Chapter 257: An array of beacons

"How's everyone been doing?" he asked after gathering everyone together. He decided to exclude Runa and Enri from this talk, since he sometimes felt that the two tended to talk over the others a lot. 

[We're fine…]

[How's you?]

The answers that came weren't anything unusual, so Evin continued on to the next question.

"How are you finding the golems?" 

[Seems fun…], [I'm excited… to pilot mine…], the majority of the World Sprites were saying, while Lucario, who had experienced the process firsthand revealed some more details, in a very professional manner.

[It's empowering to control the golems by turning into energy. It's the same as me having control over a stronger and better body than my own.]

Evin was very surprised at how coherently Lucario spoke. The boy didn't even use any loose and useless words like most people did (himself included), plus the way he spoke simply oozed confidence and charisma.

'How the hell do some of these kids already speak better than me?' Evin even wanted to grumble about it.

"That's great. Unfortunately, your mother and I, with everyone from the research team, couldn't really find a way to grant you your freedom, yet," Evin began, but was quickly interrupted by D.

[I don't get why mother and you are so adamant about getting rid of us. Are we so undesirable that you two just can't wait to see us leave?] 

The words sparked a barrage of similar responses. Some of the nicer World Sprites obviously weren't as direct as D, but they all didn't seem very excited about leaving Evin and Kyune behind.

[Yeah…], [We don't want to leave mother…], 

[We don't need freedom…], [We just want to be stay with you…]

'Guess me and Kyune are idiots. Although we call them children, we both act as if they're all adults. Of course they would feel weird if their parent figures start talking about letting them go right after they're basically born…' Evin sighed in realization.

He thought about reminding them to tell Kyune and him if they ever changed their mind, but he soon realized that the World Sprites would never even remember him saying these after just one year, and if they ever reach their teenage years and somehow enter their rebellious stage, they'll naturally start wanting to leave their nest.

He and Kyune just had to work on finding the method to set them free beforehand and giving them the choice when they wanted to actually leave them.

"Alright, sorry for bringing this up all the time. Just remember that your mother loves and cares for you very much and the same goes for me. For now, let's just get back to Somaturgy."

Evin then spent some time talking to the World Sprites about their days, listening to them talk about random stuff, as all children did. 

…

Three weeks passed in the blink of an eye, as Evin was standing in the Vulpine Mother's cavern, which now had a few poles decorated with a flag on top of it. The flags had a variety of runes drawn on them, but Evin could see the shape of an underlying main rune on all of them. 

The research team had finished their jobs and departed his shadow, leaving him with 80 or so World Sprite operated golems at his beckoning. But of course, Evin didn't have any plans to let these World Sprites fight wars with himself any time soon, despite all their protests.

Well, he would find a use for them soon enough. Until then, Evin decided to focus on his own strengths. And coincidentally, today was one such example of that. Kyune's preparations for the move were finally finished, and she had invited Evin into her now changed caverns.

The Vulpine created a small silver blob in front of her and urged Evin to take hold of it.

"Take hold of this."

Evin did as requested and felt as his senses became connected to 23 new beacons that formed a shape of a cube with Evin in the center. The closest one was located about 30 steps away. Some of them were even located inside the walls of the cave, which meant that the Vulpine Mother had put them inside there somehow. They also emitted an unnatural pull, beckoning Evin closer.

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.                  .                  .                          .

. 

.                  .                  .                          .

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.                  .                  .

(Author's explanation: I know it's a bit hard to understand, but I've drawn a cube depicting the thing a bit better here (hopefully). As you can see, every dot is a totem and Evin would be located in its center. Each totem would have 33.3 meters between each other.) 

"I've made the process as simple as possible for you," Kyune began with a proud tone, "All you have to do is spread your Dark Room around this area, by connecting it to the totems I've placed all around one by one."

Normally, Evin was unable to even cover 300 meters in a straight line with his Dark Room, let alone a kilometer huge, cube-shaped volume, but he supposed that the Vulpine considered that in her preparations. He casually entered battle-mode and thought 'Dark Room'.

His automated brain did the rest of the job, and his shadow started to take on an unusually dark tint. His shadow used looked considerably darker compared to other shadows due to the World Sprites inside it, but after it became a dimension, the darker shade became something optional. Naturally, to not stand out as much, Evin made it so that it looked and acted similarly to a normal shadow.

Anyhow, after his Dark Room reached one of the nearest two totems about 30 meters away, Evin felt something very unusual. It was like another, completely fresh copy of him was standing near the totem, freely offering Evin to use up any energy that it possessed.

As he expected, when Evin tried to push his Dark Room further from that totem, almost none of his energy was used up. Evin casually broke his record of the widest area that he ever covered with the spell, and something told him that he was going to break this record countless times over.

'Am I supposed to cover the entire area through this method?' Evin thought as he moved on to the next totem. 

Almost effortlessly, Evin was able to have his Dark Room connect to the 23 totems that were directly around him. After this, he started to feel the totems that were located further beyond the ones closest to him. He felt like the center of a giant cube-shaped web where every intersection of two strings was a totem. 

'I'm kind of scared to find out just how big this thing is in reality…' Evin thought fearfully before he started to send his Dark Room to each and every totem around. His spell went through the walls of the cave, ignoring the concept of collision like no one's business.

But the fact that he had to make his usually two-dimensional Dark Room become three-dimensional cost him a lot of his mana. The volume that he could cover without the totems was actually just in range of the totems that were placed 30 or so meters away from each other. 

But there wasn't really much he could do about this fact, so he could only diligently work on reaching the next layer of totems.

Ten minutes later, Evin was able to cover the volume of about a 200-meter cube, which equated to almost 350 totems total, 342 to be specific (7^3 - 1). He could literally feel every single detail inside this area, through an extension of his Dark Room. He could even accept information on a much wider scale, since he was ignoring most of the things he could feel through the totems. And his mana-core wasn't even strained, since most of the energy for this gigantic pool of darkness was supplied by the totems that the Vulpine Mother had left for him.

But, as he pushed further and further with his spell, he could feel the strain on his mind becoming greater and greater. After all, literally feeling everything around you wasn't really a pleasant experience. Thankfully, Evin was partially exposed to a similar overload of information thanks to his eagle eyes, so he quickly learned to ignore most of the useless information he was exposed to.

"Impressive how you were able to push through three layers around yourself without getting fatigued," Kyune commented from the side, pride oozing from her mouth, "As expected from my candidate."

But the pride was quickly replaced by fake sympathy as she casually revealed the monstrosity she had just created.

"But, as you can probably feel, the next layer is waiting for you. And another 11 after that. A whopping 15 layers where the number of totems increase exponentially with each new layer! I wouldn't be lying to say that I've outperformed myself, in consideration of the pitiful amount of mana you can control."

"Wait, how many totems are there in total?" Evin said, scared of the answer he came up himself.

"31 cubed, which 29791 totems in total. Oh, minus one, which is our position, and the number becomes 29790," Kyune said flatly.

…