As if a sword immortal had descended upon the world, twelve daggers formed an array around The Author's Pen. The Pen could strike the fingers in just the right places, weakening their structure. After all, the fingers were made out of concrete. Alec was sure. This was just another illusion. It wouldn't make sense otherwise.

The confirmation had come from his interface. His HP lowered ever so slightly when that finger hit his hand. The same hadn't happened when Edward attacked him. It didn't register outside attacks against the user's health points.

Ripping through the plethora of giant fingers appearing out of nowhere all around, Alec managed to make it to his friend's side. Whatever the boss was, its ability to obstruct vision was too high, so Alec wasn't aware of their situation up until that point.

And when he did see them, he found them to be in a dire situation.

Momentum was a vital aspect of fights, especially when it came to mages. They needed time to set up their attacks and tactics. Without plenty of preparation, they would fall into simpler, easy-to-counter tactics. That was exactly what had happened to his friends. In fact, if not for Iris' early warning and Evan's fast reaction, the whole team would have been eliminated. Alec could see why the Professor had called the middle boss to be almost impossible for a single team.

Evan and Lea were working in tandem, trying to create that time window for the others to pick themselves up. While Evan blazed with golden flames, each of his punches and palm strikes minutely altering the course of those fingers, making them miss by a hair's breadth—Lea followed slightly behind him, launching surprisingly many amounts of basic artillery spells at close range. However, Evan's flames seemed to be slowly running out. Both literally and figuratively. His movements and usage of spells were of utmost efficiency, to a degree that even Alec couldn't compare. But still, his stamina and mana pools were nowhere near enough for the scale of this fight.

The ones struggling the most were Alyssa and Thomas. Alyssa was a rare plant mage. She would take out seeds from her pockets and throw them around. The seeds would sprout in no time, forming countless vines and entangling the fingers, restricting their movements ever so slightly.

Thomas was in a similar situation. He was a mage specializing in light magic. Although light magic could be really useful against biological monsters with soft flesh, he struggled quite a lot against the fingers made out of concrete. His fingers parted, and ten beams of light masterfully attacked the boss. However, no matter how much he concentrated fire, he could only take care of a single finger at a time.

Alec had to win them some time to regain their footing. If not, the boss would steamroll them in no time.

"Gather around me!" Alec said while pulling Evan by the arm. With a quick dash, he gathered all 7 of his teammates around him in touch distance. Not wanting to try writing on air and fumbling it, he used Evan's back as paper and wrote.

[Gravity Well]

Suddenly, a purple wave of energy spread throughout, pushing away all the fingers into the spatial cracks they had come out of. This would buy them a couple of seconds, which was more than enough.

"Iris, Evan!" he shouted. "Ping bomb him!"

The duo nodded. Like a sea of fireflies, more than two hundred spells appeared around them, all of the first circle. While more than fifty belonged to Alec, the others were an equal split between Evan and Iris. Once they activated at the same time, a dizzying wave of pure white awareness spread throughout, encompassing the entire cave. Finally, the boss monster revealed its entirety to their eyes.

"It's just fingers?" Evan muttered under his breath. The boss was attached or was protruding from the wall. It looked like a gargantuan stone hedgehog was stuck in the wall and showing only its back. Albeit the spikes were instead stone columns disguised as fingers. The rest—the cracks in space, the eyes... All of them were merely illusions. The fingers would leave the anti-memetic effect just before striking them, maybe as a mechanic of the exam.

Seeing the truth behind the situation, they still couldn't relax.

"So... What do we do now?" Evan asked with a bitter frown on his face. Alec shrugged. He doubted he had something that could deal with it in his arsenal. "So we just chip it down?"

The boss' HP bar had only gone down by five percent.

"But we don't have the time to do so," Iris added. The fingers had started approaching them once again, recoiling from Alec's gravity spell. "I don't know what that wave of force was. Can you do something bigger?"

"There is no way. Even if you were to supply all of your mana to me at the same time, I wouldn't be able to deal enough damage," Alec said. It was a restrictive spell at most. Using it to deal damage to such a big opponent would require him to have 50 points in mana at least.

"Hm... Alec. How many of those blades can you control with your mana?" Evan asked. Alec shook his head as the twelve blades launched forward with the pen, keeping them safe for a couple more moments.

