After only a few seconds pa.s.sed from turning the alarm on, the main screen on the wall got covered by oversized letters spelling "DEFMIN". This wasn"t a call they could ignore! After all, after just three seconds of scaring everyone from the heights of the monitor, letters disappeared and a reddened face of the very minister of defence appeared.

"What the h.e.l.l is going on? Is Hurutai attacking or what?!"

Instantly lashing out at the poor residents on the bunker, Minister appeared on the screen like the final boss of some kind of silly game that nowadays young people were wasting their lives playing.

"No sir, it"s something worse. Take a look at the map!"

Swiping the screen with two fingers extending in opposite directions, Arthur zoomed in the view, and then uploaded the video on the communication channel.

"Isn"t this some kind of malfunction? Do you think you can announce the f.u.c.king nationwide alarm only because of some bug? What is your IT support there for! If I were just a bit slower, the whole underdimension would surface! Can you imagine the consequences of doing that?"

Not even looking at the reuploaded map, fat minister stared furiously at the man on the opposite side of his screen.

"Shut the h.e.l.l up! If I"m wrong, marital court. But if I"m right, then in just a few d.a.m.n hours, there won"t be any courts to speak of!"

Arthur couldn"t handle the politician anymore. Who cared about surfacing the underdimension right now? Not doing that could very well lead to its implosion! Without enough magic energy to sustain dimensional dive of the artificial continent, it"s fate would depend just on pure luck!

"I hereby suspend your service, rank and access to the network. You will be shortly escorted to the military court and judged for defeatism and overstepping your authority!"

Minister replied in cold voice, squinting his eyes.

"Turn this whole d.a.m.n alarm off!"

Before the connection was cut, bunker residents still managed to hear his words!

"This f.u.c.king b.a.s.t.a.r.d!"

Arthur smashed his fist on the nearby table, breaking it in the process.

"Right now I really believe that sometimes authoritarian governments are far better than this democracy!"

The man inhaled a mouthful of air, kept it in his lungs and exhaled deeply. Turning around on his chair, he looked at his sister.

"Can you circ.u.mvent the blockade and connect us with the president?"

"Are you out of your mind? His channel is highly secured, not to speak about minister probably making us the scapegoats on it right now!"

Freya responded while spreading her hands. While she was great at her job, there were some limits to her ability! Breaking into the second most secure channel in the whole nation, with restricted access at that, was an impossible task!

Hearing the unfavourable answer, Arthur felt deep into his thoughts. After a few moments, another layer of the generators displayed on the widescreen on the wall turned grey, with the next ones turning red.

Despite being focused on a.n.a.lyzing the situation, he still noticed it.

"What the h.e.l.l is going on! Someone answer me!"

Seeing the pace at which the situation was escalating without her even understanding the reasons, Naria approached Arthur and hugged him from behind.

"Don"t scare me like that!"

She was the only one in here, unacquainted with the military. While her expertise was in magic fluctuations, she lacked the proper strategic mindset. The only bits of information she could extract came from the aggrieved of her closest friends! With her soft character, she was already on the verge of tears!

Arthur reached for Naria hand and planted a gentle kiss on her palm. All of the emotions cleared out from his mind, leaving nothing but emptiness. Faced with approaching apocalypse, he could do nothing so he felt nothing. Nor the fear, nor the sadness. All he could feel right now was the familiar heat of his fiancee"s hand.

"What are we going to do!"

Harsh, Freya voice brought them back to reality.

"Who do you think we are to grieve like that! It"s not in our nature Arthur!"

The woman stood up and shouted. As the daughter of the war hero, she couldn"t allow them to just perish into dust for nothing!

"If we are to die, so be it! At least we can check which b.a.s.t.a.r.d did this and make sure he will come to h.e.l.l with us!"

While she said that, she just stood on the spot, looking calmly in Arthur"s eyes. He was her older brother and senior in rank at the same time. While she might propose a "solution", it was his decision to make!

Taking a while to digest those words, the fire returned to the man"s eyes.

"Does the stepping spell spread equally or does it have some variations?"

Squeezing Naria hand, Arthur waited for an answer, not rushing his fiancee to reply at all.

"Small scale ones can be used in various ways, but the grand ones are too powerful to be controlled. Tell me what is going on G.o.dd.a.m.nit!"

Arthur ignored the question and let go of the hand of his beloved one.

"Private call, Kevan. Freya, connect me to the outpost number eight-eight-three!"

Issuing orders both to the system and his sister, the middle-aged soldier stood up and turned around to face his fiancee.

