CH693

Whistling a cheery tune as they flew across the ocean on a bed of sand, Ben couldn’t help but feel satisfied.

The meeting had stretched out late but that was more a side-effect of how smoothly it had gone overall, with the world’s two newest third tiers getting acquainted with the rest of them as they discussed ways they might be able to help each other and the world as a whole through their power, with Killi leading the group and hitting every point she’d wanted to a day early, leaving her looking tremendously pleased by the end.

He wasn’t going to act like Rook was the only unruly element among the third tiers but he was a big enough one that just the lack of his presence alone had made things easier, letting them wrap up and get back to their work and their lives.

As for whether either Ben or Thera had gotten anything out of it, only Ben felt like that was the case. As interesting as some of the talks had been and getting to learn the names and dispositions of some of the most powerful people on the planet, what he’d gotten was experience, placing his strength against their own to see where he’d stack against a few of them and despite how low it was, he’d at least seen he could plan around it to an extent, giving him just a little hope for the future.

“Alright, is this out far enough for you?” Thera asked him while Ben looked around.

It had been over ten minutes since they’d seen land in any direction, exactly what he was looking for as he nodded.

“Yep, just one sec.”

Taking out Rook's prison and holding it in his hand, Ben first spent his mana, wrapping the thing in a thick layer of steel before dropping it into the sea below, sighing contently as he did.

“Ah, now that felt good,” He said as he got up, wrapping his arms around Thera as he did. “You ready to go home?”

“As I’m going to be. This was not supposed to be such a stressful outing.”

“I mean, technically we didn’t know how stressful it was going to be beforehand since Falk never told us.”

“Not important, I just want to get a nice couple of days where nothing goes wrong for once.”

“Saying that’s a jynx, we’re going to go home and find Stonewall overrun by demons now.”

“Well luckily for Stonewall, it’s home to the beloved daughter of the great earth spirit. Plenty of the other spirits are going to be protecting it while I’m not around.”

“Is calling yourself the beloved daughter of the great earth spirit really less embarrassing than calling yourself the spirit princess?”

“Yep, now don’t question that anymore if you don’t want to fall into the ocean too.”

“Okay, I’ll be a good cute little boyfriend and just quietly take in the view.”

<At the very least that nightmare’s over now and you ended things relatively peacefully. I have to say Ben, despite it all, I appreciate your restraint.>

Huh? Restraint?

<Only trapping him for a week in there. Even if you dropped it in the ocean after and made sure it sunk to the bottom, I think you really got the point across with your letter, there’s no reason for him to bother you again when you’ve made it clear that the consequences won’t be worth it.>

Oh, the letter! You saw that, huh?

<You said to watch so I did.>

Yeah, but you didn’t speak up. Okay, so here’s the thing, I lied.

<...About?>

Mainly the length of time he could expect to be trapped in there, I do still plan on talking to Ogilt though.

<...Okay, I never doubted the second part so by how much did you lie?>

…

<Ben, how long is he going to be trapped in there?>

Ah, well here’s the thing, I actually built the enchantments to decay and calculated their decay rate to figure out how long he’d be trapped, but I’m just so good at enchanting, you know? Literally the second best on the planet, all of my enchantments want to be strong and stable, especially since they all incorporate the ring system and that’s kind of that system’s defining feature.

<Ben, stop lying to me, there’s no way you couldn’t have them break as fast or as slow as you want. Now tell me already.>

Fine, fine, it’s going to be roughly six months of real time, just to really get the message across, you know?

<...Why are you like this?>

He literally tried to kill me!

<Which is why I’m not reacting more strongly. Empty skies, I wonder if anyone else up here noticed you doing that and if this is going to lead to another meeting, but… Wait. What was that you said?>

He literally tried to kill me?

<No, before that. You said something about real time. Ben, what did you do?>

Ah, I mean, six months is a pretty short prison time considering the charge is attempted murder, isn’t it?

<Maybe it would be if it wasn’t tied to solitary confinement with no food, water, air, or anything approaching stimulus.>

Agree to disagree. Anyway, he’s immortal, that will all probably be fine and since that would be fine I just did my best to extend things as much as I could to really get the point across. Now, obviously, he needs to act as a meat shield by the time the third wave rolls around so I couldn’t justify actually keeping him in there past the third wave but through the clever addition of time enchantments I can sure make it feel like it's longer.

<Infinite hells, how long?>

Ah, not that much. So the interesting thing about what I did was that I warped space itself to make his prison, meaning that teleporting out of it would be close to the same as teleporting out of reality. Obviously not exactly the same, I wouldn’t be able to trap Ogilt like that, but even someone in the middle of an awakened space magic would probably feel trapped. Now, he has about three meters of space in all directions but since space is also warping back in on itself it could also be described as infinite, complicating things a bit more-

<And as interesting as all of that is, just give me a number.>

Fine, three times faster. Six months in there translates to about a year and a half.

<You’re psychotic. When you wrote about testing the limits of his absolute defense, you meant that, didn’t you? Infinite hells, I thought you were just trying to be annoying.>

I can be both curious and annoying.

<Empty skies, considering he tried to kill you in cold blood I can’t say I sympathize but that’s also not a good look, you know that, right?>

Hey, nobody should be mad about this, I’m basically doing him a service by helping the guy remember something it seems like he’s long forgotten.

<Do I even want to ask?>

Fear. A guy with all the time in the world and no motivation to use it beyond being creepy to women and an asshole to the people around him, that sort of thing would be far better suited to self-improvement. Even if it's too little, too late, considering we’re reaching the end of the invasion, maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll use this chance to get motivated enough in his training to actually awaken his space magic. You gotta admit, being nearly a thousand and not having dozens of awakened skills is a little embarrassing.

<I’m not admitting that, it's an absolutely psychotic opinion to hold… Although if it does end with any progress then I suppose it's not a bad thing and he doesn’t exactly have enough fans up here or down below to make anyone too upset about what happened. I guess I’ll just consider it a small mercy you at least left him with a light and leave it at that.>

…Yep, absolutely left him with a light because I have a sweet merciful heart. So there we go, all’s well that ends well.

<I wouldn’t go that far.>

I would, now stop sweating the small stuff man, it’s time to go home.

Author’s note

An arc ends and a note begins, hope you all got a kick out of the nineteenth one!

So Ben’s back and safe on the world, or as safe as he ever is at least, and he’s been busy. With a few new awakened skills and the power to create souls he can now create things that could never exist before and has greatly raised the world’s potential power with the existence of his mana bracelets alone and there’s certainly going to be a bit more experimenting with those skills in the future so hope you all look forward to that!

And then he got to enjoy a pretty significant job run as well. Since it had already been made clear that both the nature of his mind and the creation of souls generates an extreme level of experience he’s been able to get through a bunch, finally taking world killer for all of the challenges leveling something like that would pose while figuring out new and exciting ways of exploiting the system.

Let's see, I feel like I have less to say than usual but as always I’ve gotta try and look at where I think I could improve and for this section I’m just going to focus on something I feel extremely unsure about, namely how I ended the arc. Not Ben trapping Rook and tossing him in the sea, I loved that, I’m just left unsure about the fact that I didn’t show the third tiers having their meeting. I didn’t do it because I couldn’t think of a way to make it really feel fun and since it was really less important than Ben getting to meet a couple for some future events I let that happen off screen but even now I’m feeling unsure about that choice. Perhaps there was a better way I could have done it but this one singular choice is something I'm going to be thinking on for a long while.

But that’s all from me, regardless of any worries I have I hope you guys enjoyed this one and look forward to the next and as always, have a great day!