Outside the hole, there were pillars holding up a high domed ceiling interspersed along the white walls carved with intersecting lines of runes, magic circles, and charged gem. As he began to force himself out of the too-small hole, he felt something being forced out of its alignment. There were cracking and tearing sounds, barely inaudible to the human ear, from the surrounding walls that he saw out of the hole.
The sound picked up and became louder the more he forced the hole open, and he saw that the lines of intersecting runes shook visibly, making the plaster of the white walls surrounding it flaked off and fell to the ground. The hole started to become unstable, the edge transformed from the calm unstable circle into fluctuating shapes that rippled with the barely restrained flow.
He swept his gaze past the people standing around the hole. Their body tensed, face pale and expression increasingly horrified, but otherwise stuck around as if rooted in place. He inwardly shook his head over their unprofessionalism, despite being the one on the focus of their fearful attention.
If he were the one in front of the hole, witnessing the attempt of something over escaping the imprisonment of the seal, he wouldn't be standing still watching like a bystander watching a commotion. He would have done something, if he could do something, he would do it, and if he couldn’t he would find someone else to do anything. Barring that, he would keep his distance and not waiting there in the range of the breach.
He turned his attention back into the hole in the seal. He had almost succeeded in prying it open, but escape was still out of sight. In-between his attempt, he also tried to sense anything that felt off to him. The seal was loosened not because of a coincidence, but a deliberate attempt. Someone tried to do something, he didn’t know, but he felt that there was something trying to connect with him. Like a thread that tried to loop around and then pulled at me.
He didn’t make any effort in taking hold and connecting himself to it, because he was sure that it would not be able to help him escape the hole. It would only grab a small part of him and disregard everything else. Like he would want to be separated and torn to pieces. If he wanted to go somewhere, he would make sure that he had everything. He would never leave anything behind just because he couldn’t bring it.
There was a movement at the edge of his vision. A bunch of people walked in hurriedly from the exit. They were wearing an easily distinguished clothing compared to other people who just kept standing there foolishly watching. They walked with surety of someone who knows what to do and shoved away anyone in their path.
He had thought that the people standing around was the one tasked to watch the seal, but now that he inspected them again, they were of various age and wearing random clothing that looked like of civilian make. They were actually a real bystander and the uniformed people was the one responsible for the seal. It was a little bit infuriating to him that the prison-like place where he was sealed in was turned into a tourist attraction.
The soldiers – since their uniform was reminiscent of the attire of the man at arms belonging to a certain kingdom at the border of the land of twilight – quickly spread through the room and stood ready. Though they looked as if they were standing haphazardly without purpose, he could tell that their position was predetermined. They stood at their intended place and then shouted and shoved at people nearby to back off.
And suddenly, the rippling hole stabilized gradually, and even getting smaller minusculely. He scoffed and struggled harder to rip open the hole. Even if he was by himself and those soldiers were many and helped by some preparatory arrangement, he was confident that he could prevail. Then they started a tug of war against him, but their effort was stuck in a stalemate.
When he was busy suppressing the effort of the soldiers, he saw something that made the bystanders step aside. It was a woman with gorgeous scholarly attire walking from the exit holding a big book that simultaneously looked ancient and new, unimportant to sight and forcing the eye to wander in its form’s boundary. Her expression was calm and serene, but her gait made her look like an arrogant person that was uncaring to anybody in their periphery.
He knew who she is and he can guess what she wanted to do. The sight of her face made his blood boil and churn in suddenly surfaced repressed anger. He was incredulous in her self-assurance in using that book to go against him. He had been overcome with it once, but it was back when he was too exhausted and powerless to resist. But this time, he would make sure she would pay the price of her arrogance.
While he kept his effort against the soldiers, he divided part of his consciousness to preparing a nice surprise against her. He knows what he needed to do to take care of the book, even if it was a kind of minor obstacle since he was without the necessary tool for it. After all, he was the one who gifted the book to her in a sense. So when she used her book as a conduit, he struck with a sudden attack. The backlash of the attack threw her back violently and made her impact the wall while the book was detached from her hold, flying the other way.
But something unexpected happened. The book struck something and the hole rippled in a frenetic wave while an earthquake struck the room and toppled the soldiers from their position. The wall, broke and come down, taking swathes of rune-line and magic circle with it. The hole was fluctuating quickly like it was about to be closed forcefully. He was struck with sudden anxiety and decided to charge through the hole, accumulating all his strength and released it in one surge.
The room exploded and the hole closed suddenly, throwing a mana backlash as it imploded into itself. The soldiers, the sage, and the bystander were flung away and hurled in every direction, bumping into each other from the rebound. He felt something wrong when he emerged, a sudden lethargy assaulted him before the thread that was previously trying to attach itself to him pulled him away from his body.
He was trying to hold on and sever the thing tried to pull him away but he was too dazed to struggle this quickly after suffering from the backlash from point-blank range. He was being pulled away violently, and before he got trapped in another container, he saw his body being piled on by the soldier as it erupted with ink-black light-devouring darkness. He also saw a thick pillar of light – so thick it looked solid – descended upon that area and clashed with the darkness.
