A solution popped up in my head, and it put a satisfied grin on my face. I sent Chrona a message, telling her to come to my coordinates. As she flew over, I made an entrance for her outside of Torix’s domain. She flew into my basement, being mindful of the glass flooring as she landed here. Once settled, she tilted her head at me,

“What is it that you needed so urgently?”

I pointed at the missing monolith, “There’s a ritual that’s happening. I’m going to finish the grimoire then put the resulting shockwave into my pocket dimension. I don’t trust my reaction time to be precise enough to handle that. I think I’ll miss netting up the explosion, pretty much killing everybody here.”

A bead of cold sweat fell from Chrona’s face, “That is..unfortunate. H-how am I to help you with this?”

I put my hands on my hips, “You’ll slow time in this one spot, making the explosion less..well, explosive. It’ll radiate slowly, and I’ll put it back into my pocket dimension. Once there, I’ll just pull out the grimoire and keep the explosion in my storage for later.”

“Guildleader..You’re insane.”

I raised my eyebrows, “Insanely smart, eh?”

Her eyes widened, “It..It is a solution, but I believe it’s overly risky.”

“It’s only risky if you can’t slow down time much. What kind of temporal dilation could you put on an area like this?”

I gestured at the ritual’s center. Chrona curved her tail until the tip of it rubbed the bottom of her chin, “I could cut it down to less than a hundredth the speed of normal time, given how small the area is.”

I clapped my hands, “That’s perfect. I can work with that.”

“Then I am willing to try if you believe this is a good idea.”

I gave her a thumbs-up, radiating confidence, “It is. Let’s do this.”

Planting the cleaved section of monolith back in place, I radiated energy through the runes. They charged through nearby stones until they glowed with volatile heat, electricity, and kineticism. My surroundings quivered, the stone seeming to come to life as if shifted in our vision, blurred by the warmth.

This left Chrona uncomfortable, the energies damaging her skin and concentration. To keep her safer, I stretched out several tendrils of armor around the monolith. More thin cables of the metal pulled out from my corded armor like leaves from a branch. This branching continued until the cords created a tesselated pattern that grew smaller and smaller. These metallic ferns covered the area with my dimensional fabric.

They acted as conductors, absorbing and soaking up the latent energy releasing from the ritual. This cooled the nearby area, letting Chrona breathe a sigh of relief. It also gave me a nice bonus.

New Skill Learned! Conductive Plumes(lvl 10) – You’re able to wield your hunger as a fluid tool, one without limit. In that infinity of options, you’ve constructed yet another way of devouring, one that is more passive yet no less effective. +10% to passive energy absorption from created ‘plumes.’

This was one of the absolute weirdest skills I’d ever gained, but hell, I’d take what I could get. It let Chrona stay and form her temporal dilation, so I counted the crazy skill as a blessing. Either way, these, er, ‘conductive plumes’ worked as advertised; Chrona didn’t get melted in this ritual’s aftermath.

Minutes passed before the ceremony got close to completion. Coming within a few seconds of being fully realized, I gave Chrona the sign to do her thing. The moment she generated the temporal field, the ritual slowed down to an absolute crawl. The next two seconds of the rite extended out for the next fifteen minutes.

Turns out, Chrona’s time powers wrought better results than even she intended. That was superb because the ritual’s culmination let out a tectonic boom. Even when slowed down immensely, the shockwave still moved out at a blistering pace, but I caught it in time. Swiping over the ritual once more, the monolith disappeared in a starry portal.

Having contained the resulting burst, I smiled at Chrona as she let out a deep sigh. Chrona wiped her draconic face with her tail, droplets of sweat pooling over her skin,

“Daniel, please give me more warning before we handle something like this again in the future.”

“Eh, I’ll try.”

“Comforting. Very comforting.”

Rummaging through my pocket dimension, I found the kinetic blast floating in stasis. Searching through that place was like finding a memory, one you visualized clearly. In this case, it stuck out from recency and the dynamism of the event. Contained within that blight of percussive forces, an object lay at the center.

There it was. Pulling it out, a large, pristine grimoire poured from stasis. Generating crystalized quintessence to get a better look at it, Chrona and I gawked at its pages.

It suited our ancient necromancer well.