"It's not about mana. It doesn't even cost much. I just don't have the brain power to control all of them. Letting go of the fine controls, I could maybe deal with another four. If I didn't have to move and use both brains only for that, maybe twenty-four in total," Alec said. This made a glint appear in Evan's eyes.

"Everyone! Win Alec and me some time!" he asked. He then made Alec call back The Author's Pen. "I don't exactly know how this artifact of yours works, Alec. But it probably creates stuff that you write, right?"

Alec nodded hesitantly in answer.

"Great. Then give me something to write with," Evan said. Alec nodded and wrote a simple pen to write with.

Evan started drawing and scribbling on the floor with immense speed. His hand a blur, he managed to write a couple pages worth of stuff in less than a minute.

"We are running short of energy here!" Iris relayed. Alec and Evan momentarily looked over before going back to it.

"Can you do something using these?" Evan asked. Alec quickly read through, inspecting the drawings. They were about a spell, or some sort of ritual. It was pretty complicated. Which made Alec frown.

"Did you think of these on the spot?" he asked. Evan nodded.

"Yes. My mind stat has long surpassed 50," he answered. Alec gulped when he heard that. "At that point, it was better for me to go all in on it. It has practically become impossible for me to become a combat mage. All of my stat points are on mind."

"Oh..."

Alec inspected the ritual once more. He committed it to mind, conceptualized it, and wrote it down.

[Mind Nexus Ritual]

Alec's mana pool, which had filled up to 60% while waiting and fighting on low maintenance, dipped down to 10%. His eyes became hazy, as he struggled to stay up. If it was anyone else, they would have immediately gone into a mana coma. For Alec who had induced himself with such comas many times, however, it was bearable.

"It's done," he added with a hoarse voice. "But someone will need to supply me with mana."

"Douglas can do that. He should be the one with the most mana. Once the ritual starts, you will be able to freely share mana anyway," Evan said before blasting off in a direction to help the others. Douglas quickly came along and kneeled down next to Alec. He started pouring in mana without a word. He seemed to have quite a big mana pool, close to Alec's. After all, magic missiles were all about spamming. And that needed mana. A lot of it.

Once the mana flowed, Alec felt energized. He started writing blades into existence. A pile, containing more than a hundred blades appeared. Although he had spent a sizeable amount of mana, the one paying the price wasn't himself.

Getting up, Alec started running around, drawing a big magic circle on the ground with the pen. Literally carving away the ground with its tip. Once he was done, he unleashed another gravity well and recalled his friends to his side. There were circular empty spots on the ritual circle. He made everyone sit. He then settled in the middle.

"Brace yourselves! This will be uncomfortable!" Alec shouted. Once the magic circle activated, he felt his mind expand. The same happened to the others. However, he also felt bloated. Their consciousnesses overlapped. It was similar to having a mana brain, however less efficient. Still, it was more than enough. Once both mana and calculation power started flowing toward Alec through their connections, he willed the inert blades into action with gravity proxies. More than two hundred blades floated and pointed outwards.

A big portion of the calculation power came from Alec and Evan. In fact, Evan's mind was like a brilliant glow compared to the others. However, his massive mind was mostly spent on coordinating them.

A finger, finally freed from Alec's gravity well, launched in their direction. More than 10 blades focused on it and ripped it apart. As they got used to utilizing the mind nexus, the blades started pushing back against the fingers. The fingers retreated further and further away until the amount of blades just couldn't keep up with the amount of area they had to hold. Now settled down to a stalemate, a barrier of blades had formed around the eight.

The mana kept flowing toward Alec from the formation. Everyone was getting tired, and there were about two minutes left for the exam. The boss still had about thirty percent health.

"This isn't going to work out. We have to finish it in one go," he told through their mental connection. Receiving signals of affirmation, he tugged on the mana pool and took a huge portion for himself. He distributed the orders of attack. Then The Author's Pen lowered. It wrote on the ground, seemingly glowing.

[Gravity Well]

However, what Alec visualized wasn't a singular gravity well, but a series of them. They reached from where they were to the main mass of the boss, creating a corridor of unimaginable gravity. The air shook. The two hundred daggers immediately pointed toward the boss. The Author's Pen flew up to stand in their middle.

The air parted into a vacuum because of the gravity. Time seemed to stop. The fingers trying to reach them from that particular direction were swooshed away like leaves in the wind.

