Archmage Valerius stood before the Threshold Inn, his academic curiosity rapidly curdling into professional frustration. The failure of his Trinity Lenses was not just a setback; it was an insult to his craft. Magic was a system of laws, as immutable and predictable as mathematics. You apply force A to object B, and you get reaction C. But this… this inn was an impossible variable, a place where the equation itself fell apart.
"Perhaps a more direct approach is warranted," he muttered to himself, dismissing the anxious fluttering of Duke Carrington beside him. "If the subject will not be analyzed, it must be provoked."
He raised a single, steady hand. Unlike the flashy incantations of the knight before, Valerius's magic was brutally efficient. The air in front of his palm compressed, gathering ambient mana into a dense, shimmering sphere of pure, untamed power. It was colorless, almost invisible, but the sheer pressure it exerted made the misty ground around it hiss and steam.
Inside the Inn, Lyra's breath caught in her throat. "A Tier-5 Mana Lance," she whispered, her voice tight with awe and fear. "Not a spell, just… raw force. I've seen one shatter the gates of an adamantine fortress."
Leo's knuckles went white where he gripped the edge of the magical one-way window. He felt like a homeowner watching a demolition crew aim a wrecking ball at his living room.
With a sharp flick of his wrist, Valerius launched the sphere. It shot forward, silent and impossibly fast, a bullet of pure reality-warping energy. It crossed the fifty-foot gap in an instant and struck the invisible line of Leo's domain.
The impact was a spectacle of anticlimax. There was no cataclysmic explosion, no thunderous boom. There was only a dull, hollow thump, like a fist hitting a sandbag. The shimmering sphere of power simply flattened against the barrier, spread out for a fraction of a second like a liquid pancake, and then evaporated into nothingness. Not even a shimmer was left behind.
The silence that followed was heavy with failure.
"Well," Silas drawled from beside Leo, taking a large bite out of an apple he'd procured from the kitchen. "That was disappointing. I was expecting at least a few fireworks."
"He expended enough mana in that single attack to power a small city for a week," Lyra stated, her eyes wide. "And this place… it just absorbed it? No, it didn't even absorb it. It just… deleted it."
Leo let out a shaky breath. His fortress held. But watching it happen was going to be hell on his nerves.
Outside, Archmage Valerius was no longer smiling. A vein was throbbing in his temple. His pristine academic robes felt less like a symbol of mastery and more like a fool's costume.
"Fine," he snarled, his voice losing its condescending calm. "If the walls will not yield, then perhaps the foundation will."
He placed his palms flat against the strange, misty ground. He closed his eyes, and the constellations on his robes began to glow brightly. "Terra Firma, audi me!" he commanded, his voice resonating with the authority of one who speaks to the earth itself. "Break! Sunder! Yield!"
It was a powerful geomantic command. A deep, rumbling groan should have shaken the very land. A fissure should have split the ground, aiming to swallow the Inn whole or at least destabilize its physical location.
But the ground remained stubbornly, insultingly still. The Archmage was commanding an army that refused to answer his call. The very earth beneath the Inn was part of its domain, and it did not recognize his authority.
"This is getting sad," Silas commented, crunching loudly on his apple. "He's trying to tell the mountain to move, but the mountain doesn't speak his language. Anyone want a drink?"
Leo was beginning to feel less like a potential victim and more like a spectator at a particularly strange and one-sided sporting event. His initial terror was slowly being replaced by a bizarre sense of pride in his property.
Valerius, his face now flushed with anger, tried a third approach. He abandoned direct force and earth-shattering commands for something more insidious. He began to weave a complex spell of entropy, a curse designed to unnaturally age and decay any structure it touched. Faint, sickly green threads of magic drifted from his fingertips towards the Inn, promising rot and ruin.
Like everything else, they vanished at the property line.
He tried summoning a localized blizzard. The air refused to cool. He attempted a spell of teleportation, trying to bypass the barrier entirely. He simply remained where he was, as if he'd tried to walk through a wall.
After a solid hour of fruitless, increasingly desperate magical attempts, Valerius finally stopped. He stood panting, his elderly frame trembling not from exertion, but from sheer, impotent rage. He had thrown a significant portion of his arcane arsenal at this… this building, and had failed to elicit so much as a single reaction. He hadn't scratched the paint. He hadn't even managed to deliver the mail.
The Duke, who had been watching with growing despair, finally found the courage to speak. "Well? Theron? Is it hopeless?"
The Archmage didn't answer. He simply stood there, his chest heaving, staring at the quiet, unassuming inn. The fiery anger in his eyes slowly cooled, replaced once more by that cold, calculating, obsessive curiosity. He had tried to break the lock with a hammer and failed. He had tried to smash the door off its hinges and failed. He had tried to rot the wood from a distance and failed.
His approach was wrong. Utterly wrong.
With a long, weary sigh, Valerius straightened his robes. He smoothed down his white beard, his composure returning, but it was a different kind of composure now. It was not the easy confidence of a master, but the patient, stubborn focus of a researcher who has just found the problem of a lifetime.
He turned his back on the Inn, walked to his carriage, and retrieved a small, foldable table and a comfortable-looking camp chair. He brought them back, setting them up just outside the fifty-foot boundary. He then retrieved a large, leather-bound notebook and a series of strange optical instruments.
He sat down, opened his notebook, and began to watch. He made no more attacks. He cast no more spells. He simply sat, and observed, and took notes.
Inside, Silas had returned from the kitchen with a plate of cheese and a few more apples, which he passed around. The three of them stood at their magical window, watching the Archmage. The immediate threat of destruction was over, but this new development was somehow more unnerving.
"This is worse," Lyra said softly, her voice barely a whisper. "An angry man is predictable. A patient man is dangerous. He's not trying to fight it anymore."
Leo nodded, his expression grim. "No," he agreed, taking a slice of apple from Silas. "Now he's trying to understand it."
The silent, intellectual siege had begun.