CH1149

Back in the untamed lands, the three of them started at one of the hundreds of spots Ben had wanted to hit, Abrus and Ogilt both there to watch as he got to work, emptying his rings of all of the materials he was going to need for the first stop, looking around as he did.

“Let’s see, I’m going to need the land cleared a bit. Could you guys get rid of all of the trees in a twelve-meter ring around us?”

“Simple enough,” Abrus nodded, carefully pulling out trees by the dirt clinging to their roots and filling in the holes they left, leaving the area flat and empty for Ben to work.

“Alright, in that case, I’ll get started too.”

With the space he required free, Ben warped and shaped the materials he had out while materializing more he needed, applying the necessary enchantments he’d created to everything as two giant rings took shape, leaving the great spirits to look at his designs in curiosity.

“Gates?” Ogilt asked.

“Special gates,” Ben told them. “Unlike any other ones in the world. At least, they will be when they’re done. Just need to add the finishing touches.”

Warping the earth itself, Ben shaped a divot for one to sit comfortably in the ground before pulling out the last four items he needed, heavily enchanted pieces of rainbow mana crystal left placed within his designs before he sealed the structure shut and applied the rest of the enchantments, finishing the design.

To any typical mortal, it would have looked like the space within the ring had been filled with small grasses and plants, while a small family of animals slept peacefully in the center of it all, only the world’s few humans having the knowledge to identify them as bears, but that was nothing more than an illusion at the heart of a trap that already left feet pounding both to and away from them as Ben focused on the spirits.

“Okay, this is where you two really come into play. I need the other ring placed in a distant orbit around the planet. From the sounds of it, the sooner, the better.”

Not given the time to ask, Ogilt opened a portal and dropped it into space before both spirits followed, making the adjustments they needed to keep it in a stable position before coming right back, in time to see the trap claim its first victims.

Five demons jumped through the trees together, and Ben held up a hand to stop the great spirits from killing them. The eyes of those invaders was already locked onto the prey they’d found while the magic his tool was spewing into the wider world had already polluted their brains beyond any chance of escape so, with no other result possible for them, the demons lunged, falling through the gate and into the suffocating void of space beyond.

“Impressive,” Abrus nodded.

“If this works as well as I hope, then that should be a significant understatement," Ben laughed back, already hearing more demons running their way.

The tool was straightforward, no matter how complicated the design behind it had been. A gate to safely drop demons that fell through it into the void of space, an illusion as some added protection to keep any demons from noticing something was wrong in case any could be strong enough to fight off the effects that had brought them to it, and then two more important features.

The first being a one-way barrier on the space gate, letting things through while giving them no way to return, along with the added benefit of keeping the vacuum of the void from sucking things through it either. Whatever demons made the trip wouldn’t be able to return, and the design left no sign that anything might be amiss before it was too late, leaving only the final feature and the very one that made the design possible.

The very thing he’d been making and filling a spatial bag with that morning while awakening Thera’s mind, the crystals he added when finishing the gate had been based upon his previous research with the demidemons. By merging the targeted charm Anailia had taught Thera with the tracking spell he’d found within the library’s basement, he’d beaten the limits of them both. The charm spell may have been useful, but for anyone other than Thera, its range was weak, and the tracking spell had a shocking area of effect, but still required the caster to go out to whatever distant target it locked onto. Together, though, he’d been able to create a spell that would actively pull demons in from hundreds of miles around, starting subtle at first, nudging them closer and closer until they were too steeped in its effects to be able to escape them.

And given that Thera’s a soul mage with a passive variant of that magic, I was able to get an incredible effect from the tracking aspects of the spell. Bet the original creator of it never expected any aspects of their spell to be used by a third tier, or for it to go towards protecting the world either.

Mixed in with it was a subtler fear spell to drive off everything that wasn’t a demon that got too close, to keep any innocent people from accidentally falling through to their doom, but with that, they had finished their first stop, leaving them ready to move onto their next.

Abrus lightly slapped Ben’s back, laughing as he did. “I couldn’t have guessed what you had in mind when you said you were going to save the world, but this sure qualifies. Incredible, Ben. If I focus, I can feel things in all directions rushing towards us too.”

“I’ll take that as a good sign, but if you two are ready, we should be on our way. I have a few hundred more stops I want to make on land, and then we’re going to need to get the great water spirit’s help too for making a similar tool for the sea. If everything goes according to plan, though, it shouldn’t be long before we start seeing a significant drop in the demon population.”

Having witnessed the value of his work, the two great spirits themselves made sure to act as quickly as they could, teleporting him to the locations he specified, clearing the land he needed, and moving his gates to orbit, all for the express goal of killing as many demons as they could while the hours moved by.

They went across the whole of the untamed lands, the portion of the terrestrial world where the greatest concentration of demons that had made it through could hide, compared to the more well-traveled settlements the various races made their homes, but even ones that were done, there were still plenty more. They’d dealt with the demons of the surface, but there were still more haunting the depths.

A portion with the potential to hold far more demons, due to the vertical nature that living in water allowed, it led to a meeting with the great water spirit Salinoth, giving him an explanation as to what they had been doing as well before recruiting their help to deposit similar structures in the unsettled areas of that world’s oceans, the untamed depths.

With the nature of three-dimensional travel through water making the design harder. Ben couldn’t just make the flat plane of a gate when the demons he wanted to attract could come through all angles, and while his surface design would technically lead to some air loss from any that happened to slip through, it wouldn’t be a fraction of a percent of what a planet might lose to solar winds in any given day. A constant torrent of water falling out of the world, though? While it was hard to judge what the long-term effects of such a thing would be, he didn’t want to risk becoming an enemy of all of the aquatic races when he was specifically trying to help them.

A necessity that resulted in a different design, and a more complicated one at that. While normally, gates were projected within a ring of enchantments, Ben was put into a position where instead, he needed the portal projected outwards in a sphere around it, trapping the tool that had made the gate itself inside so that demons could come at it from all angles.

The difference in design also left a difference in production, making it so that he needed to build the gate that would sit in the ocean and the one that would float in space in two functional halves each, that Abrus could then link together into their proper whole with his magic to get the final effect, since Ben wasn’t any more equipped to work in the depths of the ocean than he was to work in space.

And while that had been a challenge, it wasn’t the only technical issue either. On top of the first problem, there was also the matter that water wanted to move the things floating in it, leaving Ben to have to add Salinoth’s magic into the mix as well, using the power of the great water spirit to not only alter the properties of the water around the portal to keep too much of it from constantly passing through, but also combined it with a different space magic to anchor it in place within the ocean, without any fear that the tool might end up drifting into some sub-aquatic town.

With the more complicated design meaning a longer time to work through it all, with hundreds of such gates scattered across the world’s lands and seas, eventually, Ben was done, satisfied with his work as he finished.

Took a few good hours longer than I would have hoped, but it’s finished and that’s all that matters. I applied as many different variations of the demon charming spell as I could, so hopefully nothing can adapt to resist it too easily, which means all that’s left is to wait and see what the results look like in a few days’ time.