Genius Mage in a Cultivation World

"And here is your reason why I never considered you a good material for my group," said Layn while calmly observing the approaching group. For anyone else in his shoes, seeing a group of nearly twenty men rushing at him with their weapons brandished would quickly force them to either escape or seek help.

But Layn was a damned archmage.

'I survived on the greatest battlefield humanity will see in the next tens of thousands of years if not millions of years. And you expect me to get scared by you?' ridiculing the attackers in his thoughts, Layn simply waved his hand.

The air turned stale.

"DIE!" shouted the same man who tried to coerce Layn into paying up before. His sword made an arc above his head before striking down at Layn's right shoulder. Yet, the archmage did nothing to stop it.

"What?!" muttered the same man. His sword was stuck in the air, barely an inch away from Layn's face. 

"What an idiot," said Layn while shaking his head in pity. Then, without any regard for mercy, he swatted his hand through the attacker's face.

BOOM!

Both the air and Layn's hand were infused with a copious amount of his mana. Due to the man letting go of the sword and attempting to dodge, Layn only managed to brush the attacker's face with his fingertips. But for the basic battle reinforcement spell, that was more than enough.

CRASH!

After flying past his confused teammates, the man crashed heavily into the ground. From what Layn could see, the power of his lazy attack was still enough to cause the cracks in the stone road where the body of the attacker fell.

"Anyone else wants a beating?" asked Layn while raising his head high and squinting his eyes. There was no hint of worry or anxiety in his eyes. Even though he was still facing nearly the entire group that attempted to lash at him just a moment earlier.

"I want no trouble…" said one of the men while putting down their weapon.

"What are you waiting for, boys! He is just a single…" another man attempted to encourage others, only to be swatted to the ground by Irea's hand.

"Who said that he is alone?" asked Irea while retracting her hand. While her attack was clearly several times weaker than Layn's, it wasn't weak by any means.

At that point, even the bravest of the failed recruits understood their situation. After lowering their weapons, they quickly dispersed and diffused into nearby alleys in an attempt to escape justice for what they attempted to do.

"Now then, are you going to stop pretending now or should we forget about the mission?" asked Layn while lowering his head over the motionless body on the ground once again.

"I… I'm awake!" stuttering, the man answered. From the terror on his face, it was clear how terrified he was, unable to even come up with a proper way to respond to being called out like that.

"Then, what's your choice? Do you still want to have a shot at earning this stone?" asked Layn while allowing his lips to turn into a gentle smile. What's more, he even reached with his hand down, with a clear intention of helping the man to stand up.

"Thanks," said the man while accepting Layn's hand. Once back on his feet, he looked at the two bodies still on the ground, one of which wasn't there when the entire rouse was devised. "Also, I didn't take part in what they planned. That's the reason why I turned the way you saw me. I'm sorry for not being able to help or even warn you." The young man looked to the side while his face turned beet red. "Not like you needed any help or warnings in the first place, though."

The young man rubbed his cheek with an uneasy expression plastered all over his face.

"Well, this situation was more or less what I expected. In this shit of a town, how could people react in a different way when blinded by such wealth?" asked Layn while shaking his head. "With that said, here," he said while pulling out one of the spirit stones from his pocket and throwing it the young man's way. "Consider this the advance payment I spoke off before. Now, what's your name?"

"It's Pavrien. You can call me Pav… sir," the young man introduced himself, raising his eyes to Layn's face only to avert them the very next moment.

"Great. I'm Layn and this is Irea.  From now on, you will be in our care," announced Layn before sending a wink to the new addition to his party. "As for now, we should leave this city post haste. It's only a matter of time before," turning his head around, Layn looked in the direction of the academy, "before the shit will go down. Let's not get involved in it."

Not wasting any time, Layn patted Pavrien's before picking up the pace. For a moment, the young man simply stared at the back of the archmage before lowering his eyes at the stone he held at his bosom. Then, as if something snapped inside him, Pavrien finally rushed forward, catching up to the duo.

Even though it was already nighttime, with Layn's means it wasn't any trouble to cross the gate. Or to be more specific, to cross the walls.

'Now that I have no idea how to cultivate any further, there is no point pushing all the mana into this cultivation at all.' thought Layn before casting a simple yet extremely energy-consuming spell to lift everyone. Just like any spell that directly went against the fundamental laws of the world rather than slightly bending them, by the time the trio reached the upper level of the walls, Layn's forehead was already filled with fat drops of sweat.

"I need a little break," announced the archmage as soon as the small group set foot on the upper part of the massive wall circumventing the entire city. 'I forgot that I'm not as conductive as I was before,' thought Layn while panting heavily and even using his hand to support himself against the stones of the walls.

"Are you okay?" asked Irea, noticing the state of her partner.

"Yeah, just give me a moment," answered the archmage while struggling to regain his breath.

While at the very basic of using magic one would simply facilitate the mana gathered in one's aura, once a spell complicated or taxing enough would come to a play, more and more limitations would appear. Just like when Layn used all the resources he managed to hoard over several years just to circumvent those limitations to cast his gran arcana, using the levitation spell not only ate away at his energy but also strained the limits of how much energy he could output over time.

'If not for this body…' raising his hand to his eyes, Layn closed them for a moment before striking himself squarely in the chest. With a bout of pain acting as a stimulant, Layn's heart rate finally stabilized, allowing him to take a proper breath. 'It would take me far longer to actually recover.'

Layn straightened himself up before casting a fleeting glance at the two of his companions. "Okay, let's go," he said while grabbing their hands. 'It should go like… this.' Even for an archmage, a spell fighting against gravity was too complicated to invoke it at will. And as short as it was, a proper image of the spell's structure still had to appear in his mind before he could set his mana in exactly the same shape.

"Jump!" ordered Layn just as the sound of footsteps reached his ears. At this time, in this place, only the gate guards would be free enough to make a trip to this remote corner of the walls. As such, it was wiser to disappear from the place before they would take notice of the strange trio.

So they jumped. The levitating spell, intentionally choked by an insufficient amount of energy feed into it, only managed to slow their descent down rather than allowing the trio to completely defy the gravity. Just like Layn intended for it to happen.

CRACABOOM!

Just as Layn's feet were about to touch the ground, the entire world shook. The moment Layn managed to land, he was instantly swept aside by a furious wave of raging mana, spreading in all directions from the point somewhere in the city.

"They fucking did it," commented Layn as he attempted to stand up, only to be pressed tightly to the ground by the ongoing onslaught of energy.

"Didn't you say you can make use of it?" asked Irea while struggling to stand up as well.

Pavrien didn't say anything, most likely praying to all the gods he ever heard off in the face of this invisible disaster.

"If I do so here, they will be able to detect me!" protested Layn in response. "We need to get moving. The further away we will be, the easier it will be to hold our own against the waves."

Layn gave up on his attempts to stand up, opting to just crawl as far away from the walls as he could. Soon, both Irea and Pavrien followed suit, gritting their teeth and brushing their arms against the ground.

In the next thirty minutes or so, the mana continued to rage in the air while the trio kept crawling away from the center of the disaster. By the time it was over, they already reached a forest near the town, a place that would take just a few minutes to reach on foot.

"What the hell was that?" Pavrion's whitened face proved how scary the situation was for those who didn't expect it.

"Just a little trick of mine," answered Layn while finally standing up on his feet. "But it doesn't matter now. Right now, we need to hurry and leave this place."