The whole area shook, and Mark felt dozens of Auras push into the space. He went to block them, but Jonathan and Lisa had already expanded their own to shroud them.

Mark was geared up second, and the rest moved to the front door. The building wouldn't offer them any protection at this stage, so they burst out of the front door at the same time as their ambushers arrived.

Nearby, four individuals turned to them with blades ready, and without hesitation, they plunged toward Sam and Patrica near the edges.

Lisa intercepted one of them, breaking his arm in the process, and Jonathan got another by kicking him in the chest, center mass.

The man went flying backward and crashed into the side of the library, vaporizing the wall in a cloud of dust and causing a section of the roof to cave in.

Of the remaining two attackers, Sam created a band of lightning which she wielded like a whip and shot out at her attacker, sending him to the ground, convulsing.

The last attacker headed straight for Patrica, but instead of attacking, he tried to grab at her in an attempt to pull her away.

Mark saw this and reacted.

He created a construct overhead in a fraction of a second and brought it down like a hammer. The Aura users hand had just touch the nape of Patrica's shit when he was suddenly crushed into the concrete, sending chips of grey stone flying in all directions. Luckily for him, his body was resilient enough to survive the pressure, but he couldn't move an inch.

All four assailants were taken down in less than a second, but by the looks of things, this was far from over.

Dozens more people were coming from all directions, and each of them wore similar attire. Now that they could see them, Mark realized they were dressed in armour and robes with markings denoting their gods embazened on their chests and backs.

Templars.

These people were from the religious district, and by the looks of things, there was more than just one church here.

"Halt!" a familiar voice rang out.

They all turned to look at the sky as a bright white radiance began to light up the night.

The surrounding fighters all stopped advancing, but Mark noted they were ready to charge in at a moment's notice. He wrapped them all up in a powerful construct and turned to look at the man in the skies.

Yasha Reinhardt floated in the center of the glow above them, his robes drifting languidly in the air.

"Good evening. I'm sure I don't need to explain why I'm here, but I am willing to offer you all a deal. Step away from Miss Williams and leave here. If you do so, you will not share the same fate as the heretic."

Mark's perimeter construct was still in effect, and he could tell there were already over a hundred fighters around them, and the number was still climbing.

From the feel of it, they weren't taking any chances and had brought their full strength here today.

Lisa stepped forward.

"I'm sure you know we can't do that. More importantly, what happened to my people? Are they alive?" she asked, a quiet menace in her voice.

Yasha's mouth lifted at the corners.

"No need to worry about them not where you're going."

Jonathan looked around and raised his voice.

"Are you sure you want to do this? If you lose, you know what that means, right? You've brought a lot of people here, but the best case scenario for you is I kill more than half of them before you take me down."

Yasha's face twisted in amusement.

"People are replaceable; what you face today is the combined might of four gods!" he screamed.

At that moment, Mark noticed three other individuals drift down from the sky. Mark had never seen them before, but he could tell by the amount of the three energies coming off them that they were high priests.

"My faithful, surge, attack those who would do evil and those who would protect it," Yasha shouted, his voice carried on the winds.

Mark didn't hesitate to link the six of them together with [Telepathic link].

The fighters around them surged, and Mark activated his waystone. If they could get back to the city, then at least they might be able to get some help, but his plans were dashed a moment later when his item began the process and then fizzled. It gave off a strained energy and fell silent. Mark's eyes widened as he looked down at the amulet.

It hadn't failed; its energy was still full. Something else was going on. It was almost as though it couldn't activate. Mark's head snapped up to look at Yasha, and when he saw the man's satisfied grin, he understood.

They were blocking off their escape via magic.

It wouldn't be the first time that the Ideals did something that they didn't yet understand.

Mark grunted and turned his attention back to the templars as they arrived.

Lisa and Jonathan had taken up the frontline, but they were outnumbered heavily. Right now, ten to one, and that was only the beginning.

The Templars let out bolstering cries as they charged, weapons raised.

When the two sides clashed, heat and blades sang through the air as Lisa and Jonathan dove into the mass of fighters.

Sam and Nathan had begun building a fortress of lightning and acidic slurry.

The two wound the energies around their group like barbed wire, forcing those advancing to slow. The lightning arced through the air in countless cords of drifting plasma. While Nathan sent out his rot as searching tendrils. Directing his magic to seek out those who got too close. Mark strengthened the construct over the four of them in order to block the sudden influx of projectiles coming their way.

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Overhead, the four high priests had not moved a muscle, content to let their shock troops do their jobs.

Unfortunately for them, after one reached a certain level of Aura, it became incredibly hard to overwhelm them with numbers. Sure, there was a limit, but both Jonathan and Lisa had been fighting on the frontlines since the beginning. They bobbed and weaved around their attackers, and sure enough, each of their counterattacks either maimed or incapacitated a Templar.

If they had to defend others, things would have been different, but the four of them were more than capable of keeping one another safe.

Like this, they fell into a practiced pattern defending against spells and skills was a lot harder but they were managing.

That was until one of the high priests with a mountain emblazoned on his chest acted.

There was a sudden tremor through the earth, and Mark felt all the surrounding stone and concrete fall under his control.

'Get off the ground!' he shot down the link, but what happened next was unavoidable.

The world trembled, and the entire street beneath their feet–tar and all–rose as grand pillars.

Buildings nearby crumbled as they melded in with the rising street, causing what could only be described as a mountain this size of a couple blocks to rise up.

