Page 67 of Mantle

And then he reached out to the glowing containment field trapping the medallion within. Floating runes circled its perimeter—interlocked spirals, one gold, one blue-black.

He called his vibrant-blue magic and swept it over the expanse of it, a few inches from actually touching it.

“It’s not ancient,” I spoke, not feeling anything of the sort as I scented it and breathed the magic in.

“No. It’s not. Hold on… there’s something…”

A thunderous pop sounded and I jerked my head around to see that Kai and Ariana had disintegrated their opponents.

“I can’t… this requires equilibrium, but I can’t determine the parameters.” His gaze flicked to mine. “If they’re not precise and we don’t balance it correctly, the whole thing will implode.”

“Like a magical bomb?”

“Pretty much, yeah.” He turned toward the sky and called out, “Kai! Need your expertise!”

As Kai swung his head toward him, two more Threniths blasted into the Rifted Cradle.

“Go!” Ariana told him, her voice carrying across the sky. “We can’t complete the mission without you over there!”

Kai gave her a chin lift, then levitated over—his rose-gold magic flaming from each palm, pointed down toward the ground hundreds of feet below, carrying him with floating grace.

I was about to move to go to Ariana, to essentially switch places with him, when the ground shook beneath our feet, a deep rumbling and cracking following in seconds.

“Holy… damn,” Nyx uttered, as we saw the ground split open, then three beings clawing their way out and up toward us.

Hulking masses of stone and metal, their heads featureless, torsos wide, and their fists crackling with kinetic energy.

Kai touched down right beside me, then immediately focused on the containment field.

His magic sizzled, concentrating at his fingertips as he swept his hand across the pedestal, carving out a large rectangular panel. Once complete, he pulled it free, revealing a glowing reservoir of magical liquid within.

“That’swhat we need to balance.”

“The parameters we’re working with… wow,” Nyx uttered.

“If we try to extract the medallion without perfect balance being struck according to this level, it will disintegrate, then the magic will erupt all fucking over us.”

“So we use the Twin Spiral? Like what we created in Professor Caelum’s class?”

“Yes,” Kai confirmed. “It needs synced opposing magic: elemental and arcane—one amplifying, one destabilizing.”

Nyx shifted his weight. “All right, let’s do it.”

A quake shook the stone beneath our feet and I spun just as one of the stone beings thrust their hand out, trying to grab at my leg to haul themselves onto the platform.

A blast of silver magic sent it reeling back and falling down onto the rocks below that it had emerged from.

I looked up at the sky. “Thank you, gorgeous!”

Ariana winked at me, then focused back on dealing with the Threniths.

I turned back to see that Kai and Nyx were already going for it, starting the balancing.

Two spirals of raw force were rotating in opposite directions, pushing and pulling against each other like magical gears, one crackling with rose-gold lightning, the other swirling with blue elemental wind.

The containment field shuddered, a sign that it was working.

Another very good sign was the magical level shifting, the pink liquid within moving closer to the center point.

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