"We are all going to die soon. Everything points out that one of the Horien maniac"s managed to create their so-called "doom spell". Generators are stopping working one by one and it won"t be long when the underdimension"s submersion energy requirement won"t be met. All we can do now is take early revenge on them."
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After saying his piece, Arthur turned back to the screen only to see his old friend face on it.

"What"s going on brother? Our alarms went off for a moment, before turning back down! Any information on your end?"

His face was the very definition of worry. With his eyes running in every direction with each pa.s.sing second, he obviously wasn"t in a good mood!

"The ministry got hacked. We discovered it so they cut us off from the grid. I need you to order a "katharsis" on Horien"s territory. First seven layers of our generators are down, we suspect the Frictional bomb attack. I will find out the exact location soon, in touch!"

Seeing Freia raised thumbs, Arthur didn"t hesitate to end the call after saying just a single piece.

"Can you connect us?

"Right away!"

In just a few seconds, the entire screen on the wall turned into a camera view of a closed room. With many people in three types of different uniforms bustling around, the former soldier didn"t hesitate, grabbed a microphone from his sister"s hand and started speaking.

"Patarian Bunker number zero, three, zero. We are isolated. The enemy is attacking. Send current generator outline maps, so we can calculate and pa.s.s the strike coordinates!"

There was no answer. A hearable one at least. With his words stopping everyone in the camera view in their tracks, he didn"t need to wait for long to see a raised thumbs of the entire crowd!

This was an emergency communication technique. Even if someone managed to block the military channels, blocking one-way communication was physically impossible. By using three different frequencies to transmit respectively: his voice, video request and video itself, Arthur managed to establish some sort of communication with them!

In just those few moments that were required to receive the data from the joint operation base, another layer of generators turned down with the next line turning red. While even in the zoomed view the changes were relatively slow, taking the speed of stepping spell advance into an account, it would be only a matter of a few hours at most before the apocalypse would start!

After the maps finally got uploaded onto Arthur"s private communication channel, he transferred them through to his personal computer. While receiving live on the broadcast was impossible, the data allowed him to trace the changes in the generator status on a greater scale in comparison to taking only Patarian ones into the account.

Pa.s.sing them on Freya account, he waited only for a moment where she nodded her head.

"Listen to me very carefully. Can you trace the origin of this stepping spell from its advances on this map?"

Grabbing tightly his fiancee"s arms, Arthur"s asked with hope reverberating in his voice. Naria was one of the best magic fluctuation experts in the entire nation, if she wasn"t able to do it, no one could!

"Yes, just give me a moment…"

After observing the event"s for quite a while already, she was able to understand the severity of the situation. But as soon as she looked at the numbers displaying on the side of small markers for a short moment, her face lost all its colours.

"This isn"t a grand stepping spell…"

Naria muttered while covering her mouth with her hand. With her pupils dilating, her body started to tremble.

"It"s an archspell already!"

"You know we are not in your field of expertise, tell us in a way we can understand the difference!"

Full of anxiety, Arthur couldn"t help shouting. Instantly regretting raising his voice, he lowered his head.

"Sorry for that, I"m really on the tips of my toes here. So, what"s the difference?"

It seemed that the realisation that struck her after observing the maps conveyed the true scale of events to Naria"s head. She turned slowly to face her significant one.

"The grand spell"s can be stopped at caster will. While they require unimaginable control over them, they are still a creation dependant on its owner. The archspells were believed to be just a theory. In essence, they are a magic structure that needs to be cast and after gaining enough momentum, it will continue its work forever!"

"How can you be so sure about that! Is there any chance that you miscalculated?"

The answer he got, wasn"t something that Arthur or actually anyone in the world would take in lightly. Denying it was just a natural reaction for humans!

"As I said, grand spells need a person to control them. Casting it is a great burden alone, it was proven several years ago that human mind cannot fully wield those structures, because even keeping it up consumes more mind capabilities to allow for any kind of precise control."

Naria inhaled the air, struggling to say everything in one breath.

"Archspell, on the other hand, is just a structure. It simply forces the energy to follow certain rules, only growing in scale. If you imagine a pool with uneven ground, the water inside will level itself. The same thing is happening here. The best generators are drained as fast, as the outdated ones. This spell is adapting itself to the amount of energy in every location that it reaches!"

"And what does it means to us?"

Seeing his beloved one all jiggly but with serious and focused eyes, Arthur finally got scared. This little hugging machine was known to show this kind of face only when she was facing the problems that used to hinder human progress for ages. Her appearance meant only one thing.

"We are doomed."