Once Billy left the planet, he activated Mana Shield to protect him from the cold and radiation. Fortunately, the shield wasn't consuming too much mana, but he wouldn't be able to keep it up forever. He tried to check if he could feel the energy in space, but there wasn't… he had to find another way.
"I should have ready my armor for this kind of situation…" Billy thought and then used the remaining mana of the armor to increase his speed as much as possible.
It was kind of unsettling to fly in the darkness of the space, Billy could only see stars in the distance, and even the nearest planets were too small to see from that distance. Moreover, he couldn't see any signs of his new home planet. He wanted to believe that the time that the mirror took to work would determine the distance between those planets, but that would be too much of a good estimation. It only took three seconds for the mirror to begin to work, and if magic could move at the speed of light…
"I was dumb in assuming that mana doesn't follow the laws of physics, so naturally, it can move faster than light," Billy thought.
Regardless, Billy's armor could move at fifty kilometers per second while saving a lot of fuel, so it was fine. In the worst-case scenario, he will use his remaining mana to move at half the speed of light for a few minutes.
Eventually, Billy managed to see some planets full of life in the distance, but it was hard to think if they had mana or not. Earth was full of life at some points before the pollution, but it never had any mana on it… Probably. In any case, if he could find one to recharge his mana to the limits, he could return home a lot faster.
"There must be another way to deal with this…" Billy thought.
The first idea that he had was to try to use the radiation of space somehow and then convert it into mana. Unfortunately, Billy couldn't do that even with ordinary heat. How could he pull that off with radiation?
"Oh… I get it!" Billy smirked when he had a certain idea.
Using another of his mirrors, Billy went to check things with Blitz. His house was fine, and his kids were with his grandmother. While they didn't look particularly energetic, they were fine. In any case, Billy forced Blitz to go to one of his underground workshops using his Telekinesis to eat some of the pills.
"Stop struggling, stupid bird… I know that it is sour but at least do this favor as rent," Billy said when he saw Blitz giving him a hard time.
As if he had heard that, Blitz stopped struggling and flew to the workshop of the pills. Once he arrived, Blitz began to eat furiously.
"And I thought you disliked them…" Billy said. "When this is over, I will treat you to some dragon's meat."
Billy activated the link between them, and then he began to receive Blitz mana. He smirked again since he had the chance to increase his speed tremendously… The stock of pills had increased, and everyone was producing those because of the attacks of the brainwashed demi-humans.
Since his speed increased by five times, Billy couldn't help but feel excited. Billy recalled one day reading an article about the moving speed of planets. A planet's orbital speed changes depending on how far it is from the Sun. The closer a world is to the Sun, the stronger is the Sun's gravitational pull on it and the faster the planet moves. The farther it is from the Sun, the weaker the Sun's gravitational pull and the slower it moves in its orbit.
Earth was supposed to move at thirty kilometers per second, and Billy assumed that his new home planet could move that fast, so he was getting closer and closer… even if he couldn't see it yet. Still, he wasn't satisfied.
It didn't take long for Billy to have another idea. The plan was as simple as it could be… He just had to do the opposite of everything he did until now. Instead of giving mana to convert into experience, he would take the experience of some skills and convert it into mana. He wondered why he had never tried that before…
Currently, the skill that had the most Experience points was Heat Immunity since it required a bit more than Heat Resistance to level up, and it was at level three hundred. In any case, ten levels of that skill easily filled two of Billy's reservoirs of mana, so his smirk turned into an evil grin.
"I am coming for your ass, Zenis…" Billy thought.
–--- —-
While Billy was crossing space, the dark sphere that Zenis fired against the temple city was reaching critical levels. In the end, Zenis would be satisfied even if that exploded since the energy would wipe out the whole continent. When Icarus, Lucyna, and Meryl noticed that such a thing might happen even if they save the temple city, they couldn't help but clench their teeth.
Everyone that had some decent amounts of mana used their powers to power up the Barrier, but even that strategy had limits. Icarus, Lucyna, and Meryl used all of the energy the cores could get from the surroundings to increase the defensive power of the Barrier. Still, even their mana pool reached a limit.
In the end, the difference in power of their cores was too big. Moreover, the difference in power of their mana levels was also like that… Immense. Those three just waited silently for the end to come. At least they shouldn't let the others confirm that they had lost and would lose everything… However, much to everyone's surprise, eventually, the tremor in the area stopped, and the mana of the relic stopped being drained.
"He is here," Natalie said while smiling.
