The newly formed magical object shimmered, a wall of interlinking hexagons. The hexagons filled up with my directed mana until they became solid things that would absorb most elemental energies.

Despite the hardiness of my barrier, it was transparent. Through the thick, glass-like blocks of condensed mana, I could see the terrified soldiers taking aim at us and letting rip with their magical rifles.

They had switched charges from lightning to fire and were now pouring a steady barrage of fireballs from their spell-rifles into my Force Barrier. My magical shield shuddered as the fist-sized balls of spinning flame slammed into it, but they could not penetrate it. Instead, they burst across it in showers of hot sparks.

I gritted my teeth as tiny fissures formed on the impact points. Astrid, still in her were-form, crouched behind me, growling fiercely.

I kept my hands up and my fingers tight in the mudra sign as I reinforced my spell with more mana from my own internal pool. My reserves were quickly depleting. I’d never held a Force Barrier for this long, and never when such powerful spells were being fired at it.

”Let down your shield when they reload,” Astrid said to me in a deep growl. ”I’ll deal with them.”

“All right,” said, nodding as the sweat dripped from my brow and stung my eyes. “I won’t be able to keep this up much longer.

“You won’t have to. They’ll have to stop to reload any minute now.”

I held on, but the firepower kept coming. These dudes must be an illegally high cultivation Level to be able to keep pumping out fireball after fireball without even a break. Sure, enchanted weapons like they possessed could increase the internal chi of a cultivator, but they weren’t endless resource pools; they only enhanced what was already present in the wielder. How high a Level could they be? If they were higher than Level 3, then someone was pulling some serious strings to have an elite team like this out on the hunt for beastkin on behalf of a private company.

What the fuck did these PentaTech goons want with Astrid? And who, more to the point, was she? Not just a simple Outworlder babe as Selena had led me to believe. Selena had outworlder ancestry too, leading her to have catlike ears and tail, but as far as I knew there was nothing more to her than that. Not like Astrid, who seemed to be a highly trained Outworlder fighter. I was mixed up in something bigger than I wanted to be, that was for sure.

Finally, the enemy fire began to peter out.