One Last System

"They won't move an inch!" Mia proclaimed in a calm voice. Her lips formed a small smirk as a look of confidence flashed behind her eyes.

"But..." Mia's words were clearly not enough to convince the girl. She looked up towards the entrance of the cave, seemingly worried one of her oppressors would appear there.

"Damn, Mia," I muttered in a low voice. "That's quite brutal of you," I added, averting my eyes.

"Excuse me?" Mia shook her head to look at my face. Confusion was written all over her eyes as she leaned her head to the side while attempting to figure out what I meant.

"Oh," Mia muttered. Her eyes widened up a little. She also brought her right hand up only to curl it into a fist and then slam it down on the open palm of her left hand. "I see, I totally forgot about them!" she admitted only to shake her head.

'It's no wonder she feels guilty,' I thought.

It was a pretty basic mistake to miss the approaching invaders. The influence the mana they were made off had over the natural mana of the world made it extremely obvious to any cultivator.

And yet, in the heat of a moment, with her soul filled with emotions... Mia missed it.

"Still, as fun as it sounds, I don't think we should get them like this," I added after only a moment of silence.

The monsters would take less than a minute to reach our location. I simply had no time to let Mia figure my thoughts out on her own.

"Are you showing mercy?" Mia asked, her eyes opening up as a look of genuine surprise appeared on her face.

It wasn't anger, repulsion, or disgust. It wasn't praise, satisfaction, or acknowledgment either.

It was a sheer shock.

'People of this world really do have a different common sense,' I thought, only to shake my head.

"It is mercy," I admitted, despite shaking my head sideways. "But not for them," I solved the small puzzle of my gesticulation. "Since we are going to fight those monsters anyway, I don't want their hosts to bear the blood on their hands for no reason," I explained.

"Monsters? Huh?" the girl shrugged only to squeeze a small voice out of her lungs.

"For you, I will appear as a monster right now," I said only to release a deep sigh. "I'm sorry, but I can only ask you to bear with it for a time."

I nodded my head to the girl in an advanced apology before moving my eyes back on my own girl.

"Mia, could you be so kind as to move those fuckers down here?" I asked.

The face of the girl behind me turned white. Her cultivation was so weak, in my eyes it could not exist at all and I would hardly notice any difference.

Yet, even this weak cultivation managed to send a small wave across the spiritual energy in the air.

'Huh?' I thought, surprised by the sudden finding.

Because as far as my knowledge of the physics of this world worked, something like this shouldn't be possible.

For a moment, my excitement shoot up... Only to die down a mere moment later.

'What are the chances for me to randomly find someone with a great talent?' I asked myself, releasing a short breath of self-loathing. 'I can't be that naive to believe it,' I scolded myself.

"Sure thing," Mia nodded her head, forcing my attention to return to reality. "Firmly bound, right?" she asked as she jumped up and grabbed the edge of the dugout.

"We don't want them to do any further harm to our fellow disciples, do we?" I answered with a question of my own, only for a small smile to emerge on my lips.

The monsters were now closing in. And in a number greater than I have ever fought on my own before.

But the thing is...

I wasn't alone anymore!

"I'm going to prepare," I threw a quick heads up to Naida before jumping out of the dugout and standing up on the relatively flat area outside.

This location was still hidden well within the forest. Yet, its hilly structure and occasional patches of open grass fields allowed me a pretty satisfactory view in all directions.

And even without it, I could still track the approaching monsters just by observing the intensity of the effect their energy had on the mana of this world.

'Well then, let's do it properly this time,' I thought.

All the formation stones in my possession were already coated with a layer of my mana. Yet, as I moved them up and laid them all over the proximity...

I added a small surprise to each of the stones, ignoring the extreme toll it took on my reserves.

'I wonder if it will work out,' I thought, before focusing my attention.

"Wardens," I uttered in a small voice, turning nine of my more complex formation stones into wardens. And then...

"Mage's tower," I whispered, too ashamed to say such a cringe name out loud.

Ten seconds left.

"They are coming!" I quickly shouted over, hoping to alert Mia just in case.

All the formations, arrays, and wardens combined into a single entity. Yet, this time, every last one of the elements that became a part of my mage's tower, now had a little surprise.

I whipped out my spear from my storage ring.

"Right," I remarked. "Do you need a weapon?"

Five seconds.

"I'm good," Mia shook her head to the sides.

Seeing this, I turned my eyes in the directions I could feel the monsters coming from.

'They are charging,' I noticed, lowering myself on my knees.

Best

Even if the brunt of the attack on my barriers would be mostly mental, it was still better to brace myself.

And then, the monsters rushed out of the forest.

Their shape-shifting bodies crushed everything on their way. A tree, a rock, a hill, it didn't matter. As long as it stood in the path of the small horde of seven monsters, it would turn into a pile of dust.

'Huh?' I shrugged a little as I stabilized the flow of mana within my mage's tower. 'Isn't one of them... different?'

It was only a single instant, a mere moment when I could notice such small details. Because a single eye's twitch later, the monsters crashed right into my sphere of influence.

'Disturb,' I invoked the spell I knew the least about. Yet, from the little bit, I knew about it, it appeared like a perfect weapon for the moment.

A surge of mana suddenly sparked on the nearby cores, tearing through the space itself towards my target.

It didn't crash into monsters. In its truest sense, it wasn't even an attack. Or rather, the target of this attack wasn't the monsters.

It was the space where those monsters were.

"ROAA..." one of the monsters even managed to utter a scream... Only for it to be cut short when the laws of the world in the area it stood... broke.

Some parts of its body bloated. Others turned into mist. One of its temporary legs froze solid while the other liquified.

The mana that the monster's body consisted off turned into a physical matter, while the ground it stood became an endless pool of mana.

All the primary laws of the world that made those mana monsters into what they were changed.

And changed in ways and magnitude that I didn't even dare to attempt to understand.

'One,' a small voice appeared in my head when the distribution of space ended.

It lasted only for a split of a second. Yet even that amount of time was enough to turn one of the monsters into nothing more but a black core of the mana it condensed to protect itself.

"Mia, now!" I shouted, feeling confident enough about my power to let my girl join.

"Hurryah!" Mia uttered a strange war cry as she leaped forward. Yet, rather than using her altitude advantage to dropkick one of the monsters or even slam her body into it...

Mia orderly landed right by the monster's side.

She was still within the reach of my barriers, yet seeing her close and personal with those invaders...

My soul shook with worry. Yet, before it could turn into fear, Mia stood in a position I was extremely familiar with... and she struck her fist forward.