneath the murky light. Slime cascaded from its ridged spine in thunderous sheets as the beast clawed its way forward, its talons the size of warboats digging trenches into the stone.

  The draconic head of the creature levelled itself to the peak of the blood spire, where Eri sat. The ground stopped its quaking. A massive tail swept up from behind, reaching for the shrouded skies as its oily wings unfurled and stretched. Its fanged maw opened, hissing with the stench of brine and brimstone.

  Black, reptilian eyes — each larger than Eri’s entire body — locked on to him.

  It spoke.

  “I greet the Lord Fourth.”