The explosion at Adonis's mana sea came completely out of the blue for the malicious alien being.
One minute it was hacking and slashing at the golden glyphs like crazy, getting it to crack and crumble just like a thin egg shell, ready to shatter any moment. The 'blue yolk' was just beyond the yonder.
The next second…. it suddenly began to let out an enormous burst of light out of nowhere and
Booommm!
The alien tentacle did not even know what hit it, as a flash of blinding heat and light scorched it with the temperature of a thousand sun, obliterating anything and everything in its path.
"Wha… what is happening? No! How is this happening again? No, stop!" The alien being let out this enormous cry of surprise and incredulation, unable to believe its sheer bad luck.
This was not happening to it for a third time, not when it was so close.
So it screamed out perhaps more desperately than any other time in its entire life, trying to hastily retrieve its tendrils.
But those frilly bits had gotten vaporized almost instantly, yet the fire still continued to rise, setting anything and everything on its path to ash.
The alien being's healing factor, as formidable as it was, struggling to keep up.
And this was only the physical damage being done to it, the spirit damage being inflicted on it through the mana sea was perhaps ever worse.
he mana sea was a metaphysical organ of the human body, existing between both the physical and immaterial plane, it phased in and out of existence depending on its state of use.
The majority of the time, it resided in a person's soul, and thus given the origin of the 'fire', currently much of Adonis's soul was completely engulged in flames, threatening to smother it into ash.
In fact, the only reason it had not was predictably due to that strange tentacle.
Formerly, when the alien being healed Adonis, it also encased his soul in a web of fleshy tendrils, thus possessing him. That was how 'it' was able to use his mana signature to fool the scans.
If one would have looked into the boy's soul before, they would have found he was like a small bird, completely encased in a jungle of fleshy, pulsating tentacles, completely caged and trapped.
But now, that very cage acted as its shield, staving off the fire while burning itself like dry twigs in a wildfire.
Adonis's mana sea literally boiled and bubbled, turning to vapor and flying away, while the alien tentacle desperately tapped into its own mana reserves, trying to refill it.
Without Adonis's soul, it would be instantly detected by the nearby scans and be obliterated.
In addition, it had to also use its mana to create more and more flesh and muscles for the boy, trying to repair this vessel which contained the soul and the mana sea, in a last minute desperate bid to outlive the fire.
The attack was too sudden for it to have any hope of mounting a comprehensive defense, so this is the best it could do- endure and hope to ride out this calamity based solely on its unmatched vitality.
But such brute force strategy was hardly ideal.
By trying to face the entire thing head on, the tentacles were made to face the unfettered wrath of the explosion, and that proved too strong to resist.
It stripped through all its defenses, before setting both the boy and tentacle's soul on fire.
Then as this dreadful flame finally extinguished itself through the use of extreme amounts of the Protanyd's mana, only a sliver of the alien being's original essence remained, while Adonis's soul, though not completely destroyed, was severely damaged.
Even if he lived, he would be a cripple both in body and mind- deaf, blind and dumb, barely better than one in a vegetative state.
The fire had done its job.
Now what was the origin of this devastating explosion you ask?
Well as many of you already guessed, this was actually the second fail safe the Iudex had implanted into Adonis, when wrapping the boy with that fateful cloth.
The glyphs were like a stealthy mine, sinking deep below in the mana pool as soon as the cloth touched the boy.
And it was designed to stay hidden like so, completely undetectable by any normal means, until the boy decided to embark on his adventure as a mage and activated his mana sea.
This would be the equivalent of stepping on an anti personal mine or setting off a car bomb, after which….
'Well the standard procedure was to shoot up 200 feet into the air and scatter yourself over a very large area.'
There would be no after that.
If the extremely formidable tentacle was not there to take almost the entirety of the blast, Adonis's soul would have been vaporised just like a nuclear bomb hitting a human.
The explosion would have directly killed a Rank 4 mage and so severely injured a Rank 5 that he too would have likely succumbed to it. Even the most lucky one would have been forever crippled.
Thus the fact that Iudex was willing to use this level of scheme and preparation against a mere infant really went to show just how determined the Iudex was to remove this dark mark from his sect's books.
He was willing to turn a blind eye if Adonis remained a mere mortal, never embarking on being a mage, simply living out his life and then dying in this lower plane.
But the moment he chose to follow the currents of the Astal Sea and become a mage, it was designed to be his doom.
In fact, this same thing would have happened if the alien tentacle had simply denoted Adonis's mana sea, only at that moment, there would have been no saving the boy.
The mana sea would have been left to intentionally rupture, and then with the explosion immediately coming afterward, the alien being, even if it could somehow survive the attack, would have lost its opportunity to imprint the signal with its 'psychic scream'.
Afterwards, with its 'sheep's skin' gone, it would be subsequently torn to ribbons by the surrounding lasers.
But this also did not mean the alien tentacle was doomed to fail in its endeavor from the start.
In fact, 'it' did not yet realise just how both lucky and unlucky it had gotten.
Lucky, because contrary to the Iudex's expectation, it had actually managed to detect this hidden threat. Possessing and taking full control of Adonis's soul, had allowed it to do something even much higher ranked mages might have missed.
But at the same time it was unlucky because instead of cleverly disarming it, or even just taking it out and throwing it away, it chose to intentionally detonate it!
It mistook the shining golden runes as a protective canopy to prevent such mana sea denotations from malicious external sources and thus hacked and slashed at it, unknowingly triggering the denotation mechanism.
This was the equivalent of finding a land mine in the backyard and instead of calling the emergency services, you took a spade and started to beat on it, thinking it was some kind of locked vault with treasures inside.
Whatever happened to afterwards, the man 100% deserved it.
The same went for this alien being.
What was even more tragic about all this was that these glyphs were not very complicated.
It might have seemed very complicated to the alien being but that was only because it had no proper knowledge of magic or its various branches. It had simply gained its strength from eating lots and lots.
But if it had been any other mage, even half a decent mage one, the plot would have been surely revealed. Then, even if he could not disarm the thing, he could have at least stayed the heck away and designed a countermeasure over time.
However there were no 'ifs and buts' in life.
Whatever happened there, there was no changing it.
Thus currently the alien being was in a state of extreme pain, full of anger and regret, and more alarmingly at risk of dying.
The explosion had decimated its soul much more than its physical body, to the point it did not even have the strength to eat Adonis's one to recover.
In fact, it risked dissapating within just a few seconds.