Then, the spells were realized in quick succession. Like a railgun, more than two hundred blades, accompanied by The Author's Pen were launched forward.

The crushing gravity caused the blades to shatter into thousands of little pieces. The gravity proxies shattered and a mental backlash slammed against their collective consciousness like a tsunami. Alec tried his best to gather as much damage as possible and pour it into the mana brain, while the rest was equally distributed by Evan.

The blade pieces stabbed into the boss' main body with ear-rattling explosions. Load an object with enough speed, and it would cause an explosion. Not to mention, the huge vacuum created by the gravity spell was filled instantly, causing a shockwave to spread. It launched the eight in one direction while slamming against the boss in the other. The boss' health dipped down to zero.

Amidst the cacophony of explosions, Alec found himself lying next to a wall, directly on top of Evan, crushing him with his weight. Evan was still unconscious, barely able to breathe. The others weren't in a good situation either. The first to wake up was Alec, the amount of time passed unknown.

[Alec Greenwood, Iris Duncan, Alyssa Fraser, Douglas Burton, Team Coates, and Team Lemke have beaten the Middle Boss! As they have done so with less than ten team members, they were directly placed in the first eight seats of the leaderboard according to their participation.]

[1. Alec Greenwood] [2. Evan Coates] [3. Douglas Bu...]

The list continued, but Alec released a sigh of relief. He dismissed the illusion and looked around. The boss' illusions had ended, revealing a wide, interconnected array of columns. Each with magical carvings of different types. He got up to inspect them closely, but as he approached the leftovers of the boss' main body, he spotted a door to have opened in its remains. In fact, the door was shining. It seemed to be calling Alec toward itself.

He turned around to look at his unconscious friends and made his way to the door.

When he was no more than two meters away from it, an illusory prompt appeared, not right in front of him but at the door.

[Detected the first ranker. Please take out the token of passage.]

'The token of passage?' Alec thought. He suddenly felt a burning sensation on his chest. Unbuttoning his shirt, he noticed himself to be wearing some kind of crystal necklace. 'Since when has this been here?'

It was a small, eye-shaped crystal. He didn't remember receiving it. Probably a piece of memory lost in his last mind erasure.

Once he took out the crystal, the notification on the door disappeared. Taking a deep breath, he passed through and started descending a long flight of stairs. The door slid shut behind him, which only worked to increase the rate of his heartbeat.

The darkness made him lose his sense of time. He would occasionally stumble, barely managing to pick himself up before falling.

Then, he made it.

It was a dome-shaped place, similar to the boss' chamber, but much smaller. There were 9 columns, placed in a circular pattern.

And there was nothing inside. Nothing. Absolutely empty. No more entrances, no person, no artifacts.

"Oh."

Alec took out The Author's Pen. His mana was full. He should have accidentally pulled all the mana his friends had. Maybe all of them had gone into a mana coma. Hopefully, Professor Howard would take care of them quickly.

[Average Mental Cleansing Potion]

Once the vial appeared, Alec didn't waste any time and downed it in one go.

The room seemed to look ever so slightly different, but still empty nonetheless.

Something in him told Alec to walk further and stand in the middle. He accepted that intuition and followed it. When he stepped past the columns... That was the moment he was hit with a cascade of sensory input.

It was gone.

When there was constant noise, the human ear would get used to it. Sort of pushing the noise to the background. You would only notice it once it stopped.

It was that kind of feeling. Only for the anti-meme. It wasn't there anymore.

Alec found himself to be standing in a magic circle. A magic circle of imperceivable complexity. The lines running through it looked more like circuits in a processor, rather than lines in a magic circle. The writings were so incredibly minuscule that Alec couldn’t read them no matter how close he got. The magic circle was also big, spanning the columns and reaching toward the middle.

This was the eye of the storm. This was the anti-meme. That, Alec understood.

Under each column, a hooded figure sat cross-legged. Nine in total. Their red robes were robust, not showing even a bit of skin.

And in the middle sat a white-haired, clean-shaven, middle-aged man. His eyes were closed. He wore a robe too. A white and gray one.

Alec gulped loudly.

"Headmaster?" his voice echoed inside the chamber. The middle-aged man's eyes slowly opened, revealing two gray eyes. They were ancient. They locked onto Alec.

"Alec Greenwood," he responded. His voice was turbid in an eerie sense. Alec wondered when the man had last spoken.

"I am Odiel the Unknowable."