Heaven's Greatest Professor

Warden sat down on a heap of corpses, his heart restless, his chest heaving up and down in rhythmic exhaustion. The surrounding still reigned in darkness; he didn't even have an ounce of power to lift off the formation. It would have been a lot easier had he done it from outside, but the solution wasn't the same for one to do it from the inside.

He spat a mouthful of blood and saliva, surging with his radiance essence to recover from the worn-out state. His radiance essence had weakened considerably, wishing if he could just eat raw quintessence of light to gain back the lost power. But that was as foolish an endeavour as any.

[Higher grade energy harvested!]

[14.3 Recovery.]

[1.4 Dexterity.]

[1.2 Spirit.]

"Cheh!" he squeaked, feeling the rush of new essence. Perhaps in a minute or two, he would be in the state of fighting again. "But there ain't time to rest yet…"

The recovery potion wouldn't do in a small amount of time, considering he had taken three of them in the last five minutes. So, he simply had to find May and ask her to do the honour. But to get to her…

Warden focused on the Will he had on the array flags and forced out a little of his awareness—as much as his spirit let him. He actually could feel it now; it felt like a small bird trapped in some fragile cage. It could break free from the traps of the cage, but the bird wouldn't survive the harsh nature of outside.

His senses picked up on a dozen of the array flags out of the thirty-two. He stood up and trudged his way to the closest one. On second thought, using the Anti-gravity runes might be easier…

Thinking that, he flew onto the array flag. He wondered why they call it a flag, considering it was more like a pole. No time for musing…

Warden fished his palm in the dark and found the metal pole, or rather the poles, four were placed together. The exhaustion hadn't dulled his mind enough that he would fall to pulling up the flags because, with his current strength, it would hardly do it.

But then again, even with his full power, it would be difficult to pull up an active true tier-3 formation, empowered by tier-5 and 4 runes. The constant force of the formation would work against his force to keep itself rooted.

Instead, Warden infused a trickle of his energy and let his neophyte awareness sink into the complicated layers of scripts. He found the essence source rather quickly and cut off the connection.

That particular array flag was disconnected from the formation. But that didn't mean the formation stopped working. It could have if some half-arsed runesmith designed it, but no, even under terrible time constraints, Warden made sure the formation would work even if part of it was disabled.

It would be a terrible example of hard work if the forsaken could just disable the whole formation by breaking through just one of them.

He did the same for the three other connected poles connected to the disconnected pole as well. It had taken away the little amount of energy he had recovered. How many of them had he killed...

The array formation did not stop working, but it had become a heptagonal formation from an octagonal one, separating Warden from its isolation.

Unfortunately, no bright light assaulted his eyes—it was the same week-old darkness of the subspace, though his stress was relieved a lot, just by getting out of the isolation empowered by dark essence.

He blinked a few times, making sure he was seeing right, and cast his gaze around. Corpses lay on the outside as well, though there were fair numbers of humans among them as well. It wasn't even long, and Warden had already seen four of them close to where he stood, leaning on **[The Divider]**.

"May," he croaked.

"You!" a new voice returned. Warden turned his head to find Cole. The guy had been tinkering on the array flag the whole time, though he hadn't had the right amount of experience to disable it forcefully. "You're alive."

Warden opened his mouth to say something but found the guy as worn out as he was, with a heavy wound on his torso, attire torn up, skin pale and swelling. "You too."

The fight had already ended, and the group of women and soldiers gathered in one corner. May was likely tending to the wounded there. He found Lady Cassandra meditating in one corner, two women stood by her side, and many others in a similar meditation state, as though readying themselves for another fight.

A dead body of a couple of women lay among them; they were too exhausted to even start mourning over the loss.

"How the hell did it turn out like this?" Warden wondered. When he left them, there were less than ten trolls and three times the number of orcs—it shouldn't have killed more than a couple of them.

Warden crept forward into the group. May looked up from the soldier she was tending, and her eyes found him. She stood up and scurried towards him.

"Are you alright?" she said after casting a general healing spell. "Gods, you look awful."

"I'm fine," Warden said, catching her arm before she could begin searching through them for any wounds. "I'll heal fine. What happened here, where are the rest of them? Did they..."

"Unfortunately, nine of us have fallen," she said, her voice turning softer. "Over a dozen seriously injured."

"How?" he asked, sounding incredulous. "I thought that we could have..."

"Hold our own against the forsaken," May completed for him. She gritted her teeth to continue, "That we did, for a couple of minutes, until Lord Tayl decided to run on his own. Because you took down most of the forsaken that were protecting the gate, he and his minion hardly had a problem fighting off the remainder.

He jumped into the gate after taking care of the few, leaving us outnumbered in our plight."