The speed with which the earth moved was strong enough to push Mark to pin them to the ground

All six of them went scattering as they tried to recover, but then the earth halted and began to fall back to its original level. The suddenness of the ground falling out from underneath them

The only thing to remain was a thick wall amongst all of them separating them into two groups. Mark immediately took the sky to avoid crashing back to earth, but the high priest expected that because he wasn't done. All of a sudden, gravity felt like it had increased twenty-fold.

Mark held himself in the air for just a second before he was overpowered and sent hurtling towards the ground.

The others were falling too, but Mark wasn't worried about them. They could survive the landing.

His real concern was Patrica.

She'd been forced into the other group—deliberately, he realized. The high priests had planned it. There were enemies waiting for her and no backup.

One group would contend with Patrica on her own while the rest stalled them.

Mark ground his teeth and triggered his mental limit release. Then, using a powerful burst of Mana, he shot himself towards the falling woman, grabbing onto her by the waist.

The two of them separated further from the others, but Mark was more focused on surviving the landing.

So, creating a large construct below them, he pushed it against the ground in an attempt to cushion their fall. As they crashed into the top of it, he backpedaled with [Telekinetic control] as hard as he could. The impact lessened, but their current weight was far too high to stop, and the construct warped like a balloon.

It was easy in theory, but in reality, it took all of Mark's concentration to slow them a correctly and warp the pane of force to the increased mass it was receiving.

He managed to lower them to the ground gently, but as they touched down, both of them collapsed under the weight of gravity as it grew stronger.

The high priest would not let up, and neither of them was physically strong enough to withstand the pressure, so they couldn't even stand.

Mark may not have been able to lift his head, but even he could see that the surrounding fighters had arrived, not giving them any breathing room.

Mark expanded the construct to defend them as multiple attacks rained down on his barrier.

The force of each impact is redirected to another portion of the shield. Groaning, Mark released his physical limit, but even with that, the magic currently ineffect was too strong. The amount of Mana behind this spell had to be enormous.

His construct seemed ineffective against it, but something was off.

Sound magic was a direct counter to his, but this didn't feel like that.

It wasn't that he was incapable of blocking gravity magic, but he was missing something fundamental about the force. What he wouldn't give to have Sam here right now to explain.

Outside the shield, the attacks continued to descend. Mark could feel the others were also struggling with their own battles, unable to assist.

Yasha slowly began descending towards them as the high priest with the mountain on his chest followed. The other two priests drifted over the wall to deal with the others.

"I told you how this would go, and still you defied me," Yasha said with a twisted smirk on his face.

Patrica was panting on the ground, shaking with anger.

At Yasha's barbs, she began to glow with her Ideal's energy and slowly stood on her own, but she was struggling.

"Why are you doing this? The lord cares for both of us."

She said as she let off a dozen bolts of light, each one searing a nearby templar. But after that, she teetered, struggling to remain up.

Yasha laughed.

"Because you're weak. You called yourself a mouthpiece of the lord of Brilliance, but you're a fake. Now use up the last of your heretical gods' powers. That will make it easier for us to divy up its strength."

As he said this, a brilliant beam of white light issued forth from his chest, far stronger than Mark had ever managed to create. It had to have thousands of points of Mana packed into it as it tore through the air toward them.

Patrica lifted her hands and fired her own beam of golden light, but it was immediately clear she wasn't his opponent. Her attack was being overwhelmed, and just before it hit, Mark darkened his construct and used all his remaining Mana to charge [Light control] in an attempt to negate the beam.

With their combined efforts, the construct warped but held, holding them in a stalemate. But it wouldn't be for long. Marks Mana was being overwhelmed by the sheer quantity Yasha's Ideal held.

Mark groaned, rolling onto his stomach. They wouldn't survive this unless he found a solution, and fast. But first, they had to get free.

He squinted past Yasha's shoulder, eyes locking onto the high priest still suspended in the sky. An attack this widespread had to be draining an immense amount of Mana. And yet, with all his followers present, the priest wasn't going to run out any time soon.

Mark tried to push himself up onto his elbows. As he moved, his construct shimmered faintly, rippling with pressure. That detail caught his attention.

He stilled, narrowing in on the subtle distortion.

Gravity wasn't kinetic energy in the traditional sense, but its effects behaved like it. The increased pull from the priest's magic was creating downward pressure—his own body pressing against the inside of the barrier. The force wasn't external, it was internal.

Then it clicked.

There was a type of energy that matched what he was feeling: potential energy. Stored by position in a gravity field. And his body, pressing down on the inside of the barrier, was generating it constantly.

He'd already applied the absorb modifier to his construct… so why had he been limiting it to outside?

All it took was a shift in mindset.

Mark exhaled slowly and adjusted the structure of his construct, not expanding it, not reinforcing it, but simply allowing it to absorb internal pressure as well.

Immediately, the force weighing them down began to ease. The barrier drew in the potential energy from his and Patrica's weight pressing against it, converting a portion into usable power.

It was clumsy at first—not all of it translated cleanly—but the change was undeniable. He could feel the difference.

So could Patrica.

She looked over sharply, eyes flicking to him in surprise. They didn't need to speak. Together, they moved—darting to the side out of Yasha's burning strike. The blast scorched past them and melted through the stone wall in seconds before the spell winked out.

Through the breach, Mark glimpsed the chaos beyond.

The high priests had fully joined the battle. Their magic tore through the earth like a storm. Sam's lightning lit up the sky overhead as a colossal eye—unblinking and full of judgment—peered down from the clouds.

Mark didn't flinch. He pressed his thoughts down the link.

'They're not gods. They're ideals. That means they have limits. Find them.'

Just seconds before the wall repaired itself. Lisa came bursting through the hole in the wall, her body wreathed in fire, wings trailing behind her like a phoenix. She defied gravity entirely, rushing toward them with unstoppable momentum.

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